Old-Fashioned Modernism Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature

In Old-Fashioned Modernism , Andy Oler explores how midwestern literature produces specific forms of regional modernity through male protagonists who both fulfill and resist traditional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. Focusing on images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization, Oler examines novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. By reading literary representations of the Midwest alongside artifacts of material culture from the region, Old-Fashioned Modernism demonstrates how midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and mid-century rural masculinities by planting formal innovations in the countryside and pitting nostalgic pastoralism against the byproducts of industrial modernity.