The first book to examine the historical transformations of the American Bildungsroman through the lens of region Examines the history of the American Bildungsroman's twentieth century transformations, outlining how the asymmetrical effects of capitalism's uneven development forced novelists to rethink the genre's soul-nation allegory through the lens of region Maps examples from four notable regional variations on the novel of uneven development, including: the naturalist novel of overdevelopment in the Midwest; the development of the regional artist narrative in the Northeast; the novel of underdevelopment in the South; and the arrested development in the nation's borderlands in the Southwest Why did the Bildungsroman, defined as the novel of development, and its protagonist Youth, become the symbolic form of the U.S.'s cultural preoccupation with regional difference amidst the nation's rapid but uneven development c.1900 1960? As a genre that historically represented the young individual's development in national-historical time, the Bildungsroman became one crucial means of configuring the culturally, politically, and economically asymmetrical effects of national modernization and the U.S.'s political ascendence within the capitalist world-system. Responding to that predicament, the novel of uneven development rose to salience, led by its protagonist, the unfixed youth, whose development within the national-historical time of Americanization is unsettled by their preoccupation with regional difference: an immobilizing entanglement I call American literature's regional complex. This book maps four prominent variations across the Midwest, Northeast, South, and Southwest that responded to that uneven development, fragmenting, and ultimately denying the Bildungsroman's consolidation into a coherent nationalist form

About the Author
Dr Tamlyn Avery is a Lecturer in American Studies at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research into the Bildungsroman, nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and modernism has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including PMLA American Literature, The Mississippi Quarterly and Australian Feminist Studies. She is the co-editor of the modernist studies journal, Affirmations: of the Modern.

Reviews
"Dr Avery succeeds in supporting her central argument: that the genre of the bildungsroman, associated with the early nineteenth-century European novel, took distinctive forms across different environments and regions in the US context in ways that were linked to capital accumulation and uneven development." -Barbara Foley, Rutgers University, Newark



Book Information
ISBN 9781474489966
Author Tamlyn Avery
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press