Title
The Modernist Genre Novel
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Explores the modernist novel as a hybrid of experimental style and formulaic conventions of popular fiction, appealing to both literary critics and the mass audience. Earle teases out the complex, conflicted, and complicit relationship between modernist authors and the commercial marketplace, contending that despite their canonization as modernists, both Hemingway and Faulkner relied upon generic forms in their pursuit of economic success. Earle details the influence of the rise of American magazines on the composition of several of their novels. Includes discussions of The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not, A Farewell to Arms and Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939) and Sanctuary (1931).
Published in
A History of the Modernist Novel
Date
2015
Pages
345-368
Citation
Earle, David M. “The Modernist Genre Novel.” In A History of the Modernist Novel, edited by Gregory Castle, 345-68. New York: Cambridge, 2015.