American Modernism (Re)Considered

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.

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).