The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization
"An innovative study." --Choice"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"Gandal provides a radically new and convincing critique . . . I highly recommendThe Gun and the Pento students of history and literature alike as a superb example of what a multidisciplinary study can accomplish."-The Journal of Military History"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 Penwill make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism."--Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago"With highly original and insightful readings of three of our most canonical fictions of the postwar era--The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises,andThe Sound and the Fury--The Gun and the Penprovides 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"The Gun and the Penoffers 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"An original and paradigm-changing analysis." -- Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University"Engaging and intelligent... Extraordinary and utterly thorough... A significant study about the importance of mobilization on the fiction of the post-World War I American modernist period." ----The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review"Few who finish this study will find themselves in disagreement with Gandal's provocative thesis. Indeed, this is a book likely to change our conception of American World War I literature-or, more specifically, the relationship between the Great War and American Modernism-for good." --War,Literature & the Arts"Keith Gandal'sThe Gun and the Penis an ambitious and important book thatdeserves the scrutiny of a wide scholarly audience. He sets out to do nothing lessthan to redefine critical understanding of American fiction beginning with the novelsof the 1920s involving soldiers and other literary characters affected by World War I...[it] deserves to be read, discussed, and debated widely; it adds new depth to the study of not only war novels but of twentieth-century American literature at large." --Studies in the Novel