American Modernism (Re)Considered
American Modernism (Re)Considered
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Description
What exactly is modernism and who are modernist writers? What distinguishes American modernism from its European counterpart?
American Modernism (Re)Considered questions the principal distinction between modernism and other genres/movements/styles in literature through new critical readings of canonical modernist texts alongside texts which pose a problem for modernism due to their ambiguous, if not marginal, relation to some of its predominant tenets. It asks: Is modernism characterized principally by a transition from older forms (like naturalism and realism) to a style that is new, innovative, and experimental? Is it found in shared understandings and alignments regarding the nature and purpose of art? Is it identifiable by modernists' treatment of various central themes – including as a reaction to modernity; as a response to the Boer and World wars; as an interrogation of Britain's empire and its dissolution – and how these events fragmented modern life? Or is it all of the above?
Contributors discuss a wide range of texts – by authors such as Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne Carson, Wallace Stevens, Américo Paredes, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot – to challenge the aesthetic, social, and temporal boundaries of modernism in America. Through original close readings of these texts, American Modernism (Re)Considered subjects modernism to new interrogations and offers new answers to questions that remain contemporary even as they harken back to its height of popularity and interest in the mid-1920s.
Table of Contents
Jeff Birkenstein, Centralia College, USA and Robert C. Hauhart, Saint Martin's University, USA
Part I: A Preoccupation with Language and Interiority
1. Interiority, Regret, Loss, and Mourning in Early Hemingway
Robert C. Hauhart, Saint Martin's University, USA
2. Nella Larson and the Interior Lives of African American Women in Passing and Quicksand
Kimberly Smith, Elizabeth City State University, USA
3. Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon: Reading Late Modernism with Merleau-Ponty
Rossie Artemis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Part II: Collisions of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality
4. “Life as a ghastly skeleton”: Modernism in Fauset's Plum Bun
Andrea Tinnemeyer, The College Preparatory School, USA
5. The Strange Career of Coleman Silk: The Human Stain as Jim Crow Narrative
Durthy Washington, Colorado College, USA
6. Mexican-American Generation Authors on the U.S. Color Line
Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno, USA
7. “Emotionally Smashed Boys": Modernism and Racial Trauma
Kimberly Drake, Scripps College, USA
Part III: Forms of Performance, Artistic Expression, and Literary Images
8. Revisiting Langston Hughes' Modernist Poetry
Asma Dhouioui, University of Carthage, Tunisia
9. “The Still Point of the Turning World” in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as a Key to Modernist Literature and Related to the Image of the String Quartet
Kiyoko Magome, University of Tsukuba, Japan
10. “The image of one fatal word”: Verbal-Visual Crisscrossings in e.e. cummings' Experimental Modernism
Bowen Wang, Trinity College, Ireland
11. Images Reimagined: Modernist Photography, Painting, and the Short Story
Jeff Birkenstein, Centralia College, USA and Ericka Birkenstein, Independent Scholar, USA
Part IV: Transitioning: Expectations, Explorations, and Genders
12. The Betrayals of Passing
Luis Alberto Cortés, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA
13. Modernism's Ghostly Men
David Magill, Longwood University, USA
14. Reconsidering Women Smoking in Three Late-19th-Century American Novels
Richmond Adams, Independent Scholar, USA
15. Modern(ist) Medicine and Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep
Molly Mann, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA
16. Conducting Wallace Stevens and Anne Carson from Ancient Greece to Lorde and St. Vincent
Angus Cleghorne, Seneca College, Canada
Product details
| Published | 07 Aug 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 320 |
| ISBN | 9798765126844 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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