Overview

What exactly is modernism and who are modernist writers? What distinguishes American modernism from its European counterpart? American Modernism (Re)Considered questions the principal distinction between modernism and other genres/movements/styles in literature through new critical readings of canonical modernist texts alongside texts which pose a problem for modernism due to their ambiguous, if not marginal, relation to some of its predominant tenets. It asks: Is modernism characterized principally by a transition from older forms (like naturalism and realism) to a style that is new, innovative, and experimental? Is it found in shared understandings and alignments regarding the nature and purpose of art? Is it identifiable by modernists’ treatment of various central themes – including as a reaction to modernity; as a response to the Boer and World wars; as an interrogation of Britain’s empire and its dissolution – and how these events fragmented modern life? Or is it all of the above? Contributors discuss a wide range of texts – by authors such as Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne Carson, Wallace Stevens, Américo Paredes, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot – to challenge the aesthetic, social, and temporal boundaries of modernism in America. Through original close readings of these texts, American Modernism (Re)Considered subjects modernism to new interrogations and offers new answers to questions that remain contemporary even as they harken back to its height of popularity and interest in the mid-1920s.

Full Product Details

Author:   Robert C. Hauhart (Saint Martin’s University, USA) ,  Ph.D. Jeff Birkenstein (Centralia College, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.600kg
ISBN:  

9798765126820

Pages:   304
Publication Date:   04 September 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart, Saint Martin’s University, USA Part I: A Preoccupation with Language and Interiority 1. Interiority, Regret, Loss, and Mourning in Early Hemingway Robert C. Hauhart and Anahi Arenas, Saint Martin’s University, USA 2. Nella Larson and the Interior Lives of African American Women in Passing and Quicksand Kimberly Smith, Elizabeth City State University, USA 3. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon: Reading Late Modernism with Merleau-Ponty Rossie Artemis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus Part II: Collisions of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality 4. “Life as a ghastly skeleton”: Modernism in Fauset’s Plum Bun Andrea Tinnemeyer, The College Preparatory School, USA 5. The Strange Career of Coleman Silk: The Human Stain as Jim Crow Narrative Durthy Washington, Colorado College, USA 6. Mexican-American Generation Authors on the U.S. Color Line Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno, USA 7. “Emotionally Smashed Boys"": Modernism and Racial Trauma Kimberly Drake, Scripps College, USA Part III: Forms of Performance, Artistic Expression, and Literary Images 8. Revisiting Langston Hughes’ Modernist Poetry Asma Dhouioui, University of Carthage, Tunisia 9. Subverting Modernism: Recasting Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through the Skeet MacGowan Monologue Frank Fury, Monmouth University, USA 10. “A Sense of inertia”: The Dance of Expressive Non/Movement in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz Marisa Higgins, University of Tennessee, USA 11. “The Still Point of the Turning World” in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as a Key to Modernist Literature and Related to the Image of the String Quartet Kiyoko Magome, University of Tsukuba, Japan 12. “The image of one fatal word”: Verbal-Visual Crisscrossings in e.e. cummings’ Experimental Modernism Bowen Wang, Trinity College, Ireland 13. Images Reimagined: Modernist Photography, Painting, and the Short Story Jeff Birkenstein and Ericka Birkenstein, Saint Martin’s University, USA Part IV: Transitioning: Expectations, Explorations, and Genders 14. The Betrayals of Passing Luis Alberto Cortés, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA 15. Modernism’s Ghostly Men David Magill, Longwood University, USA 16. Reconsidering Women Smoking in Three Late-19th-Century American Novels Richmond Adams, Independent Scholar, USA 17. Modern(ist) Medicine and Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep Molly Mann, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA 18. Modernism and Feminist Dys/utopia: Women’s Resistance between the Politics and Poetics of Dissent Brindusa Nicolaescu, Bucharest University, Romania 19. Conducting Wallace Stevens and Anne Carson from Ancient Greece to Lorde and St. Vincent Angus Cleghorne, Seneca College, Canada

Reviews

This book is a useful and fresh assessment of American modernism. It reconsiders familiar works, themes, and forms in comparison with unfamiliar ones, and in so doing, introduces lesser-known writers and works into the archive. The composite effect is a reminder to readers of the stunning breadth as well as the broad inter-artistic scope of American modernism, and of modernism more generally. * Monika Kaup, Professor of English, University of Washington, USA *

Author Information

Jeff Birkenstein is Assistant Professor of English at Centralia College, USA. His publications include The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It's a Mad World (2013) and Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ""War on Terror"" (Bloomsbury, 2010). Robert C. Hauhart, Ph.D., J.D. is Professor in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin’s University, USA. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Food and the American Dream in American Literature (forthcoming), The Lonely Quest: Constructing the Self in 21st Century American Life (2019), and Social Justice in American Literature (2017).

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