Research Catalog

Title

Race, music, and national identity : images of jazz in American fiction, 1920-1960 / Paul McCann.

Author

McCann, Paul, 1971-

Publication

Madison [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, c2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

192 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

""Race, Music, and National Identity" is the first book-length study to examine closely the portrayal of jazz in American fiction during the most critical and dynamic years of the music's development. The principal argument suggests that the discourse on jazz was informed largely by a broad range of anxieties endemic to the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century. As the United States faced a new crisis in either foreign or domestic policy, writers and intellectuals often used jazz as a forum to change both the public's understanding of the musical tradition as well as the nation's understanding of itself. In many ways, the rise of jazz from low to high art was a product of this discourse. The study relies on a close reading of several notable authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac but also responds to a broad range of popular writers from the decade whose contribution to the discourse on jazz has been largely forgotten. This book provides an insightful glimpse into how the United States negotiates and ultimately understands its own cultural artifacts."--BOOK JACKET.

Alternative Title

Images of jazz in American fiction, 1920-1960

Subject

• Geschichte 1920-1960
• 1900-1999
• American fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Jazz in literature
• Race in literature
• Music and literature > History > 20th century
• National characteristics, American, in literature
• Musical fiction > History and criticism
• Music in literature

Genre/Form

• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-187) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Music of corruption : jazz as social threat in the early twenties -- "Some finer thing" : jazz amid the culture wars of the late twenties -- The market of music : jazz and the Great Depression in the Harlem Renaissance -- White jazz : a primitive commodity -- Defining a nation : jazz and American identity in the early forties -- Music of contradictions : reconciling U.S. domestic and foreign identities -- "Gin, jazz, and dreams" : cultivating the hipster aesthetic in Ellison, Mailer, and Beaumont -- A racial paradise : the ambiguity of identity in The horn by John Clellon Holmes and On the road by Jack Kerouac.

ISBN

• 9780838641408 (hbk. : alk. paper)
• 0838641407 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2008017537

OCLC

• 225847013
• SCSB-10996745

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library