front cover of The Mask of Fiction
The Mask of Fiction
Essays on W. D. Howells
John W. Crowley
University of Massachusetts Press
W. D. Howells (1837-1920) occupies a peculiar position in our current literary history. Situated on the periphery, he is one of whose "marginality" seems, nevertheless, to be a necessary counterpart to the "centrality" of other writers--such as his friends Henry James and mark Twin--who are more securely fixed in the canon. Paradoxically, Howells has been an indispensable man in the middle, linking such binary pairs as East/West, romance/realism, elitism/socialism, patriarchal canon/women writers. This volume brings together nine related essays by John W. Crowley. The first four center respectively on Howells and the Civil War, his attitudes toward women, his friendship with a homosexual writer, and the tragically short life of his daughter Winifred. Crowley's overarching purpose here is to establish Howells as perhaps the representative male writer of his time, within the gender codes of Victorian America. The last five chapters discuss Howell's later fiction, focusing on its intense concern with psychology an psychic phenomena. Crowley not only brings this relatively neglected work more fully into view, but also argues that Howells used the writing of this fiction as a process of psychological self-healing that resembles the self-analysis of Sigmund Freud during the same years.
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front cover of The White Logic
The White Logic
Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction
John W. Crowley
University of Massachusetts Press, 1994
The first extended literary analysis to take account of recent work by social historians on the temperance movement, this book examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the twentieth century. In explaining the transition from Victorian to modern paradigms of heavy drinking, Crowley focuses on representative fictions by W. D. Howells (The Landlord at Lion's Head), Jack London (John Barleycorn), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood), and Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend).

Crowley considers the historical formation of "alcoholism" and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. He also defines the "drunk narrative," a mode of fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair--the White Logic of John Barleycorn, London's nihilistic lord of the spirits.
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