Research Information System
AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol.50, no.2, pp.225-245, 2026 (AHCI, Scopus)
Dorothy Canfield’s interwar social novel Seasoned Timber (1939) portrays the pre-WWII years through her warning about rising European totalitarianism and antisemitism. Canfield points out American nativism, anti-immigration policies, working class resentment, and the post-WWI illusionary isolationism from the European conflict. Set in the turbulent 1930s, the Clifford community serves as a microcosm of postwar materialism and progressivism with references to anti-communist hysteria, rising nationalism, and white supremacist tendencies. The principal of the Clifford Academy, T. C. Hulme, thus expresses Canfield’s concerns about another world war after the failure of the post-WWI peace settlements. In the novel, the emergence of antisemitic, elitist, and sexist totalitarianism results in a struggle between the supporters of conformity and those who resist un-American defiance of freedom, equal opportunity, and democratic principles. Depicting cultural and religious intolerance, ideological attacks, and discrimination, Canfield’s novel exemplifies her interwar progressive agenda through a shift from personal politics to public consciousness about American interwar society and global affairs in the 1930s.