Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith -- Literary pasts and presents -- "It is difficult to disengage a single thread from the living web of a nation's literature": Sarah Piatt and the construction of literary history / Karin L. Hooks -- Wavering in delight: time, progress, and the turn of the century in Theodore Dreiser's sister Carrie / Myrto Drizou -- Writing into modernity: Edith Wharton's the writing of fiction / John Nichols -- Contrasting cultures -- "That is why i sent you to Carlisle": Carlisle poetry and the demands of americanization poetics and politics -- On Jane Addams's feminist pragmatism: finding modern value in recovering the sentimental myth of the "devil baby" / Kristen Renzi -- Gender, marriage, and sexuality -- Companionate marriage across the century's turn: progress, patriarchy, and the problem of representation / Melanie V. Dawson -- Laura jean libbey and sexual transformation / Dale Bauer -- Jessie Fauset's not-so-new negro women: the Harlem Renaissance, the long nineteenth century, and the legacy of feminine representation / Meredith L. Goldsmith -- Yours for the (marriage) revolution: Mary Austin and Jack London / Donna Campbell.

Approaching the period of 1880-1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly "new" works of art, this collection treats the century's long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values--those of past, present, and the imagined future. As the authors of this collection demonstrate, the literature from the century's turn is irreducible to the characteristics either of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries; rather, it is literature of dual practices and multiple values that embodies elastic qualities of historical plurality--a true literature in transition.

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Added to collection customer.56279.3