Literature and society--United States

A central paradox in modernism is its disdain for mass culture, despite mass
culture 's undeniable presence in modernist literature. American authors writing
during the early twentieth century tried to establish themselves as "highbrow" by
leaving the U.S. and traveling to Europe. In doing so, they created a particular
aesthetic characterized by depictions of the transportation that facilitated this travel.
These depictions reveal modernism's dependence on mass culture, and more
importantly, create a space in which modernist authors can negotiate what was once
a choice between high or low culture, exile or tourist, and ultimately, modernism or
mass culture. Analyzing the car and train scenes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is
the Night and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises reveals the hybrid spaces
made available to these authors through transportation.

Pulp fiction played an integral part in the development of mystery fiction through its establishment of hard-boiled fiction as a genre. Although a number of pulp magazines were popular between the 1920s and the 1940s, one of the most influential and well-remembered of these magazines was the Black Mask, which was the magazine primarily responsible for establishing "hard-boiled" detective fiction as a genre through the development of the hard-boiled fiction formula, as well as cementing the careers of some of the most well-known mystery writers, such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erie Stanley Gardner. Through a close reading of these authors and other authors who appeared in the Black Mask from the 1920s to the 1940s, changes in societal values, as well as in hard-boiled fiction as a genre, may be seen.