Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Abstract

Modernist scholars treat a number of writers most central to the canon. As in 2016, book-length studies are popular, especially collections, with John Steinbeck, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, and H. P. Lovecraft each the topic of a gathering of critical essays, Ray Bradbury a critical story edition, Agee a volume of film criticism, and Frank Waters a book of letters. The Beat movement and Saul Bellow are honored with Cambridge Companions and Steinbeck with a long overdue volume of East European translations. Ralph Ellison, Nabokov, Lovecraft, and Southern women writers are the topics of monographs. The FBI files of James Baldwin and Pearl S. Buck are of interest to scholars along with such usual topics as Cold War culture, race, religion, photography, comparative studies, cinema, ecology, gender, rhetoric, and pedagogy. As in recent years, proletarians, Southern writers, and expatriates and émigrés continue to dominate much of the critical debate on modern fiction.