Browse by Subject: Modernist Literature

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, this book shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World Wars I and II.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with intangible things in his dreamlike masterpiece Finnegans Wake. Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce wrote this work to suggest exactly why it follows the order it does in its finished form.

Joyce and Geometry reveals the full extent to which the modernist writer James Joyce was influenced by the radical theories of non-Euclidean geometry. Tracing Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works, Ciaran McMorran delves into a major theme in Joyce’s work that has not been thoroughly explored until now.

This book is the first in-depth study of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Sangam MacDuff argues that the epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce’s entire body of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language of his later writings.

Focusing on the works of Edith Wharton and her contemporaries, Melanie Dawson discusses representations of modern American identities past early youth in twentieth-century literature. Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.  

Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.            

Challenging the tendency of scholars to view women writers of the modernist era as isolated artists who competed with one another for critical and cultural acceptance, Women Making Modernism reveals the robust networks women created and maintained that served as platforms and support for women’s literary careers. This volume shows how women’s writing communities interconnected to generate a current of energy, innovation, and ambition that was central to the modernist movement.

This book provides a fresh assessment of the works of British-born poet and painter Mina Loy. Laura Scuriatti shows how Loy’s “eccentric” writing and art celebrate ideas and aesthetics central to the modernist movement while simultaneously critiquing them, resulting in a continually self-reflexive and detached stance that Scuriatti terms “critical modernism.”  

Affective Materialities breaks ground by reexamining modernist theorizations of the body, opening up artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation.