Paul Crosthwaite, <i>Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis</i>

World War I was a watershed moment for European modernism, but pinpointing a comparable moment for its American counterpart has proved more challenging.Paul Crosthwaite's Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis names Black Tuesday, the day of the 1929 stock market crash, as a significant periodizing event.Here, modernism is defined around the entrenched financial speculation that eventually led first to the crash and then to years of disillusionment; as Crosthwaite notes, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes pronounced the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance cultural casualties of the crash.Yet Crosthwaite argues that it also gave birth to new conceptions of temporality that can be seen in the many different historical and cultural artifacts of the mid-1920s through 1950s.For Crosthwaite, the 1929 crash thus functions as a turning point in speculative thinking, resulting in new anxieties not only about the long-term political, social, and cultural implications, but also how artists could represent them.