Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism PDF Author: Greg Forter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism PDF Author: Greg Forter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

Modernism and Mourning

Modernism and Mourning PDF Author: Patricia Rae
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The essays in Modernism and Mourning examine the work of mourning in modernist literature, or more precisely, its propensity for resisting this work. Drawing from recent developments in the theory and cultural history of mourning, its contributors explore the various ways in which modernist writers repudiate Freud's famous injunction to mourners to work through their grief, endorsing instead a resistant, or melancholic mourning that shapes both their themes and their radical experiments with form. The emerging picture of the pervasive influence of melancholic mourning in modernist literature casts new light on longstanding critical arguments, especially those about the politics of modernism. It also makes clear the pertinence of this literature to the present day, in which the catastrophic losses of 9/11, of retaliatory war, of racially motivated genocide, of the AIDS epidemic, have made the work of mourning a subject of widespread interest and debate. Patricia Rae is Head of the Department of English at Queen's University.

Commemorative Modernisms

Commemorative Modernisms PDF Author: Kelly Alice Kelly
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474459935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Reconsiders the relationship between the Great War and modernism through women's literary representations of deathProvides the first sustained study of death and commemoration in women's literature in the wartime and postwar periodOffers a reconsideration of the relationship between the First World War and literary modernism through the lens of women's writing Considers the literary impact of the vast mortality of the First World War and the culture of war commemoration on British and American women's writingOne of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, this book provides the first sustained study of women's literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body PDF Author: Kristina Wilson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208190
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"The first investigation of the role of how modernist objects were marketed by affirming buyers' racial and gender identities"--

Geomodernisms

Geomodernisms PDF Author: Laura Doyle
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it was expressed in the non-Western world; the contradictions at the heart of modernization (in revolutionary and nationalist settings, and with respect to race and nativism); and modernism's imagined geographies, "pyschogeographies" of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

Modernism and Subjectivity

Modernism and Subjectivity PDF Author: Adam Meehan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

Emotional Reinventions

Emotional Reinventions PDF Author: Melanie V Dawson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472121154
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Focusing on representational approaches to emotion during the years of American literary realism’s dominance and in the works of such authors as Edith Wharton, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and others, Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy contends that emotional representations were central to the self-conscious construction of high realism (in the mid-1880s) and to the interrogation of its boundaries. Based on realist-era authors’ rejection of “sentimentalism” and its reduction of emotional diversity (a tendency to stress what Karen Sanchez-Eppler has described as sentimental fiction’s investment in “overcoming difference”), Melanie Dawson argues that realist-era investments in emotional detail were designed to confront differences of class, gender, race, and circumstance directly. She explores the ways in which representational practices that approximate scientific methods often led away from scientific theories and rejected rigid attempts at creating emotional taxonomies. She argues that ultimately realist-era authors demonstrated a new investment in individuated emotional histories and experiences that sought to honor all affective experiences on their own terms.

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age PDF Author: Melanie V. Dawson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Providing a counterpoint to readings of modern American culture that focus on the cult of youth, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age interrogates early twentieth-century literature’s obsessions with aging past early youth. Exploring the ways in which the aging process was understood as generating unequal privileges and as inciting intergenerational contests, this study situates constructions of age at the center of modern narrative conflicts. Dawson examines how representations of aging connect the work of Edith Wharton to writings by a number of modern authors, including Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Eugene O’Neill, and Gertrude Atherton. For these writers, age-based ideologies filter through narratives of mourning for youth lost in the Great War, the trauma connected to personal change, the contested self-determination of the aged, the perceived problem of middle-aged sexuality, fantasies of rejuvenation, and persistent patterns of patriarchal authority. The work of these writers shows that as the generational ascendancy of some groups was imagined to operate in tandem with disempowerment of others, the charged dynamics of age gave rise to contests about property and authority. Constructions of age-based values also reinforced gender norms, producing questions about personal value that were directed toward women of all ages. By interpreting Edith Wharton’s and her contemporaries’ works in relation to age-based anxieties, Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.

Modern Sentimentalism

Modern Sentimentalism PDF Author: Lisa Mendelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198849877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Modern Sentimentalism examines how American female novelists reinvented sentimentalism in the modernist period. Just as the birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling, modernist literary innovation has been understood to reject sentimental aesthetics. Modern Sentimentalism reframes these perceptions of cultural evolution. Taking up icons such as the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcee, this book argues that these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with ideals of modern selfhood. These double binds equally beleaguer the protagonists and shape the styles of writers like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, and Jessie Fauset. 'Modern sentimentalism' thus translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production. Reading canonical and under-examined novels in concert with legal briefs, scientific treatises, and other transatlantic period discourse, and combining traditional and quantitative methods of archival research, Modern Sentimentalism demonstrates that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, animates its central principles and preoccupations.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Aaron Shaheen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198857780
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and obscure American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war's mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause, and attempt to remedy, hideous injuries. Such a relationship was also evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses proved particularly resonant in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book's six chapters explain how a prosthesis's spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew or even improve upon his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his 'spirit' or personality.