Books in the Modernist Latitudes series

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "e;the magic pilgrimage"e; to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "e;ethnic avant-garde."e; These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "e;Afro-Cuban"e; voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. At the Mercy of Their Clothes explores the agency of fashion in modern literature, its reflection of new relations between people and things, and its embodiment of a rapidly changing society confronted by war and cultural and economic upheaval. In some cases, people need garments to realize themselves. In other cases, the clothes control the person who wears them. Celia Marshik's study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik's dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing-and objectification of individuals-in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.

Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC's Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting.

Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of the relationships between modern literature, representations of indigeneity, and educative practices in colonial zones from the 1920s to the 1940s, encompassing the central place of teaching and learning both in modernist aesthetics and on the part of writer-activists.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 seems to mark a turning point in both geopolitical and literary histories. The victorious American empire ascended and began its cultural domination of the globe in the twentieth century, while the once-mighty Spanish empire declined and became a minor state in the world republic of letters. But what if this narrative relies on several faulty assumptions, and what if key modernist figures in both America and Spain radically rewrote these histories at a foundational moment of modern literary studies?Following networks of American and Spanish writers, translators, and movements, Gayle Rogers uncovers the arguments that forged the politics and aesthetics of modernism. He revisits the role of empire-from its institutions to its cognitive effects-in shaping a nation's literature and culture. Ranging from universities to comparative practices, from Ezra Pound's failed ambitions as a Hispanist to Juan Ramon Jimenez's multilingual maps of modernismo, Rogers illuminates modernists' profound engagements with the formative dynamics of exceptionalist American and Spanish literary studies. He reads the provocative, often counterintuitive arguments of John Dos Passos, who held that "e;American literature"e; could only flourish if the expanding U.S. empire collapsed like Spain's did. And he also details both a controversial theorization of a Harlem-Havana-Madrid nexus for black modernist writing and Ernest Hemingway's unorthodox development of a version of cubist Spanglish in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bringing together revisionary literary historiography and rich textual analyses, Rogers offers a striking account of why foreign literatures mattered so much to two dramatically changing countries at a pivotal moment in history.

Challenging cliches of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s.Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle's Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed's analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture.

In the years following World War I, the "e;international"e; emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing and thinking is at the very heart of internationalism. In Chimeras of Form, she shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe.Major writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire. Vadde lucidly explains how their formal experiments with the novel, short story, poetry, and political essay contribute to and sometimes even anticipate debates in postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. She reads Joyce's use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the "e;plotless"e; works of McKay and Lamming upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of twenty-first-century writers Smith and Shailja Patel shows how ongoing conflicts around migration, displacement, and global economic inequality link modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an ambition, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

Carrie Noland approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture. Engaging primarily the works of Aime Cesaire and Leon-Gontran Damas, Noland shows how the demands of print culture alter the personal voice of each author, transforming an empirical subjectivity into a hybrid, textual entity that she names, after Theodor Adorno, an "e;aesthetic subjectivity."e; This aesthetic subjectivity, transmitted by the words on the page, must be actualized-performed, reiterated, and created anew-by each reader, at each occasion of reading. Lyric writing and lyric reading therefore attenuate the link between author and phenomenalized voice. Yet the Negritude poem insists upon its connection to lived experience even as it emphasizes its printed form. Ironically, a purely formalist reading would have to ignore the ways formal-and not merely thematic-elements point toward the poem's own conditions of emergence. Blending archival research on the historical context of Negritude with theories of the lyric "e;voice,"e; Noland argues that Negritude poems present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. Through close readings, she reveals that the racialization of the author places pressure on a lyric regime of interpretation, obliging us to reconceptualize the relation of author to text in poetries of the first person.

As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic cliches, provoking conflicting responses: some modern artists and intellectuals embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by "e;killing the moonlight"e; of Venice, in the Futurists' notorious phrase.Spanning the history of literature, art, and architecture-from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover-Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new. Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, the book redrafts the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.

Viral Modernism reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Elizabeth Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic's hidden but widespread presence.

Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "e;modernist"e; and "e;committed"e; writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds-a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler 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.

Little magazines made modernism. Little Magazine, World Form shows that their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Eric Bulson uncovers a worldwide network that influenced the development of literature and criticism.

On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study.Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aime Cesaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Negritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

In this inventive mix of criticism, scholarship, and personal reflection, Carrie J. Preston explores the nature of cross-cultural teaching, learning, and performance. Throughout the twentieth century, Japanese noh was a major creative catalyst for American and European writers, dancers, and composers. The noh theater's stylized choreography, poetic chant, spectacular costumes and masks, and engagement with history inspired Western artists as they reimagined new approaches to tradition and form. In Learning to Kneel, Preston locates noh's important influence on such canonical figures as Pound, Yeats, Brecht, Britten, and Beckett. These writers learned about noh from an international cast of collaborators, and Preston traces the ways in which Japanese and Western artists influenced one another. Preston's critical work was profoundly shaped by her own training in noh performance technique under a professional actor in Tokyo, who taught her to kneel, bow, chant, and submit to the teachings of a conservative tradition. This encounter challenged Preston's assumptions about effective teaching, particularly her inclinations to emphasize Western ideas of innovation and subversion and to overlook the complex ranges of agency experienced by teachers and students. It also inspired new perspectives regarding the generative relationship between Western writers and Japanese performers. Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and others are often criticized for their orientalist tendencies and misappropriation of noh, but Preston's analysis and her journey reflect a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange.

In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists-including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson-he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, Israel theorizes a way of reading spirals, responding to their dual-directionality as well as their affective power. The sensations associated with spirals--flying, falling, drowning, being smothered-reflect the anxieties of limits tested or breached, and Israel charts these limits as they widen from the local to the global and recoil back. Chapters mix literary and art history to explore 'pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, "e;Concentrisme,"e; minimalism, and entropic earth art; a coda considers the work of novelist W. G. Sebald and contemporary artist William Kentridge. In Spirals, Israel offers a refreshingly original approach to the history of modernism and its aftermaths, one that gives modernist studies, comparative literature, and art criticism an important new spin.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women's movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another. Jill Richards argues that these movements were deeply interconnected. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action.