A Beginner's Guide to Critical Reading: An Anthology of Literary Texts Book

This book reads like a fabulous series of sharp, themed undergraduate lectures on various facets and forms of ethnic modernism. Sollors entwines the stories of famous modernists like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway with the careers of contemporaneous figures like Mary Antin and Henry Roth. One of the refreshing dimensions of Sollors' literary history is that he refuses to give ideological precedence to the formal innovations of modernism; instead, he gives a direct account of the Cold War creation of a narrative that privileged literary modernism as an inevitable corollary to American democracy and an inherent challenge to totalitarianism. Sollors' writerly voice is clear, witty, empathetic, and insightful. He is astonishing learned and yet never loses the thread of his narrative amidst the impressive array of evidence which he weaves into it. The strength of this book for me was twofold: 1) the clarity and momentum of the stories that it tells about hybrid genres, ethnic experiences and narratives, and shaping moments in literary, political, and cultural history 2) the archival range that these stories reflect. Sollors seems to have read just about everything, and his renderings of Italian-American memoirs, immigrant tales, and magazine short stories draw out recurring tropes and prevalent themes in those works. Sollors sends the scholar jotting down new sources for research bibliographies and working syllabi, and he gives the student reader a kaleidoscopic impression of 20th-century U.S. literature between 1910 and 1950. His chapter juxtaposing and contrasting Wright and Hurston was particularly rich and compelling. I give this four stars instead of five stars because this is more of a general introduction than a taut argument, and that's not a flaw of the book (it tackles the project of laying out a literary history, as this material was originally written for the *Cambridge History of American Literature*) but it also means that it is not quite as exciting to this reader as Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture or Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature