The Cambridge History of American Modernism

Bringing together multiple new scholarly approaches, this is the most comprehensive essay collection on US literary modernism to date.

Mark Whalan (Edited by)

9781108477673, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 July 2023

700 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 4.6 cm, 1.28 kg

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

Part I. Methodologies: 1. The US and Geomodernism Yogita Goyal
2. Evading Comstockery: The Provincetown Theater, the Harlem Renaissance, and US Queer Modernism Benjamin Kahan
3. Our Americas: Locating Modernisms, Dislocating Regionalisms and the Place of Cultures Eric Aronoff
4. Green Modernism Joshua Schuster
5. Modernism and the Middlebrow Faye Hammill
6. 'The Accent of the Future': Ethnic American Modernism Catherine Morley
Part II. Forms, Genre, and Media
7. New Visual Media Julian Murphet
8. Midwestern Modernism and the Radio: Eliot, Hughes, Niedecker Tom McEnaney
9. Modernist Writing and Painting John Fagg
10. Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary Sonnet Retman
11. Skyscraper Organizations: Architecture and US Literary Modernism Adrienne Brown
12. The Jazz Age Jessica Teague
13. Modernism's Deep Roots: the fin-de-siecle and the Transformation of the American Novel Guy Reynolds
14. Modernizing the American Short Story Kasia Boddy
15. Modernist American Long Poems Michael Kindellan
16. The Modernist Lyric and its Discontents Linda Kinnahan
17. Anthologies Jeremy Braddock
18. Fragile Realism: American Drama in the Interwar Period Katherine Biers
19. Post-WWII Theater and Media: Citation and Improvisation Shonni Enelow
20. The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde Lisa Siraganian
21. Magazines Andrew Thacker
22. The Modernist Presses Lise Jaillant
23. Literary Criticism Ichiro Takayoshi
24. Libertad Bajo Palabra: Surrealism in the Americas Jonathan P. Eburne
Part III. Situating US Modernism: A. Situating in History
25. War Jonathan Vincent
26. Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State Matthew Stratton
27. Modernism of the Streets: How the Left Made a Culture from Below Bill V. Mullen
28. Late Modernism Greg Barnhisel
B. Situating in Geography
29. Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines: US Modernism in Europe Eric B. White
30. The American Metropolis Nathaniel Cadle
31. Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms: Modernism in the Americas Rachel Galvin
32. Southern Modernism Jon Smith
33. Transpacific Modernism Josephine Park
C. Situating in Movements and Communities
34. Indigenous Modernism Melanie Benson Taylor
35. Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
36. The New Woman and American Modernism Alex Goody
37. Celebrity and American Modernism: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway Karen Leick.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]