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In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock...
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As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking modern artists and intellectuals to construct conflicting responses: some embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern...
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At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance-a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment...
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American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism "like wet sox and gin before breakfast." It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from "serious" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that...
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The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism,...
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In the years following World War I, the "international" emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing...
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How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension-a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons-shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.
Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone...
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In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.
The...
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The Spanish-American War of 1898 seems to mark a turning point in both geopolitical and literary histories. The victorious American empire ascended and began its cultural domination of the globe in the twentieth century, while the once-mighty Spanish empire declined and became a minor state in the world republic of letters. But what if this narrative relies on several faulty assumptions, and what if key modernist figures in both America and Spain...
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women's movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state's rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual...
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Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC's Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Directed at an educated Indian audience, its programming provided remarkable moments: Listeners in India heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake on the eve of independence, as well as the literary criticism of E. M. Forster and the works of Indian writers living in London.
In...
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In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists-including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson-he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history,...
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During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter...
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Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens to the world but, as Eric Bulson shows in Little Magazine, World Form, their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Bulson uncovers a...
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