Front Lines of Modernism

Front Lines of Modernism
Author: M. Larabee
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2011-04-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230118259

This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. Using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials, it reexamines modernist and traditional writing to reveal how various modes of topographical representation allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war.

Great War Modernists

Great War Modernists
Author: Lee M. Jenkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350285358

Taking 44 Mecklenburgh Square as the focal point and springboard for a critical group study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of modernist biofiction and poetry to the literature of the First World War. A group that Perdita Schaffner described as 'another Bloomsbury set', the Mecklenburgh Square writers, like the Bloomsbury Group proper, 'lived in squares' and 'loved in triangles', in Dorothy Parker's famous formulation. Geographically adjacent, these sets intersected socially and, at points, in their aesthetics: both practiced innovative forms of what may broadly be defined as 'life writing'. But, demarcating the Mecklenburgh Square writers from the Bloomsbury Set, the former had its origins in the transatlantic avant-garde: Lawrence. H.D., Aldington (and John Cournos) were all associated with Imagism, the poetic movement which instantiated Anglo-American modernism. Considered as a pro-tem collective, these four poets, all of whom were also novelists and translators, contest the binaries that still obtain between modernist and First World War writing. This group study of Lawrence, H.D., Aldington and Cournos tracks the transition of Imagism from a pre-war mode to a war poetics which includes but is not confined to the trench lyric and it traces, in the transtextual relations between the Mecklenburgh Square novels, the traumatic imprint of the war on modernist life writing.

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan
Author: Li-Chun Hsiao
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498569102

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

Inventing American Modernism

Inventing American Modernism
Author: Jill E. Pearlman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2007
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780813926025

"In this book Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not effect changes alone and, further, that the Harvard Graduate School of Design was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. - She offers a crucial missing piece to the story - and to the history of modern architecture - by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder."--BOOK JACKET.

Modernism

Modernism
Author: Vassiliki Kolocotroni
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 658
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226450742

This anthology provides a guide to the Modernist movement in literature. Covering intellectual concerns of the period 1850-1940, it draws on contemporary essays, reviews, articles and manifestos of the political and aesthetic avant-garde.

The Ecology of Modernism

The Ecology of Modernism
Author: Joshua Schuster
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0817358293

The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an environmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an environmental aesthetic, and explains why American modernism was never green. Examining the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution, Joshua Schuster posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission.

James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture

James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture
Author: Jeffrey S. Drouin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317541502

This book makes an important intervention in the ongoing debates about modernism, science, and the divisions of early Twentieth-Century print culture. In order to establish Joyce's place in the nexus of modernism and scientific thought, Drouin uses the methods of periodical studies and textual criticism to examine the impact of Einstein's relativity theories on the development of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Looking at experiments with space, time, motion, and perspective, it rigorously surveys discourse of science and the novel in the print culture networks connected to Joyce, with concrete analysis of avant-garde magazines, newspapers, popular science books, BBC pamphlets, and radio broadcasts between 1914 and 1939. These sources elucidate changes that Joyce made to the manuscripts, typescripts, and page proofs of certain episodes of his final two novels. The new evidence establishes for the first time the nature of the material link between Joyce and non-technical science, and the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake owe their structure and meaning to the humanistic issues associated with science during the wartime and inter-war years. In examining the relationships between Joyce's later work and the popular science industry, the book elucidates the often conflicting attitudes toward science in inter-war British print culture, filling in a piece of the puzzle that is modernism's relationship to the new physics and, simultaneously, the history of the novel.

Spectrality in Modernist Fiction

Spectrality in Modernist Fiction
Author: Stephen Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192888358

Spectrality in Modernist Fiction argues that key modernist writers, chiefly Conrad, Forster, Butts, and Bowen, use spectral rhetoric to tackle problems of sex and sexuality, revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and desire all through complicated ethical engagements. These engagements invariably come packaged in, and are shaped by, the language of spectrality. In its capacity to articulate a particular sort of relationship between the past, the present and the future, the spectral concerns the basic question of how to proceed, how to live with-maybe even address-ethical indeterminacy. Whether their spectral rhetoric traces the logics of capitalist possession (Conrad), queer "friendship" and paganized Christianity (Forster), regressive politics haunted by historical traumas (Butts), or the devious passages of perverse desire (Bowen), these writers locate something like hope in their ghosts. The ethical and political impasses they chart through their spectral rhetoric are not final, but temporary, and the drive to overcome them constitutes a tensile optimism.

Rereading Modernist Postcards

Rereading Modernist Postcards
Author: Bradley D. Clissold
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000922782

Informed by both new and old media theory, materialist approaches to the study of everyday objects, and a series of close readings that chart the critical history of postcard use in the fiction and correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, and Wilfred Owen, this book locates and attempts to rediscover lost, misplaced, and neglected postcard materialities, as they relate to the archiving, editing, publishing, and fictional repurposing of postcards across Anglo-American Literary Modernism (1880-1939). It argues that postcards need to be recognized as important early twentieth-century communication technologies and distinctly modernist textualities, composed of multimedia, recto–verso intertextualities. Moreover, their material limitations encourage users to inscribe messages often in fragmented language forms and innovative cultural shorthands (a.k.a. postcardese). This study redresses the ongoing, widespread scholarly neglect of signifying postcard materialities in modernist studies and the editorial silencing of postcard features in collections of published author correspondence. It also stresses that for these four literary figures of modernism, the material choice of a postcard for communicating is always as much the (meta)message, as any of the signifying materialities they carry uploaded onto their platforming surfaces.