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Alliance
20th-Century Literature Directory
This collection features the leading academic websites
on 20th-century American literature, reviewed and catalogued by university
experts.
The Modern World
This
large network of pages is devoted to experimental and avant-garde 20th-century
writers, including those associated with modernism, surrealism, magical
realism, and postmodernism.
Voice
of the Shuttle: Modern American Literature
Created
by Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Voice of the
Shuttle is perhaps the oldest humanities research portal on the web. This
page brings together a collection of internet resources on modern American
authors, works, and projects.
Contemporary
U.S. Literature: Multicultural Perspectives
From the electronic journal, U.S. Society & Values, published
by the Department of State.
Postmodernism
Is/in Fiction
This site was established as part of a course on contemporary fiction
at Pomona College taught by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Featured authors include
Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison,
Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie.
Spermatikos
Logos: Thomas Pynchon Resource Site
This extensive site contains information on Pynchon's life and works,
reviews of individual works, guides to individual works, criticism of
individual works, links to online essays by Pynchon, mailing lists, discussion
groups, and links to other related sites.
Life
Studies: American Poetry from T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg
This online poetry exhibit from the Academy of American Poets provides
an excellent overview of the history of modernism in American poetry and
contains separate resource pages on selected poets.
Post
World War II American Literature and Culture Database: Genres
"Intended to introduce scholars to major secondary works in the area
of postwar American literature and culture," this site serves as
an excellent portal to online resources on postmodern literature, organized
by literary genre.
Modern
and Contemporary American Poetry
Created
and maintained by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania, this research
portal devoted to 20th-century American poetry is a remarkably thorough
and useful resource.
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Mountain
Interval
This collection of lyric poetry by Robert Frost was originally published
in 1920 and contains many of his best and most popular poems, including
"The Road Not Taken," "The Oven Bird," and "Birches."
In
Memory of W. B. Yeats
From the poetry collection Another Time, originally published in
1940, W. H. Auden's elegy mourns the death of the great Irish modernist
William Butler Yeats. In this poem, Auden delivers his provocative and
often quoted observation that "poetry makes nothing happen,"
but is rather "A way of happening, a mouth."
Hamlet
and His Problems
In this critical essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet, T. S. Eliot takes Shakespeare
to task, criticizing the play for reasons that shed more light on the
aesthetics of high modernism than Elizabethan tragic drama. It is in this
essay that Eliot introduces the critical concept of the "objective
correlative," so important for American new criticism.
Chicago
Poems
This collection of poems, which includes popular works like "Chicago"
and "Fog," launched Carl Sandburg's career as a serious poet
and modernist voice. Sandburg's poetry was an enormous influence on later
generations of writers, such as the Beats.
Winesburg,
Ohio
Published
in 1919, this collection of Sherwood Anderson's short stories anticipates
the later work in this genre by Faulkner, Hemingway, and others, who were
deeply influenced by the formal innovations and psychological sophistication
of Anderson's writing.
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Framing
the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture
Phillip Brian Harper examines social marginalization as a cultural influence
on the emergence of literary fragmentation as a constitutive trait of
postmodern literature and culture.
Hemingway's
Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text
In this excellent study, Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes examine Hemingway's
writings and life in order to demonstrate his preoccupation with gender.
Negative
Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology
Cyrus Patell reexamines the values of the traditionally American ideal
of individualism and the political theory of liberalism within the writings
of Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, our two most recently canonized American
novelists.
Poetry
and Pragmatism
Richard Poirier explores the influence of Emersonian pragmatism on the
literary practice of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens.
The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
In this watershed study, Henry Louis Gates explores the relationship between
modern African American literature and the African and African American
vernacular traditions.
William
Faulkner: First Encounters
One of the founding fathers of American new criticism, Cleanth Brooks
here provides an excellent introduction to Faulkner and to modernism in
general.
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Prufrock,
J. Alfred Prufrock
In this article from The Atlantic Monthly online, Christopher Ricks,
critic and Professor at Boston University, discusses T.S. Eliot's 1917
poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The site includes
a link to a recording of Ricks reading the poem.
The
Influence of Jazz on the Beat Generation
Mike Janssen discusses the importance of the music and lifestyles of Bebop
legends Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis
to the development of the Beat ethos in the writings of Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and others.
The
Poerotic Novel: Nabokov's Lolita and Ada
Maurice Couturier, of the University of Nice, examines the erotic mode
of Nabokov's fiction, arguing that the "Nabokovian novel constitutes
a fusion of the pornographic, the comic and the ironic modes: it openly
seeks to produce a strong erotic effect in the reader, but also a comic
and ironic one, while seemingly keeping the author's desires out of reach."
African-American
Theory and Criticism: Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement
An article-length entry in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism, this essay by Theodore O. Mason, Jr. of Kenyon College
provides an overview of the history of 20th-century African American literary
criticism to the 1970s.
Orchestrating
Reception: The Hierarchy of Readers in Post-modern American Fiction
In
this fascinating essay written from the perspective of reception theory,
John Unsworth provides an analysis of canon formation in contemporary
postmodern fiction, focusing on the status of the reader in the emergence
of this new wave of literature.
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