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OverviewErnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America's postwar literature. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Keith Gandal (Professor of English, Professor of English, Northern Illinois University)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 16.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 24.20cm Weight: 0.535kg ISBN: 9780195338911ISBN 10: 019533891 Pages: 288 Publication Date: 14 August 2008 Audience: College/higher education , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of Contents"Illustrations Part I Introduction 1: Rethinking Post-World War I Classics: Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization 2: Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction Part II Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s 3: The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army: Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl 4: The Sun Also Rises and ""Mobilization Wounds"": Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas 5: The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects: The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle 6: Postmobilization Romance: Transforming Military Rejection into Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism Part III The 1930s and After 7: Postmobilization Kinkiness: Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military's Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease 8: The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the World War I Mobilization Novel Afterword: Here We Go Again: World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs's Junky Notes Index"Reviews<br> An innovative study. --Choice<br><p><br> To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen. --The Hemingway Review<p><br> Gandal provides a radically new and convincing critique . . . I highly recommend The Gun and the Pen to students of history and literature alike as a superb example of what a multidisciplinary study can accomplish. -The Journal of Military History<br><p><br> Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and he has--with great brilliance as well as originality--demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. The Gun and the Pen will make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism. --Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago<p><br> With highly original and insightful readings The Gun and the Pen offers a bold and entirely original interpretation of the leading American modernist writers and their greatest works. Gandal uses archival evidence to great advantage in showing how the war culture of the early twentieth century, with its corresponding revolution in perceptions of sexuality, ethnic identity, and meritocracy, was integral to the era's literary masterpieces. --Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles<br> Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and he has--with great brilliance as well as originality--demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. The Gun and the Pen will make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism. --Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago<br> With highly original and insightful readings of three of our most canonical fictions of the postwar era--The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury--The Gun and the Pen provides rich new materials that document a revised, more accurate account of America's mobilization efforts in World War I. --Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland<br> Author InformationKeith Gandal is Professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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