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American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation

Adam Nemmers

American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, ... More

American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.Less

Art and the Nation State: The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland

Róisín Kennedy

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art in Ireland from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era ... More

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art in Ireland from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modern art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of Irish national identity. Through an analysis of significant controversies and debates on modern art, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Disputes about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O’Connor; the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault; the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly, British artist, Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.Less

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

Matt Theado (ed.)

This book collects fifteen academic essays that address the aesthetic, cultural, historical, and personal connections among Beat Generation poets and Black Mountain poets.

Before the War, and After the Union: An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson (Samuel Williams)

Samuel "Aleckson" Williams

Susanna Ashton (ed.)

Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. It ... More

Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage. It is published here for the first time under his own name and with biographical and interpretive context. Published privately by his family, Before the War and After the Union traces Williams’s life from his earliest memories of being enslaved and forced to serve Confederate soliders in army camps, through the post–Civil War years as his family struggled to reconnect and build a new life during Reconstruction. It the ends with tales about his life as the head of a Southern Black family newly relocated to Vermont at the turn-of-the-century. When he wrote his memoir nearly sixty years after emancipation, Williams was an elderly man, far from the site of his childhood in South Carolina, but his memories and analysis were keen and veer from occasional fraught nostalgia to sharply bitter analysis, creating a fascinating American story of suffering and transcendence.Less

Cape Fear

Rob Daniel

Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the ... More

Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the film as a thriller, but Cape Fear is thematically and formally more coherent when viewed as a horror film. Across an introduction and five chapters, this book explores why this is the case. How Scorsese’s Catholicism and passion for horror has informed artistic decisions throughout his career, and the ways in which it reached an apex when he directed Cape Fear. The ways in which conventions of Gothic literature and fairy tales influenced this richly metatextual film, plus the impact of historical trends in horror cinema. How Robert De Niro’s research into antagonist Max Cady created a character who is closer to cinematic bogeymen rather than the more earthbound villains expected in thrillers. Film theory models around genre are utilised, along with interviews with key personnel on the film. Including a primary source interview with screenwriter Wesley Strick, who relates his experiences. Scorsese’s hyper-stylised directorial technique in Cape Fear is analysed for the ways in which it works to creates sensations typically associated with horror cinema, and the film’s legacy is also reviewed. Sexual politics and the controversy that surrounded Cape Fear’s depiction of sexual threat is also analysed, within the context of Scorsese’s depiction of women and accusations of misogyny that have been levelled against him during his career.Less

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Martyn Bennett, Raymond Gillespie, and Scott Spurlock (eds)

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell’s involvement with Ireland, in particular his military ... More

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell’s involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. Overall, a picture emerges of a more moderate Cromwell than the version that has been passed down in Irish history, tradition and folklore.Less

Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound

Walter Baumann, John Gery, and David McKnight (eds)

This volume gathers fourteen essays by authors from eight different countries who offer new interpretations on Ezra Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It ... More

This volume gathers fourteen essays by authors from eight different countries who offer new interpretations on Ezra Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound’s work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the early1900s through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator, to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, as well as translations of his poetry into other languages during the last half century. Although in our era such terms as “cross-cultural thinking,” “globalism,” “transnationalism,” and “internationalism” remain fluid and often stir controversy, especially in relation to modernism, the place of Pound as a prominent modernist figure worldwide remains unquestioned. Without attempting to be comprehensive, these essays provide a clear picture of the reach of Pound’s engagement, including the international scope of his literature, his translations, his editorial work on behalf of others, and the diverse historical, social, ideological, interdisciplinary, and theoretical contexts in which he can be read and interpreted. Divided into four categories, Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound considers his early influences, his collaborative, transnational, and interdisciplinary methods, questions of modernist translation (concerning both Pound’s translations and translations of his poetry), and cross-cultural readings of his literary stature.Less

Don Paterson

Ben Wilkinson

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s ... More

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, negotiating the postmodern demands of the age in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Alongside the poet’s insistence on poetry as a mode of knowledge, the study argues that Paterson’s originality as a poet is evidenced by his rejection of an idiosyncratic poetic voice, seeking instead to refine a stylistic adaptability. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Less

The Evil Dead

Lloyd Haynes

THE EVIL DEAD is one of the most inventive and energetic of all horror movies. Sam Raimi’s debut feature transcends its small budget and limited resources to deliver a phantasmagoric roller-coaster ... More

THE EVIL DEAD is one of the most inventive and energetic of all horror movies. Sam Raimi’s debut feature transcends its small budget and limited resources to deliver a phantasmagoric roller-coaster ride, a wildly absurd and surreal assault on the senses. The first two chapters detail the unique circumstances of the film’s origin - it began life as a short film which was used to encourage financial backing from a variety of investors – and it’s production history which was fraught with problems. Chapter Three examines the concept of the Bad Place (the cabin in the woods) and how the film structurally creates a ‘bad dream’ effect. Chapter Four considers how the film’s ‘macho’ male hero Ash shares similarities with the Final Girl of other horror movies of this period, while Chapter Five explores the critical approaches to the film and its reputation in Britain as a ‘video nasty’. Chapter Six examines how THE EVIL DEAD has influenced other works both within and outside of the horror genre since its release in 1982.Less

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric

Edward Allen (ed.)

