Apostles of Modernity

American Writers in the Age of Development

Guy J. Reynolds

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780803216464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following World War II, Americans entertained a far more international political, cultural, and intellectual awareness as well as a greater fascination with development, progress, and modernity than ever before. In a revisionist account that takes "development" as its main theme, Guy Reynolds charts the responses of novelists, travel writers, and literary intellectuals to the nation's deepening engagement in world affairs. Reynolds remaps recent literary history featuring authors as diverse as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Pearl Buck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Powers, Susan Sontag, and Richard Wright. Apostles of Modernity offers an original, in-depth study of the literary manifestations of this period of globalism in novels, memoirs, essays, reportage, and political commentary. Through close readings of texts Reynolds revisits and reassesses U.S. internationalism, showing how writers and intellectuals engaged with a cluster of topics: decolonization, the rise of the Third World, Islamic difference, the end of European empires, China's enduring significance, and transatlantic and cosmopolitan identities. Throughout, the ideals of the United States as "apostle of modernity" and sponsor of "development" feature as central to American letters in the decades after World War II. A major contribution to the study of literary internationalism, Apostles of Modernity establishes new paradigms for understanding America's place in the world and the world's place in America.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The American Writer and Development: Contexts of Cultural Internationalism
• 2. The “Skin Game”: Du Bois, Wright, Malcom X, Baldwin
• 3. “You were in on the last days of Morocco”: Paul Bowles and the End of Empire
• 4. Sinophilia: China and the Writers
• 5. Nonalignment and Writing: Rich Lands and Poor
• 6. Stone Ages: Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia
• 7. African American Representations of the Hispanic: Remaking Europe
• 8. Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans: American Presence, European Decolonization
• 9. “These great new times”: Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Writing
• Notes
• Index