One of the Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature, Catherine Morley's Modern American Literature offers a concise, accessible introduction to US literature published largely between Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition and New York's 1939 World's Fair. These bookends reveal Morley's method – to locate texts in historical and cultural contexts – more than they do the periodization of her study. She roots modern US literature in mid-nineteenth-century forebears such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and also gestures to the presence of modernist tropes and forms in postmodern writing. She does so by focussing not solely on, for example, formal experimentalism, but on literature constructed in response to processes of modernization. As a result, Morley sidesteps some complicated critical conversations about the meanings of “modernism” and “modernity.” But she does not cast off “modernism” as an analytic category. Instead, she gives it expanded and permeable boundaries.

Her chapter topics thus range from the predictable (New York, expatriation, experimentalism) to the not always so (modernism's American Renaissance origins, regionalism, the New Negro movement). Each chapter sets a historical and cultural scene and introduces several authors or movements, providing analyses of selected works. As a result, Morley's material acts like a series of lectures. Assigning her book, then, could change the pedagogical tenor of the classroom – contextualization of literature could be accomplished through reading rather than instruction, and class periods could be dedicated to more student-centered engagements with primary sources. To facilitate student use the book includes a glossary of terms (largely referencing avant-garde movements like Dada or futurism, but occasionally historical events like Reconstruction), a chronology from 1850 to 1939, relevant Internet resources, brief bibliographies on major themes and writers, and discussion questions. As a result, it could provide a useful supplement to courses on American literary modernism. Despite its efforts to historicize and its nods toward cultural studies, however, it retains a literary-critical core, and therefore may be of less use in interdisciplinary courses in American studies.

In addition to extending modernist periodization, Morley makes efforts to broaden its thematic core and canon. This is exemplified through her chapters on regionalism or the Harlem Renaissance, once overlooked in modernist studies, and also through the writers she chooses to address. Portraits of individual authors and their work drive the book, and there is plenty of attention paid to the usual suspects of American “high modernism.” Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald by no means receive short shrift, and indeed figures like these comprise the bulk of Morley's chapters on the expatriate “Lost Generation” and aesthetic experimentation. Her chapter on New York City, however, contains a more surprising cast, including the experimental John Dos Passos and Hart Crane, the realist writing of Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, and the more marginalized voices of ethnic American authors Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen. Such an arrangement is not consistent throughout the book, however. For example, while Morley deserves credit for bringing regionalism into conversation with modernism, the writers she addresses remain predictable: Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and the Southern Agrarians. Morley correctly acknowledges, “In any study such as this, there will inevitably be omissions” (7). Yet what would it have done, for example, to discuss Zora Neale Hurston as a “southern” writer? Or Mexican American authors like Américo Paredes, or Native American novelists like John Joseph Mathews, as writers of the “West?”

To do so would unsettle the notions of both region and transnationalism that operate in the text. To read Hurston as a novelist of the South would reveal the relations between the South and the Caribbean. To read Paredes as a western writer would expose the borderlands of Greater Mexico and add Mexican American voices to the scope of modernism addressed by the book. To read Mathews as an Oklahoma modernist would complicate both notions of nation in the period when Native Americans were finally extended US citizenship and notions of primitivism prevalent in modernism and regionalism. While Morley acknowledges the transnational circuits of modernism, writing that “in many ways modernism is a perfect example of the transnational aesthetic,” her examples are the familiar transatlantic travels of Pound, Eliot, and Hemingway, and she constructs a largely Euro-American transnationalism instead of engaging the circulation of modern American literature in non-Western sites (4). Morley's text, therefore, can be applauded for providing historical contexts for modern American literature, troubling periodization, and complicating purely formalist notions of modernism, all in clear, accessible writing. It is a teachable text – not only because it synthesizes the field we know, but also because it demands the field we are still creating.