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to ... More

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial dimension of the evolving history of lyric.Less

Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African-American Cultural History and Letters

Michael Ra-Shon Hall

Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. ... More

Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational black press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.Less

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 1 (1716-1992)

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase (eds)

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. ... More

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short chapters provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume One covers plays by Irish women playwrights written between 1716 to 1992, and seeks to address and redress the historic absence of Irish female playwrights in theatre histories. Highlighting the work of nine women playwrights from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as thirteen of the twentieth century’s key writers, the chapters in this volume explore such varied themes as the impact of space and place on identity, women’s strategic use of genre, and theatrical responses to shifts in Irish politics and culture.Less

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 2 (1992-2016)

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase (eds)

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. ... More

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short chapters provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume Two contains chapters focused on plays by sixteen Irish women playwrights produced between 1992 and 2016, highlighting the explosion of new work by contemporary writers. The plays in this volume explore women’s experiences at the intersections of class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, pushing at the boundaries of how we define not only Irish theatre, but Irish identity more broadly.Less

Ireland's Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

Zan Cammack

Gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability. As a result, Irish Modernism inherently links the ... More

Gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability. As a result, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone reveals its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. The gramophone, therefore, points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.Less

Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958)

Deirdre F. Brady

This book presents a vivid history of the pioneering women involved in the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements, and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish print ... More

This book presents a vivid history of the pioneering women involved in the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements, and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish print culture. As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissent texts, as political campaigner against creative censorship, and for the right to intellectual freedom, a radical group of women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for women writers. This book offers a history of the Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958), examining its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Exploring the period through a history of the book approach, this book covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, intellectual circles, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and connections to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, co-mingling with other artistic groups to fight for freedom of expression and the right to earn a living by the pen.Less

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats

Ragini Mohite

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their ... More

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature. This book foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, Yeats’s complex engagement with South Asia, the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame and the value of reading his English translations as independent products on the global stage. Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the two authors’ works allows us to recognize the significant moments of tension, intersections, and divergence in their oeuvres. Engaging with their works across genres, with particular attention to the socio-cultural and political backgrounds of the time, this comparative study examines the transnational lives of the texts and provides a timely perspective on how aesthetic and cultural dialogues carry national conversations across borders and into the present day.Less

Oasts and Hop Kilns: A History

Patrick Grattan

The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, ... More

The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, Hampshire and Farnham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The evolution of the kilns, the drying methods and the machinery used is pieced together from surviving buildings, agricultural books, archives and local lore. 250 diagrams, sketches and photographs present a graphic picture of hop drying and the impact of oasts and kilns on the countryside. Hop growing expanded to meet the demands of Industrial Revolution Britain, its army and navy. The commercial and political drama of hop farming, drying and marketing is present in the book. Fortunes were made and lost. Gambling and dodgy dealing on hops and taxes was common. No crop was more volatile than hops. Political battles over tariffs and free trade are reported. The hop drying buildings in continental Europe – notably Flanders, Alsace, Bavaria and the Czech Republic- and in parts of the USA are described. They demonstrate that hop drying buildings in England were unmatched in the 17th-19th centuries, but that in the 20th century modern drying machinery in the USA and Germany left England behind.Less

The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes's Creative Process

Carrie Smith

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to ... More

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Hughes’s extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book’s unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes’s techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes’s changing ideas about how poetry ‘ought’ to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes’s major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes’s poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.Less

Pamela Colman Smith: Artist, Feminist, and Mystic

Elizabeth Foley O'Connor

Today, Pamela Colman Smith is primarily remembered for designing the storied 1909 tarot deck that served as the model for T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and “her wicked pack of cards” in The Waste ... More

Today, Pamela Colman Smith is primarily remembered for designing the storied 1909 tarot deck that served as the model for T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and “her wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. For almost one hundred years it was known as the Rider-Waite deck, named for the mystic A. E. Waite, who is credited with conceiving the deck, and the London publisher, William Rider. This omission perfectly encapsulates Colman Smith’s gendered erasure from the cultural imagination, a type of misogyny that affected many women artists and writers at the turn of the twentieth century but, in her case, was also tinged with racism. Colman Smith was much more than the graphic designer of the tarot deck. Active from the mid-1890s through the 1920s, Colman Smith had a burgeoning career as an American artist, writer, folklore performer, editor, publisher, stage designer, and suffrage activist. Colman Smith’s letters to friends, patrons, publishers, and gallery owners reveal an irrepressible spirit who was committed to rooting out all types of hypocrisy and prejudice, including classism, sexism, and racism, but who, nonetheless, capitalized on racial stereotypes through her Afro-Jamaican Anansi performances. Taken as a whole, Colman Smith’s prodigious body of work is particularly notable for its ability to take on, and often as quickly cast aside, a range of personas and identities.Less

Possession

Alison Taylor

Born in the shadow of marital turmoil and political rupture, it is almost inevitable that Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) would be caught between two worlds. In Cannes, the film premiered in ... More

Born in the shadow of marital turmoil and political rupture, it is almost inevitable that Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) would be caught between two worlds. In Cannes, the film premiered in competition for the illustrious Palme d’Or; in the UK it was put on trial for charges of obscenity as part of the infamous ‘video nasties’ campaign. Beginning with a marital breakdown and ending with an apocalypse, Possession is a fascinating and confounding artefact skirting the boundaries between art and exploitation, visceral horror and cerebral reverie. Shot against the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War and replete with tales of a disappearing producer, drunken stunt doubles, and Haitian voodoo trances, the film’s production history is almost as bizarre as the finished product. Possession’s mystique has not dissipated over time; its transgressive imagery, histrionic performances, and spiral staircase logic continue to mesmerise audiences 40 years after its original release. Including new interview material from Sam Neill, extracts from the original shooting script and the BBFC’s archival reports, this book takes a deep dive into Possession’s history, stylistic achievement, and legacy as an enduring and unique work of horror cinema.Less