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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

The Beats: A Teaching Companion

Nancy M. Grace (ed.)

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat ... More

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.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.

Contradictory Woolf

Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (eds)

This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the ... More

This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Glasgow. The theme of contradiction in Woolf's writing, including her use of the word “but,” is widely explored in relation to auto/biography, art, philosophy, cognitive science, sexuality, animality, class, mathematics, translation, annotation, poetry, and war.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

Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos

Massimo Bacigalupo

This exploration of the Italian background of The Cantos provides indispensable keys to an understanding of a major American epic. Bacigalupo follows Pound’s steps through Italian cities and ... More

This exploration of the Italian background of The Cantos provides indispensable keys to an understanding of a major American epic. Bacigalupo follows Pound’s steps through Italian cities and landscapes, his contacts with writers from Dante to his contemporaries, his own writings in (and translations from) Italian, and his final introspective years between Rapallo and Venice—all of which is considered for the light it casts on his work. A new approach to Pound’s difficult poetry is thus offered, as well as the fascinating, dramatic and entertaining story of an American writer’s life-long concern with his adoptive country. An appendix offers a detailed chronology of Pound’s relation with and reception in Italy.Less

Gastro-modernism: Food, Literature, Culture

Derek Gladwin (ed.)

This volume of essays surveys gastronomy across global literary modernisms. Modernists explore public and domestic spaces where food and drink are prepared and served, as much as they create them in ... More

This volume of essays surveys gastronomy across global literary modernisms. Modernists explore public and domestic spaces where food and drink are prepared and served, as much as they create them in the modernist imagination through narrative, language, verse, and style. Modernism as a cultural and artistic movement also highlights the historical politics of food and eating. As the chapters in Gastro-Modernism reveal, critical trends in food studies alert us to many social concerns that emerge in the modernist period because of expanding food literacy and culture. The result is that food production, consumption, and scarcity are abiding themes in modernist literature and culture, reflecting tensions amidst colonial, agricultural, and industrial settings. This timely volume ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with food culture known as gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.Less

Jack London

Kenneth K. Brandt

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” ... More

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” This study explores how London’s Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America’s most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and “To Build a Fire”- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London’s key subjects—the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility—are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.Less

Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival

Frank Shovlin

This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom, and shows how his acute historical sensibility ... More

This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom, and shows how his acute historical sensibility is reflected in Dubliners, posing new questions about one of the most enduring collections of short stories ever written. The answers provided are a fusion of history and literary criticism, using close readings that balance techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is a study that shines light on Dubliners and Joyce's later masterpieces.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

Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

Sam Wiseman

The late-Victorian era has been extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this study seeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studies to the early ... More

The late-Victorian era has been extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this study seeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studies to the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with the quintessentially urban Gothic space of fin de siècle London, as represented in classic texts such as Dracula and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the study proceeds to ask how the themes and energies which emerge in this moment evolve throughout the early twentieth century. In the ghost stories of authors like M.R. James, the Edwardian era witnesses an uncanny return to the rural English landscape, in which modernity encounters the re-emergence of suppressed fears and forces. After World War One, London again experiences a renewal of Gothic themes, with figures such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot representing the city as a stricken and desolate space, haunted by the trauma and ghosts of the recent conflict. That legacy of violence and loss is also evident in rural representations of place in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a renewed interest in supernaturalism and paganism found in authors like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Butts. Ultimately, this study argues, this period of dramatic social and cultural change is shadowed by a corresponding evolution in Gothic literary representation, whether that is expressed through modernist experimentation or more conventional narrative forms.Less

Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality and the Queer Nineteenth Century

Peta Mayer

Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. ... More

Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.Less

Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture

Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck (eds)

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of objects. It places objects, how they emerge or withdraw, how they fashion us, ... More

