Literature of the United States II: Modernism to 1950 is an obligatory subject in the third year of the English Studies degree at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Students in this subject read four novels representative of literary modernism in the United States, as well as a selection of American modernist poetry. Gender is a common concern in the novels selected, particularly in the way constructions of American masculinity and femininity are inflected with questions of class and race in a period of immense wealth, socioeconomic inequality, and immigration as well as internal migration. The intersections of gender with class and race determine the expectations and aspirations of the protagonists of these novels, from the wealthy white heiresses and their male suitors in Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), to the two mixed-race women protagonists of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). The latter novel in particular highlights the intersections of gender, class, race, and sexuality in ways that make it an ideal literary text and “case study” for students to approach using the gender-theoretical texts and critical tools furnished by our teaching innovation project.