Modernist Fiction

Abstract

Initially, “modernist fiction” named the experimental narrative of the interwar period, most eminently associated with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, and, secondarily, with Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Willa Cather. Their masterpieces belonged to “the jazz age,” even though Stein started publishing before, Faulkner's best work appeared during the 1930s, and some of these writers remained active until the early 1960s. Early approaches to this work were formal, influenced by the New Criticism, and when historically minded scholars like Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling discussed this literature, they tended to invoke a mixture of biographical and national motifs, such as individual alienation before a mercantilist society indifferent to aesthetic value or the disillusionment of a generation marked by World War I.