Gail McDonald is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (1993). She is also a Founder and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association.

"To call this an 'introduction' or 'guide' to its topic is accurate but modest...McDonald does not attempt to redefine texts so much as portray their coincidental nature...Highly Recommended." Choice

• List of Illustrations viiTimeline viiiAcknowledgments xxiiIntroduction 11 Big 6Expansion and its Discontents 12The City 19Representing Nature 36Apocalypse 43The Sense of Place 482 Rich 60Weber and Veblen: Reasons to Work and Reasons to Spend 66USA 71Work and Identity 79Labor Reform 91Consumption and Identity 993 New 110Beginning Anew: Crevecoeur and Hawthorne 115Young America 119Making It New I: Literary Modernism 128Making It New II: The Other Arts 1494 Free 165The Multiple Meanings of Freedom 170War and the Affirmation of American Values 173Writing War 180Upstream Against the Mainstream 187“An Inescapable Network of Mutuality” 203Notes 211Websites for Further Study of American Literature and Culture 215Bibliography 217Index 231