From Melville's assertion that "failure is the true test of greatness" to Faulkner's self-proclaimed "splendid failure to do the impossible," the reinvention of failure has persisted as a watchword for literary success. As a response to the relentlessly forward-looking impulse of American modernity, this romance of failure registers both a modernist embrace of dislocation as well as a profound unease with the social and demographic changes ushered in by modernity. False Starts investigates failure as a term with a rich and contentious intellectual genealogy, arguing for a long history of American modernism between the years of 1850 and 1950.

My introduction places an understanding of failure at the center of received notions about the origins and impetus of literary modernism. Modernism, I argue, can be understood by two crucial failed imperatives: the imperative to divorce itself from a mass culture through which it is always constituted, and the imperative to write an authentically new beginning in literature that remains bounded by its own historicity. I then analyze the 1850s as a proto-modernist moment in my second chapter on Herman Melville and Susan Warner, demonstrating that Melville's rhetoric of failure responded to Warner's bestselling novel. By uncovering a mutually dependant relationship between the discourses of modernity and sentimentality, sentimental fiction becomes more than an isolated tradition neglected by modern critics, while American Renaissance writers' position within the literary marketplace is more completely articulated. My third chapter on Henry Adams and Edith Wharton compares both writers' responses to fin-de-siècle theories of historical, cultural, and racial degeneration, with particular interest in their acutely ambivalent depiction of Jewish Americans. Wharton unfolds the ways in which women are conspicuously occluded from consideration in the rhetoric of failure, while sharing Adams's unease with the quintessentially modern figure of the Jewish parvenu. My final pairing of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison countenances the failure of language itself by tracing their varying representations of documents that fail to signify. Faulkner and Ellison reveal that the condition of language's disarticulation in modernism bears with it the persistent trace of racial dispossession in the modern condition.