Author: Claire Seiler Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231550944 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
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 North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.
Author: Brigitta Olubas Publisher: Sydney University Press ISBN: 1743324111 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 167
Book Description
Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of the acclaimed Australian-born, New York-based author. In the course of the last half century, Hazzard’s writing has crossed and re-crossed the terrain of love, war, beauty, politics and ethics. Hazzard’s oeuvre effortlessly reflects and represents the author's life and times, encapsulating the prominent feelings, anxieties and questions of the second half of the 20th century. It is these qualities, along with Hazzard’s lyrical style that place her among the most noteworthy Australian writers of the 20th century.
Author: Matthew Stratton Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000872718 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 661
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English provides an interdisciplinary overview of the vibrant connections between literature, politics, and the political. Featuring contributions from 44 scholars across a variety of disciplines, the collection is divided into five parts: Connecting Literature and Politics; Constituting the Polis; Periods and Histories; Media, Genre, and Techne; and Spaces. Organized around familiar concepts—such as humans, animals, workers, empires, nations, and states—rather than theoretical schools, it will help readers to understand the ways in which literature affects our understanding of who is capable of political action, who has been included in and excluded from politics, and how different spaces are imagined to be political. It also offers a series of engagements with key moments in literary and political history from 1066 to the present in order to assess and reassess the utility of conventional modes of periodization. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of literary studies, which will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions within broader contexts.
Author: Kelly M. Rich Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192893432 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Studying works by Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Samuel Selvon, Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, it shows how contemporary fiction reflected the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, and preserved its transformative potential while redefiningits possible futures. With this long view of postwar fiction, this volume demonstrates the holding power of welfare's promises of repair and Britain's mid-century on the British cultural imagination.
Author: Scott Herring Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231556004 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging. Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City. Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.
Author: Hannah Freed-Thall Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231551975 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
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 and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices—including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing—as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.
Author: Mona Hajj Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC ISBN: 1580935478 Category : House & Home Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
A luxury volume on a luxury designer, A Romance of East and West presents the residential work of Baltimore-based interior decorator Mona Hajj. Characterized by delight and discovery, grandeur, and rustic charm, Hajj's work spans a wide range of historic periods and styles. Her interiors combine a far-reaching global vision with an American emphasis on elegance, comfort, and simplicity. Born in West Africa and educated in Europe, Lebanon, and the United States, Mona Hajj brings a truly eclectic aesthetic to her interiors. Since founding Mona Hajj Interiors in 1990, she has produced a body of work that is grounded in classicism yet influenced by modern-day styles and ways of living. Her international background inspires the work in myriad ways, from the inclusion of a Syrian chest of drawers to a reference to Moroccan ceramic tiles. A Romance of East and West features antique European and Middle Eastern textiles from Hajj's personal collection that inspire the use of color and pattern in her work.
Author: Adam McKible Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231559496 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense. Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.
Author: Cate I. Reilly Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231560397 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. Modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity. Looking beyond modernism’s well-studied relationship to psychoanalysis, this book tells the story of the non-Freudian vocabulary for mental illnesses that forms the precursor to today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s, this psychiatric taxonomy grew from the claim that invisible mental illnesses were analogous to physical phenomena in the natural world. Reilly explores how figures such as Georg Büchner, Ernst Toller, Daniel Paul Schreber, Nikolai Evreinov, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal understood the legal and political consequences of representing mental life in physical terms. Working across literary studies, the history of science, psychoanalytic criticism, critical theory, and political philosophy, Psychic Empire is an original account of modernism that shows the link between nineteenth-century scientific research on the mental health of national populations and twenty-first-century globalized, neuroscientific accounts of psychopathology and sanity.
Author: Matthew Kilbane Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421448130 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern poetry—including its proximity to popular song, hallowed objecthood, and seeming autonomy from historical determination—this revisionary theory of lyric presents a new history of modern US poetry as one sonorous practice among many clamorous others. Focusing on the mid-twentieth century, Kilbane traces the impact of new sound technologies on a diverse array of literary and musical works by Lorine Niedecker, Harry Partch, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Sterling Brown, John Wheelwright, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Russell Atkins, and Helen Adam. Kilbane shows how literary critics can look to media history to illuminate poetry's social life, and how media scholars can read poetry for insight into the cultural history of technology. In this book, the lyric poem emerges as a sensitive barometer of technological change.
Author: Claire Seiler
Author: Brigitta Olubas
Author: Matthew Stratton
Author: Kelly M. Rich
Author: Scott Herring
Author: Hannah Freed-Thall
Author: Mona Hajj
Author: Adam McKible
Author: Cate I. Reilly
Author: Matthew Kilbane