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Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell & Andy Mousley
This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader's understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide.
Modern American Literature
Catherine Morley
An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes.
Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, this guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism, and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, it introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies.
Key Features
" Presents American literary modernism as emerging from a broad intellectual and philosophical landscape
" Extends the timeframe, definition and intellectual parameters of American modernism
" Provides close critical and contextual analysis of more than thirty American writers and key texts including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Catherine Morley is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature (2009) and co-editor of American Thought and Culture in the 21st

Catherine Morley is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature (2009) and co-editor of American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (2008) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).

Series Preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Introduction: Chicago, 1893; Chapter 1: The Making of American Modernism; Chapter 2: Tales of New York City: The Birth of the Modern Metropolis; Chapter 3: Regional American Modernism; Chapter 4: Home Thoughts from Abroad: The Lost Generation; Chapter 5: 'When Harlem Was in Vogue': African American Modernism; Chapter 6: 'Make it New!': Experiments in Poetry and Drama; Conclusion: New York, 1939; Student Resources; Glossary; Electronic Resources and Reference Sources; Questions for Discussion; Guide to Further Reading; Index.