"Backed by research connecting the textual representations to the material culture of the early-twentieth-century Midwest, Old-Fashioned Modernism demonstrates how conflicts and paradoxes in the literary imagination, the disruptive contact zones between retro values and the realities of social and cultural change, also shaped daily life in the Heartland. Oler creates a composite portrait of a Midwest where the seeming placidity of its white patriarchy and its rural nostalgia are disrupted by the fact that the Midwest, like everywhere, is caught in the conflicts and conjunctions of modern dislocation. Old-Fashioned Modernism: Masculinity and Midwestern Literature complicates a core component of "American Normal" through a wide ranging set of illustrative examples and case studies."--Douglas Reichert Powell, author of Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape

"Drawing on a range of provocative sources, Old-Fashioned Modernism enlarges our understanding of gender in light of the Progressive Era's contrived oppositions between city and country, progress and conservatism, nation-building and cultural memory. Oler has successfully added further nuance to the growing body of work on critical regionalism."--Janet G. Casey, author of The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction and A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America