The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960

Description

The first book to examine the historical transformations of the American Bildungsroman through the lens of region Examines the history of the American Bildungsroman’s twentieth century transformations, outlining how the asymmetrical effects of capitalism’s uneven development forced novelists to rethink the genre’s soul-nation allegory through the lens of regionMaps examples from four notable regional variations on the novel of uneven development, including: the naturalist novel of overdevelopment in the Midwest; the development of the regional artist narrative in the Northeast; the novel of underdevelopment in the South; and the arrested development in the nation’s borderlands in the Southwest Why did the Bildungsroman, defined as the novel of development, and its protagonist Youth, become the symbolic form of the U.S.’s cultural preoccupation with regional difference amidst the nation’s rapid but uneven development c.1900–1960? As a genre that historically represented the young individual’s development in national-historical time, the Bildungsroman became one crucial means of configuring the culturally, politically, and economically asymmetrical effects of national modernization and the U.S.’s political ascendence within the capitalist world-system. Responding to that predicament, the novel of uneven development rose to salience, led by its protagonist, the unfixed youth, whose development within the national-historical time of Americanization is unsettled by their preoccupation with regional difference: an immobilizing entanglement I call American literature’s regional complex. This book maps four prominent variations across the Midwest, Northeast, South, and Southwest that responded to that uneven development, fragmenting, and ultimately denying the Bildungsroman’s consolidation into a coherent nationalist form