"New edition"--P. xii. "First published 1994"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-252) and index.

A dream city, lyric years, and a great war: Novel as ironic reflection ; Confidence and uncertainty in The portrait of a lady ; Lines of expansion ; Four contemporaries and the closing of the West ; Chicago's "dream city" ; Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city ; Henry Adams's Education and the grammar of progress ; Jack London's career and popular discourse ; Innocence and revolt in the "lyric years": 1900-1916 ; Armory show of 1913 and the decline of innocence ; Play of hope and despair ; The great war and the fate of writing -- Fiction in a time of plenty: When the war was over : the return of detachment ; The "jazz age" and the "lost generation" revisited ; Perils of plenty, or how the twenties acquired a paranoid tilt ; Disenchantment, flight, and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty ; Class, power, and violence in a new age ; Fear of feminization and the logic of modest ambition ; Marginality and authority, race, gender, and region ; War as metaphor : the example of Ernest Hemingway -- The fate of writing during the Great Depression: Discovery of poverty and the return of commitment ; Search for "culture" as a form of commitment ; Three responses : the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos ; Cowboys, detectives, and other tough-guy antinomians : residual individualism and hedged commitments ; Search for shared purpose : struggles on the left ; Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent ; Southern renaissance : forms of reaction and innovation ; History and novels, novels and history : the example of William Faulkner.