Dr. Mark Whalan joined the University of Oregon as the Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English in 2011, after beginning his career at the University of Exeter in the UK. He specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and has published five books: The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (University of Tennessee Press 2006); Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (University of Tennessee Press 2007); The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (University Press of Florida, 2008); American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and most recently, World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is co-editor, with Professor Martin Halliwell of the University of Leicester, of the Edinburgh University Press monograph series Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies, and has published in American Literary History, African American Review, Modernism/Modernity, American Art, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Journal of American Studies. He is currently at work on editing The Cambridge History of American Modernism.
In this book, Mark Whalan argues that World War One's major impact on US culture was not the experience of combat trauma, but rather the effects of the expanded federal state bequeathed by US mobilization. Writers bristled at the state's new intrusions and coercions, but were also intrigued by its creation of new social ties and political identities. This excitement informed early American... Read more
This book offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), and their development of unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism and rural decline.
This is the first book to explore the wide-ranging significance of World War One to the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Reading authors such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the book argues that the war served as a crucial event conditioning African American cultural understandings of masculinity, memory, and nationality in the 1920s... Read more
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