Synopses & Reviews
Gandal contends that The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury were all written by men who were greatly influenced by their shared frustration of not serving in the American military's colossal war effort. At the same time, these same authors also observed, among other
startling developments, the Army's first egalitarian treatment of ethnic or hyphenated-Americans in regard to officer selection. The Great War mobilization shaped large-scale shifts in American life, including the meritocratic assignment of recruits to military rank based on intelligence testing,
rather than Anglo-social and family background; an unprecedented military propaganda campaign aimed at fighting venereal disease and the redefinition of masculinity as chaste, chivalrous and athletic; the incarceration of tens of thousands of prostitutes as well as "promiscuous" women in an effort
to police American female sexual behavior; and a dramatic but failed effort to ban sexual contact between American troops and French prostitutes. Mobilization Fiction involves a fundamental rethinking of these three novels, as well as other modernist postwar prose of the 1920s and 30s, in view of
this essential history of the Great War mobilization.
Review
"The Gun and the Pen offers a bold and entirely original interpretation of the leading American modernist writers and their greatest works. Gandal uses archival evidence to great advantage in showing how the war culture of the early twentieth century, with its corresponding revolution in perceptions of sexuality, ethnic identity, and meritocracy, was integral to the era's literary masterpieces."--Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles
"Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and he has--with great brilliance as well as originality--demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. The Gun and the Pen will make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism."--Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago
"With highly original and insightful readings of three of our most canonical fictions of the postwar era--The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury--The Gun and the Pen provides rich new materials that document a revised, more accurate account of America's mobilization efforts in World War I."--Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland
Review
"An innovative study." --Choice
"To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen." --The Hemingway Review
"Gandal provides a radically new and convincing critique . . . I highly recommend The Gun and the Pen to students of history and literature alike as a superb example of what a multidisciplinary study can accomplish."-The Journal of Military History
"Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and he has--with great brilliance as well as originality--demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. The Gun and the Pen will make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism."--Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago
"With highly original and insightful readings of three of our most canonical fictions of the postwar era--The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury--The Gun and the Pen provides rich new materials that document a revised, more accurate account of America's mobilization efforts in World War I."--Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland
"The Gun and the Pen offers a bold and entirely original interpretation of the leading American modernist writers and their greatest works. Gandal uses archival evidence to great advantage in showing how the war culture of the early twentieth century, with its corresponding revolution in perceptions of sexuality, ethnic identity, and meritocracy, was integral to the era's literary masterpieces."--Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles
"An original and paradigm-changing analysis." -- Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University
"Engaging and intelligent... Extraordinary and utterly thorough... A significant study about the importance of mobilization on the fiction of the post-World War I American modernist period." ---- The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review
"Few who finish this study will find themselves in disagreement with Gandal's provocative thesis. Indeed, this is a book likely to change our conception of American World War I literature-or, more specifically, the relationship between the Great War and American Modernism-for good." --War, Literature and the Arts
"Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen is an ambitious and important book that
deserves the scrutiny of a wide scholarly audience. He sets out to do nothing less
than to redefine critical understanding of American fiction beginning with the novels
of the 1920s involving soldiers and other literary characters affected by World War I...[it] deserves to be read, discussed, and debated widely; it adds new depth to the study of not only war novels but of twentieth-century American literature at large." --Studies in the Novel
Synopsis
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-
About the Author
Keith Gandal is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film. He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous.
Table of Contents
Part I Introduction
1. Rethinking Post-World War I Classics: Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization
2. Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction
Part II Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s
3. The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army: Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl
4. The Sun Also Rises and "Mobilization Wounds": Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas
5. The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects: The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle
6. Postmobilization Romance: Transforming Military Rejection into Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism
Part III The 1930s and After
7. Postmobilization Kinkiness: Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military's Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease
8. The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the World War I Mobilization Novel
Afterword: Here We Go Again: World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs's Junky
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Part I Introduction
1. Rethinking Post-World War I Classics: Recovering the Historical Context of the Mobilization
2. Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction
Part II Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the 1920s
3. The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army: Ethnic Egalitarianism, Intelligence Testing, the New Man, and the Charity Girl
4. The Sun Also Rises and "Mobilization Wounds": Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas
5. The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects: The Feebleminded and the Postmobilization Erotic Triangle
6. Postmobilization Romance: Transforming Military Rejection into Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism
Part III The 1930s and After
7. Postmobilization Kinkiness: Barnes, West, Miller, and the Military's Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease
8. The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the World War I Mobilization Novel
Afterword: Here We Go Again: World War II Mobilization Blues in William Burroughs's Junky
Notes
Index