Working (Modern) Man

Early Modernism in America fiction marks the birth of several major new literary styles and techniques -- stream-of-consciousness (though Joyce and Woolf were practicing the technique even before them), a focus on first-person narratives, and an obsession with ambiguity, with a purposeful obtuseness that was lacking in the much clearer, much more deliberately clear work of earlier centuries -- while it also the advancement and adaptation of several older techniques, dialect and regionalism becoming particularly prevalent focuses. Writers, coming out of World War I and very similar experiences, had witnessed the certain "truths" of the old world topple in a mere matter of years, as new movements in politics, economics, art and philosophy emerged from the fire and challenged everything everyone had once held dear.

Hence, why the themes in these works deal so much with the overturning of the old and the introduction of the new. In Faulkner's "Barn Burning," the old certainty of relationships between landed, working tenants and their landlords if spat upon entirely by the Snopes' patriarch, who has no respect for his landlords, property, or even his children. He is a new type of nihilistic, self-destructive monster. Similarly but contrarily, Fitzgerald covers the prevalence of property in his story "Babylon Revisited," deals with this lost generation's desperate attempts to cover up their newfound emptiness by overindulging in the extravagences of the past, all the while knowing their consumptive natures are only dooming them all the more certainly.

Old issues of race and provincialism were likewise challenged by writers such as Porter and Hurston, who did not, as writers of old had, identify themselves based solely on these criteria. Nor did they reject them, though, opting instead to embrace those aspects of them that made them unique and actually examine them. After all, with the old assumptions and stereotypes attached to race and region gone, there was all the more reason to dig into these labels to find the truth waiting behind them.

These concers, as well as the unique style of the writing, lend this period of fiction a very distinct shade, one that is particularly philosophical. All in all, a very rich time in the history of American literature.