World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State

Mark Whalan is Robert and Eve Horn Professor of English at the University of Oregon. His previous books include American Culture in the 1910s (2010), The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (2008), and Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (2007). He has published in American Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and African American Review, and is co-editor, with Martin Halliwell, of the Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century series.

• Acknowledgements; Credits; Introduction; 1. Freeloading in hobohemia: antimodernism, free verse, and the state in American World War One periodical culture; 2. Letters from a soldier: wartime letters and states of intimacy; 3. The regional novel and the wartime state; 4. USA., World War One, and the petromodern state; 5. Fictions of rehabilititation; Conclusion; Notes.

'In this readable, well-theorized critical study Whalan (Univ. of Oregon) examines how modernist literature charts the rise of a true deep state, one pervasive and totalizing, with a federal budget in 1916 of just $0.75 billion that three years later exploded to $19 billion. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.' B. Adler, Choice