Following World War II, Americans entertained a far more international political, cultural, and intellectual awareness as well as a greater fascination with development, progress, and modernity than ever before. In a revisionist account that takes "development" as its main theme, Guy Reynolds charts the responses of novelists, travel writers, and literary intellectuals to the nation’s deepening engagement in world affairs. Reynolds remaps recent literary history featuring authors as diverse as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Pearl Buck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Powers, Susan Sontag, and Richard Wright.

 

Apostles of Modernity offers an original, in-depth study of the literary manifestations of this period of globalism in novels, memoirs, essays, reportage, and political commentary. Through close readings of texts Reynolds revisits and reassesses U.S. internationalism, showing how writers and intellectuals engaged with a cluster of topics: decolonization, the rise of the Third World, Islamic difference, the end of European empires, China’s enduring significance, and transatlantic and cosmopolitan identities. Throughout, the ideals of the United States as "apostle of modernity" and sponsor of "development" feature as central to American letters in the decades after World War II.

 

A major contribution to the study of literary internationalism, Apostles of Modernity establishes new paradigms for understanding America’s place in the world and the world’s place in America.

Guy Reynolds is a professor of English and the director of the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire and Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction: A Critical Introduction.

"Reynolds looks at the new literary internationalism—and writers he calls "the apostles of modernity.". . . Reynolds is the perfect spokesperson for these heady issues."—P. Wolfe, Choice

"A respected voice in Modernist studies, Reynolds explores a fascinating moment in American foreign relations—a United States receding from the colonialist models at work from the nation's founding through the Spanish-American War, and not yet encountering the globalized, postcolonial culture which would flower in the Sixties. . . . Apostles of Modernity is a compelling study of how American writers reflect, refract, and critique American economic development in decolonized countries."—Andrew Strombeck, Studies in American Naturalism