Transatlantic Avant-Gardes
Little Magazines and Localist Modernism
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:1st Mar '13
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Provides an alternative account of the modernist transatlantic Engaging with recent studies of modernist journals and the historical avant-garde, Eric White investigates how modernist writers interrogated the relationship between physical places, the printed page, and national identity in the transatlantic print networks of the early twentieth century. He articulates the ways in which artist-run ‘little magazines’ such as Blues, The Dial, Contact, Fire!!, Others, The Little Review, Pagany, S4N, and Secession formed the crucible of transnational modernism and simultaneously ‘located’ its avant-gardes in specific environments. By focusing on the collaborative networks that sprang up within and between these publications, the book delves into correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and unfinished projects to explore frequently overlooked points of contact between European and American avant-gardes. In the process, it proposes a version of localist modernism that re-inserts figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Alfred Kreymborg, and Kathleen Tankersley Young back into the ‘global design’ of literary modernism. The book also opens new dialogic channels between the fields of literary, textual, and cultural criticism to challenge the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into ‘exile’ and ‘localist’, or ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘regionalist’, factions. Key Features: Provides a new account of the literary avant-gardes that questioned the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identityComplements modernist studies of American expatriatesCombines literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism to deliver a ‘networked’ reading of American modernism in the transatlantic contextProposes a version of ‘localist modernism’ that prioritises issues of geographic and textual ‘location’ in transnational literary studies
White’s rich archive of evidence drawn from transatlantic little magazines will prove extremely valuable to both modernist and American periodical studies. -- Melissa Girard, Loyola University Maryland * American Periodicals, 26(1) *
A comprehensive and rewarding study of the contents, graphics, and marketing of the influential little magazines at the center of the localist and transatlantic incarnations of modernism. The study does full justice to the range and—as White shows, complexly interdependent-- personal, political and aesthetic agendas behind their origins and editorial agendas. * Christopher MacGowan, College of William and Mary *
In bringing American modernism back home, and exposing the cosmopolitan contours of modernism in the American grain, Eric White makes an important intervention into contemporary scholarship. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes is required reading for scholars of American modernism and its material culture. -- LEE M. JENKINS, University College Cork * Notes and Queries, Vol. 61, no 2 *
Important and far-reaching. -- Alexander Howard, University of Sussex * Textual Practice *
[T]he sensitive research, reader-attuned writing style, and scholarly precision with which White tackles a vast subject [offers] a synoptic overview of the tangled networks of periodical production while carefully deconstructing the paradigms affiliated to them. The result is a comprehensive, probing study whose far-reaching conclusions destabilize the familiar tropes of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘identity’, and pave the way for more materialist, multi-disciplinary methodological approaches to the little magazines that, as White states, ‘helped consolidate the modernist canon’ (209). -- Louise Kane, University of Birmingham * The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies (2014) *
The major monograph on little magazine networks for 2013 is undoubtedly Eric B. White’s excellent Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. [...] In a year with extraordinary work on the little magazines, White’s project stands out for its attention to the complex regionalism that circles back to transnational migrations and distribution networks that both nourish the little magazines’ bigness in New Modernist studies and attend to their deus loci, or said differently (to quote Williams), to ‘re-awakened genius of place’ (p. 207). -- James Clifford, Farleigh Dickinson Univeristy, et. al. * The Years Work in English Studies (2015) *
This brilliantly written monograph offers a stimulating study of the transatlantic movement of little magazines produced throughout the modernist period and expertly chronicles the dynamic collaborations that formed and reformed the avant-garde in multiple transatlantic locations. [...] [A] thorough reading and re-reading of his book will aide a greater appreciation and keener understanding of the collaborative network that infused transnational modernism. It’s an essential volume for any modernist scholar and will prove an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students studying the literary avant-gardes. -- Paul R. Cappucci, Georgian Court University * William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (Spring 2014) *
ISBN: 9780748645213
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 581g
272 pages