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Axis / Axes to Grind studies various types of political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. “Political,” which is essentially about power and control, includes interpreting the meaning of the war and predicting the political climate of post-war America (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions); exploring the dynamics of individual and group rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22); and tracing conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political ethos of military authority (White, Christian, heterosexual).These conflicts can occur among enlisted men (The Young Lions, From Here to Eternity) but more often between military policies, such as racial segregation, and minorities (And Then We Heard the Thunder, Guard of Honor, The Gallery). The locales of these conflicts are also various: on board a ship during a typhoon, at an Army Air Force training base, even in a war industry (If He Hollers, Let Him Go). War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the authors’ own times. Thus, Slaughterhouse-Five is as much about anti-war protest during the Vietnam war as it is about the firebombing of Dresden. And in Gravity’s Rainbow, the industrial cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against London prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon’s time. Where necessary, the book provides historical context (e.g., the real typhoon that inspired The Caine Mutiny, Martha Gellhorn’s experience at Dachau, etc.) to further clarify the novels’ political themes.

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for the river basin beyond the destructive practices of resource extraction. It problematizes well-intentioned literary projects to map the region otherwise by charting their impact in framing contemporary struggles against the division and commodification of Amazonia. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza deliberately described the Amazonian regions of their respective countries in contrast to state and corporate projections, and the acceptance of their Amazonian novels in the Latin American literary canon has given power to their geographic representations. Smith reveals how authors sometimes mapped imperfectly, misrepresenting cultural geographies, erasing lived realities, and speaking for unacknowledged sources. Navigating Amazonia across its real and fictional landscapes, this book seeks to identify where literary configurations of the region have shaped geopolitics. This spatial reexamination of influential twentieth-century novels suggests that even literary works implicated in the ongoing repurposing of the rubber fields of the past can also plot pathways out of the cycles of extractivism.

John Dos Passos & Cinema, the first study to use the novelist’s little-known writing for the screen to assess the trajectory of his prolific career, explores both how film aesthetics shaped his revolutionary modernist narratives and how he later reshaped them directly into film form. The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of his screen writing during the 1930s for Hollywood feature films and in an innovative independent treatment; it examines the complexities of his role in the 1937 political documentary The Spanish Earth; and it explores the unproduced screen treatment of his attempts from the 1940s on to adapt his epic trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism of that period. John Dos Passos & Cinema thus provides a new context for and reading of his modernist literary innovations and his conservative political reorientation in the 1930s that redefined his literary career.

The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated. De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.

The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.

In 1938, American poet Ezra Pound published Guide to Kulchur, a book so radically different from his earlier writing that readers might not have believed that it was written by the same firebrand aesthetician who had advocated in 1913 that poets go in fear of abstractions. But Guide to Kulchur was only the latest example of a new kind of prose that Pound had been writing—fiercely invested in politics and the mobilization of cultural heritage to its service. Pound’s new modernism came as a direct effect of his investment in fascism. Since the last monographic treatment of Pound’s fascism, scholars of literature, history, art history, urban design, and music have uncovered important aspects of the fascist regime’s use of culture to foment Italian national identity. These studies reveal the cultural, mythical, rhetorical, and intellectual aspects of that regime—more than enough new knowledge to require a reappraisal of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in that era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century. Unlike previous discussions of Pound’s adoption of Italian fascism, which focus mostly on his political and economic interests, this book reveals the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini’s fascist regime. By bringing Italian primary sources and new approaches to the cultural project of Mussolini’s regime to bear on Pound’s prose work (including unpublished material from the Pound Papers and untranslated periodical contributions), Paul shows how Pound’s modernism changed as a result of involvement in Italian politics and culture. At the same time, it uses the familiar figure of Pound to provide an entry for scholars of Anglo-American modernism into the diverse and complex realm of Italian modernism.

This book is a study of Tim O'Brien, one of the most thought-provoking writers of the Vietnam War generation. It breaks away from previous readings of O'Brien's development as a trauma artist and an outspoken chronicler of the American involvement in Vietnam: its thematic, rather than chronological, approach contextualizes O'Brien's work beyond the confines of war literature. The necessary exploration of O'Brien's recurrent engagement with the conflict in Vietnam leads to a thorough discussion of the writer's revision of key American (and western) ideas and concerns: the association between courage, heroism, and masculinity; the celebration of the pioneering spirit in the frontier narrative; the sense of superiority in the encounter with foreign civilizations; the fraught relationship between power and truth, or reality and imagination; and the attempt and the right to speak about unspeakable events. All these themes highlight O'Brien's preoccupation with the role and the ethical responsibility of the storyteller. With his clear privileging of ‘story-truth’ over ‘happening-truth’, O'Brien makes a bold, serious investment in the power of fiction, as testified by his formal experimentations, meta-narrative reflections, and sustained meditations on matters such as individual agency, moral accountability, and authenticity. Approached from this perspective, he emerges as a figure deserving to find a wider audience and demanding renewed scholarly attention for his achievements as a contemporary mythographer, an acute observer of the human condition, and a sharp critic of American culture.

This book examines American cinematic classics and also looks at some lesser-known figures such as Karl Van Vechten and Tom Kromer. The phrase cinematic fiction has now been generally accepted into critical discourse, but is usually applied to post-war novels. The book asks a simple question: given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings? From its very beginnings the cinema has played a special role in defining American culture. Covering the period from the 1910s up to the Second World War, the book offers insights into classics such as The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, discussing major writers' critical writings on film and active participation in film-making. It is careful not to portray ‘cinema’ as a single or stable entity. Some novelists drew on silent film; others looked to the Russian theorists for inspiration; and yet others turned to continental film-makers rather than to Hollywood. Film itself was constantly evolving during the first decades of the twentieth century and the writers discussed here engaged in a kind of dialogue with the new medium, selectively pursuing strategies of montage, limited point of view, and scenic composition towards their different ends. The book contrasts a diverse range of cinematic and literary movements.

Bringing together established Fitzgerald scholars from the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, this collection offers eleven readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. While The Great Gatsby continues to attract more attention than the rest of Fitzgerald's oeuvre combined, persistent, if infrequent, writings on Tender is the Night from the 1950s onwards indicate that, like Gatsby's green light, Fitzgerald's fourth novel continues both to perplex and intrigue. In addition to the inevitable biographical interpretations, the novel has, in myriad readings, been viewed as: a marriage novel, a text of disturbed psychology, a text nostalgically marking the passing of a talent and a time, an outdated ‘Jazz Age’ story, and ‘the great novel about American history’. This collection opens criticism of Tender is the Night to a new generation of scholars, providing new ways for readers to appreciate this complex, compelling, and profound work. Contributors include editors of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Fitzgerald Society Executive, and the directors of the biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald conference. The book was published to coincide with the biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald conference in July 2007.