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of objects. It places objects, how they emerge or withdraw, how they fashion us, and what status they hold, at the heart of what constitutes modernism. Three processes are consistently to be observed in modernist object experiments: objecting to realism, fashioning the human, and performing the ornamental. The cumbersome bourgeois semiotics of material possessions was itself taken on by writers as diverse as Beckett or Djuna Barnes as a material to be chipped away at, given new life or hollowed out. Writers and creators embraced the object in a way that culminated in such intimate extensions of the mind and body as constructivist clothing, literary magazines, musical instruments, and restorative sculptures. The most skin-deep artifice is shown here to have epoch-changing potentialities. Can a lost brooch define the feminine through an aesthetics of absence? Can the ever-accelerating succession of hats on the head of a lonely alien in Paris,or of manufactured appliances on the dress of a German baroness, loosen the maddening grip of consumer society? Can the bourgeoisie be placed in a position to camp gender (Boscagli) through the use of Japanese lacquer on the outer surfaces of a recliner? This book is characterized by attentiveness to works hitherto considered as minor alongside canonical ones, a careful reclaiming of women’s writing and fine art, and a methodological habitof extending transnational probes outside the realm of the English language.Less

Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering ... More

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering instead a bold, unapologetic, evidence-based portrait of a woman and her significant contributions to twenty-first-century considerations of gender, race, and class. This full length critical study by the late, path-breaking feminist scholar, Jane Marcus, rereads Cunard’s identity as a poet, an anthologist, a journalist, and political activist against racism and fascism.Less

Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press

Neil Pearson

This book details the work of one of the most extraordinary publishing enterprises in history. Censor–baiting, provocative, simultaneous publisher of the literary elite and of ‘dirty books’, Jack ... More

This book details the work of one of the most extraordinary publishing enterprises in history. Censor–baiting, provocative, simultaneous publisher of the literary elite and of ‘dirty books’, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce among others. At the same time Kahane subsidised his literary endeavours with cheap erotica and trash fiction from long–forgotten eccentrics such as New York Daily News' Rome correspondent and self–styled ‘Marco Polo of Sex’ N. Reynolds Packard. Kahane's business model was simple: if a book was banned in the UK and US it could be profitably published in Paris. Here, the author has pulled together the incendiary story of Obelisk, including biographies of Kahane and his major and minor authors, and a bibliography of Obelisk books.Less

Readings in the Cantos: Volume I

Richard Parker (ed.)

This project provides critical readings of individual sections of The Cantos of Ezra Pound written by prominent Pound scholars who combine critical insight with useful information about sources and ... More

This project provides critical readings of individual sections of The Cantos of Ezra Pound written by prominent Pound scholars who combine critical insight with useful information about sources and contexts. Focused around a generous selection of the most important Cantos, this book provides a vital introduction for new readers of The Cantos and a valuable resource for the more experienced.Less

The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism

Sam Wiseman

This book examines a renewed focus upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions among English interwar modernist writers, specifically D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia ... More

This book examines a renewed focus upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions among English interwar modernist writers, specifically D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf. All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and all four writers display imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences. The first chapter emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, and argues that this is inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Chapter Two argues that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through a fantastical, nostalgic lens; he develops a sense of the landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. Chapter Three notes a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts; like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, promoting a cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England. Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure able to manage tensions between urban and rural, modern and traditional, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form. In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals; the central stress in the conclusion is on the need to incorporate such perspectives.Less

Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists

Anthony W. Lee (ed.)

This book brings Johnson more sharply into focus by casting him amongst an unfamiliar milieu and company; likewise, it is hoped that by bringing Johnson to bear on the various authors and topics ... More

This book brings Johnson more sharply into focus by casting him amongst an unfamiliar milieu and company; likewise, it is hoped that by bringing Johnson to bear on the various authors and topics gathered, it manages to foreground some aspects of Modernism and its practitioners that would otherwise remain elusively hidden. If it is unlikely that the phrase “Modernity Johnson” will eclipse such better-known appellations as “Dictionary Johnson” and “the Rambler,” this volume suggests that it urges a rethinking of both Johnson and Modernism in ways that are at once compelling, illuminating, and critically productive.Less

Satiric Modernism

Kevin Rulo

This book reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. It shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. ... More

This book reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. It shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G. S. Street, the Sitwells, J. J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, the book remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.Less

The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence

Benjamin D. Hagen

Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf ... More

Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College while Lawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between 1902 and 1912. This study reframes Woolf’s and Lawrence’s later experiments in fiction, memoir, and literary criticism as the works of former teachers who remain deeply preoccupied with pedagogy. Across their respective writing careers, moreover, they conceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation, emotion, or intensity. The “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrence depict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather, they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces, and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction, for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playing the student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models a novel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom of common readers who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure. Sensuous Pedagogies also reads Lawrence’s literary criticism as reparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and their respective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogical concerns.Less