_Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis_ examines
how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster
shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to
mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and
crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period,
as well as on important aspects of visual representation. The
conceptions of time-and especially futurity-arising from the theory
and practice of speculation provided crucial models for writers' and
other artists' aesthetic, intellectual, and political concerns and
strategies. The attractions and dangers of speculation were most
spectacularly apparent in the period's pivotal economic event: the
Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book offers an innovative account of
how the speculative boom and bust of the "Roaring Twenties" affected
literary and cultural production in the United States. It situates the
stock market gyrations of the 1920s and 1930s within a wider culture
of speculation that was profoundly shaped by, but extended well
beyond, the brokerages and trading floors of Wall Street. The early to
mid-twentieth century was a “speculative time,” an age
characterized by leaps of economic, political, intellectual, and
literary speculation; and the notion of speculative time provides a
means of understanding the period's characteristic temporal modes and
textures, as evident in work by figures including F. Scott Fitzgerald,
John Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, William Faulkner, Federico García
Lorca, James N. Rosenberg, Margaret Bourke-White, Archibald MacLeish,
Christina Stead, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.
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American Literature in an Age of Crisis
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780198891819
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter