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Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century

The Midcentury Minor NovelAmerican Fiction, 1945–1965

By Michael Kalisch

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£100.00

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About this book

Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel
  • Identifies for the first time an important strain of mid-twentieth century American writing: the midcentury minor novel
  • Explores how this distinctive project for the novel was shared by a group of critically neglected writers, including Eleanor Clark, Lionel Trilling, Jean Stafford, Richard Stern, and John Williams
  • Situates the emergence of the minor novel in relation to a number of significant midcentury intellectual discourses and literary movements, including liberalism, anti-Stalinism, regionalism, existentialism, and the New Criticism
  • Places the work of ‘minor writers’ in dialogue with well-known authors of the period, including Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and Carson McCullers
The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these ‘minor writers’ sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel’s bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, the book argues, midcentury anxieties about the ‘death of the novel’ breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, the book offers close readings of five writers who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature.

Reviews

This is a useful book that opens up other, potentially significant, avenues for future research. It aligns well with the recent interest in questions of scale and form being undertaken by ecocriticism and the “new formalism,” although Kalisch does not make this claim directly. These “minor” novels also touch on the social construction of whiteness and the operations of social class in educational institutions at mid-century in illuminating ways.
This is literary history at its most vital. Conducting a ‘rescue mission’ for the forgotten ‘minor’ novels of mid-century America, Kalisch refocuses our understanding of the anxieties and achievements of the period more generally, and offers a welcome challenge to our own tendency ‘to ask too much of the novel’.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction in a Minor Key

  1. ‘A refusal to be great’: Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and The Journey Abandoned and the minor novel of ideas
  2. Breaking into laughter: Anticommunism, late modernism, and Eleanor Clark’s The Bitter Box
  3. Changing form: Jean Stafford and the limits of New Criticism
  4. Herzog in Venice: Richard Stern’s Stitch and Jewish American literary history
  5. A lost classic: John Williams’s Stoner and the ‘rediscovery’ of the midcentury minor novel


Coda: Towards a Minor Criticism
Bibliography

About the author

Michael Kalisch

Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).

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