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The University of North Carolina Press
464 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, appends., notes, bibl., index
Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960
Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of America's confrontation with modernity.
Hutner explains that realist novels were frequently lauded when they first appeared. They are almost completely unread now, he contends, largely because they record the middle-class encounter with modern life. This middle-class realism, Hutner shows, reveals a surprising engagement with the social issues that most fully challenged readers in the United States, including race relations, politics, immigration, and sexuality. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have--and, Hutner suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.
"An interesting analysis of how the literary academy decides which books will be remembered."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Hutner covers a great deal of ground with a good deal of clarity, and his book deserves to be read with close attention by anyone interested in the reading habits of the American public."
--The National Review
"Hutner surveys four decades of American fiction from the viewpoint of the reading public and the mainstream critics of the time, and reveals just how shifts in the currents of critical tastes can leave many good works stranded and quickly forgotten."
--NeglectedBooks.com
"In restoring to view the middle-class novels that chronicled Americans' multifaceted responses to modernity, Hutner is a master chronicler himself. His reclamation project--astutely directed at both criticism and fiction--enables us to recover a more accurate and a more democratic literary history than we have previously possessed."
--Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, author of Songs of Ourselves: American Readers and the Uses of Verse
"For more than twenty years, Gordon Hutner has been a leader in transforming the field of American literature studies. In What America Read, he makes a distinctive and original undertaking: to diagnose the soul of the American literate middle class over a crucial forty-year period by examining quality realist fiction and the critical conversations in which this fiction took part."
--Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
Cloth: $39.95
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