This study explores numerous depictions of crowd violence, literal and figurative, found in American Modernist fiction, and shows the ways crowd violence is used as a literary trope to examine issues of racial, gender, national, and class identity during this period. Modernist writers consistently employ scenes and images of crowd violence to show the ways such violence is used to define and enforce individual identity in American culture. James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, for example, depict numerous individuals as victims of crowd violence and other crowd pressures, typically because they have transgressed against normative social standards. Especially important is the way that racially motivated lynching, and the representation of such lynchings in African American literature and culture, becomes a noteworthy focus of canonical Modernist fiction composed by white authors.

A perfect guide for use in high school classes, this book explores the fascinating literature of the Harlem Renaissance, reviewing classic works in the context of the history, society, and culture of its time. The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most interesting eras in African American literature as well as a highly regarded period in our country's literary history. The works produced during this span reflect a turbulent social climate in America ... a time fraught with both opportunities and injustices for minorities. In this enlightening guide, author and educator Lynn Domina examines the literature of the Harlem Renaissance along with the cultural and societal factors influencing its writers. This compelling book illuminates the cultural conditions affecting the lives of African Americans everywhere, addressing topics such as prohibition, race riots, racism, interracial marriage, sharecropping, and lynching. Each chapter includes historical background on both the literary work and the author and explores several themes through historical document excerpts and thoughtful analysis to illustrate how literature responded to the surrounding social circumstances. Chapters conclude with a discussion of why and how the literary work remains relevant today.

Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, Christopher Schedler defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (high) modernism. In this study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American modernists with the works of Mexican, Native American, and Chicano writers who engaged with modernist theories and practices. In the process he uncovers a unique intercultural aesthetic produced in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico aimed at modernizing the native literary traditions of the Americas. Addressing issues of migration, cultural identity, and ethnography, Border Modernism is a major contribution to current debates over the origins and development of American literary modernism and a new model for transnational and intercultural reconstructions of American literary history.