Reading Life / Writing Fiction

Studies of the American novel of the 20s and 30s have tended to concentrate either on works by men (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck), or on those written in the tradition of experimental modernism (Stein, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes). Based on the conviction that women writers of the period fictionalized their own private and public experiences and concerns, the present study offers an analytical introduction to some hundred novels by more than thirty writers. Its aim is to recover a significant corpus of forgotten or ignored texts, which will make a reconsideration of the centers of interest of American modernism unavoidable.