Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960

Dr Tamlyn Avery is a Lecturer in American Studies at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research into the Bildungsroman, nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and modernism has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including PMLA American Literature, The Mississippi Quarterly and Australian Feminist Studies. She is the co-editor of the modernist studies journal, Affirmations: of the Modern.

• INTRODUCTION. The U.S. Bildungsroman’s Regional ComplexPART ONE. MIDWESTERN NATURALISMChapter 1. Industrial Folklore and the Regional Ingénue in Dreiser and SinclairChapter 2. Developing the Countryside: Cather and Hughes’s Poetics of RuralityChapter 3. South Side’s Overdevelopment: Farrell and Wright’s Extreme YouthsPART TWO. THE NORTHEAST’S YOUNG AESTHETESChapter 4. Emplacing Modernism: The Fitzgeralds and the Artist’s Regional ComplexChapter 5. Thurman and Fauset’s Portraits of Harlem’s Regional ArtistPART THREE. SOUTHERN UNDERDEVELOPMENT Chapter 6. Imagining the Region of UnderdevelopmentChapter 7. The Way of the World: Hurston’s Folkloric BildungsromanChapter 8. Caught and Loose: McCullers, O’Connor, and the Gothic BildungsromanPART FOUR. SOUTHWEST FRONTIERSChapter 9. Mathews at the Limits of the Bildungsroman’s National FrameworkAFTERWORD. Situating the Bildungsroman’s Transnational AfterlivesWORKS CITED

Dr Avery succeeds in supporting her central argument: that the genre of the bildungsroman, associated with the early nineteenth-century European novel, took distinctive forms across different environments and regions in the US context in ways that were linked to capital accumulation and uneven development.