The gun and the pen: hemingway, fitzgerald, faulkner, and the fiction of mobilization

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and classdifference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understandingof America's postwar literature. INDICE: Part I Introduction; 1.: Rethinking Post-World War I Classics: Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization; 2.: Methodology and theStudy of Modernist Fiction; Part II Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s; 3.: The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army: Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl; 4.: The Sun Also Rises and 'Mobilization Wounds': Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes,and Postwar Jewish Quotas; 5.: The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects: The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle; 6.: PostmobilizationRomance: Transforming Military Rejection into Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism; Part III The 1930s and After; 7.: Postmobilization Kinkiness: Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military's Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease; 8.: The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the World War I Mobilization Novel; Afterword: Here We Go Again: World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs's Junky; Notes; Index

• ISBN: 978-0-19-974457-2
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 288
• Fecha Publicación: 29/07/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés