The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature

## Abstract The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature is designed around an impossibility: that of representing the diversity of the texts and methodologies that comprise—as well as trouble—the field. Rather than attempt a compilation of one hundred years’ worth of novels, poetry, autobiography, and other forms of narration and writing that would provide an illusory notion of coverage or representation, this volume seeks to foreground the interstitial, the fissures, the “in-between” spaces within established histories, canons, genres, and ideologies. We suggest that the “in-between” represents a rich and productive site of literary inquiry, one that makes visible the multiple oppositions that structure and inspire literary and critical imaginaries. In challenging North/South, Black/white, urban/rural, national/transnational, high culture/popular culture, Indigenous/settler, or citizen/noncitizen binaries, this anthology engages any number of continuums clustered around both realities and fantasies of difference. Highlighting these intersecting continuums—whether socio-political, generic, or identity-based—simultaneously maps and displaces, assembles and disassembles, locates and makes strange the body of texts and approaches that simultaneously constitute and defamiliarize the field of twentieth-century American literature. Overall, then, this collection of groundbreaking and original essays from pre-eminent and emerging scholars employs twenty-first-century methodologies of memory studies, disability and care studies, environmental humanities, media and sound studies, queer theory, Black studies, and affect theory, among others, to examine multiple literary genres and forms from the previous century. List of Contents List of Figures List of Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction: Structures, Movements, Attachments, Imaginaries • Leslie Bow and Russ Castronovo PART 1: STRUCTURES 1. The Book of Love is Long and Boring: Reading Aloud, Care Work, and Children’s Literature • Elizabeth Freeman 2. Colonization to Climate Change: American Literature and a Planet on Fire • John Levi Barnard 3. Nuclear Poetry: Cultural Containment and Translational Leakage in Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead • Simon van Schalkwyk 4. Precarious Forms: Reading Labor in and beyond the Neoliberal Novel • Joseph B. Entin 5. Asian Americans in the Novel of Late Capitalism: Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man and Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians • Cynthia Wu PART 2: MOVEMENTS 6. The Hidden Voice: Indigenous Experience and Authenticity in Twentieth-Century American Literature • Sean Teuton 7. “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid”: Post-1945 American Literature and Radio • Lisa Hollenbach 8. Faulkner at the Speed of History • Mark Goble 9. Twentieth-Century Western Man of Color: Richard Wright, Race, and Rootlessness • Yogita Goyal 10. “Warm with Tipsy Embraces”: Allen Ginsberg, the US–China Writers’ Conferences, and Queer Internationalism • Harilaos Stecopoulos PART 3: ATTACHMENTS 11. The Last Puritan in Shanghai: The Faded Romance of China Trade Finance and the Queerly Transnational Melancholy of Emily Hahn’s Wartime Opium Smoking • Kendall Johnson 12. Modernism’s Cares: Reading For and With • Rachel Adams 13 Black Literary History and the Problem of Identification in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo • Aida Levy-Hussen 14. Andrea Lee’s Europe: Race, Interracial Desire, and Transnationalism • Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus 15. Where Border Meets Narrative, Where Body Meets Word: The Animality of Border Subjectivity • Bernadine Hernández PART 4: IMAGINARIES 16. Of Canons and Cabinets: Indigenous Bodies, Epistemological Spectacle, and an Unusual Indian in the Cupboard • Becca Gercken 17. The Liberal Imagination Revisited: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and the Crisis of Democracy • Johannes Voelz 18. Constructing Whiteness: Faulkner, Ferber, and the American Racial Imagination • Heidi Kim 19. Unidentified Flying Objects: Conceptualism, Interpretation, and Adrian Piper • Rachel Jane Carroll 20. Cultural Memory Studies and the Beloved Paradigm: From Rememory to Abolition in the Afterlives of Slavery • Michael Rothberg Index An essential and field-defining resource, this volume brings fresh approaches to major US novels, poetry, and performance literature of the twentieth century. With sections on 'structures', 'movements', 'attachments', and 'imaginaries', this handbook brings a new set of tools and perspectives to the rich and diverse traditions of American literary production. The editors have turned to leading as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field to foreground methodological concerns that assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, critical race and indigenous studies, disability and care studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, media and sound studies, and other cutting-edge approaches. The 20 original chapters include the discussion of working-class literature, border narratives, children's literature, novels of late-capitalism, nuclear poetry, fantasies of whiteness, and Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx creative texts. A collection of essays situating twentieth-century American literature in a global frame. This volume reads US literature through the a range of critical lenses, including critical race and indigenous studies, disability and care studies, environmental criticism, gender analysis, and media studies.