This incisive book traces the attack on American provincialism that ended the myth of the Happy Village. Replacing the idyllic life as a theme, American writers in revolt turned to a more realistic interpretation of the town, stressing its repressiveness, dullness, and conformity. This book analyzes the literary technique employed by these writers and explores their sensibilities to evaluate both their artistic accomplishments and their contributions to American thought and feeling. Originally published 1969. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.

"Beyond Main Street" examines the impact and legacy of the literary movement that Carl Van Doren, in an infamous 1920 article from The Nation, referred to as the "revolt from the village." This movement, which is widely acknowledged to encompass such writers as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, pushed back against the primacy of the heretofore-dominant pastoral tradition when it came to depictions of rural America. These authors sought to create a more accurate portrayal of the small town, one that, while not completely eschewing the pastoral, also exposed the more seedy side of village life. Critics typically view this movement (if they view it at all) as one grounded in a very specific time period, usually from around 1915 until about 1930 or so. There is little extant research about the influence of this movement after 1930, and it remains a kind of cultural footnote in the legacy of literary modernism. To say that, after this period, depictions of the small town simply reverted to notions of the pastoral, though, would be oversimplification at best. This project argues that, as with so much of modernism, what began as a flouting of convention developed into an established paradigm. The "revolt" is no longer a "revolt" as such, because its conceptions of small-town America have become a lasting motif in American literature of the twentieth century and beyond. The pastoral image of the village functions now as a kind of simulacrum, an ideal that still permeates the American cultural imagination, but it is rarely given legitimate consideration in literary depictions of individual towns. Rather, I argue, the individual village has become a construction ripe for critique in an increasingly modern and urbanized society. In this project I examine three popular novels from the mid-twentieth century, Henry Bellamann's Kings Row (1940), Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956), and Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show (1965), in order to illustrate this paradigm shift which can be traced directly back to the "revolt from the village."