Old-Fashioned Modernism
Subtitle: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780807170786
Subjects: American literature, history and criticism; Masculinity in literature; Middle west, in literature
Description: "The Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the "heartland," a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent "flyover country," part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood"--