Browse by Subject: Modernist Literature

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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Mina Loy's Critical Modernism

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.”  

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Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature

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.

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Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media

Marked by a rejection of traditional affiliations such as nation, family, and religion, modernism is often thought to privilege the individual over the community. The contributors to this volume question this assumption, uncovering the communal impulses of the modernist period across genres, cultures, and media.

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Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde

The diverse topics and methodologies assembled here illustrate how food studies can enrich research in the literary and visual arts. A milestone volume, this collection introduces possibilities for understanding the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world.  

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Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel

At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level.

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American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers replaced values and traditions of the Victorian era with wholly new works of modernist literature, and the turn of the century is typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, this volume argues that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field.

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At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University

At Fault is an exhilarating celebration of risk-taking in the work of James Joyce. Esteemed Joyce scholar and teacher Sebastian Knowles takes on the American university system, arguing that the modernist writer offers the antidote to the risk-averse attitudes that are increasingly constraining institutions of higher education today.     

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Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, Third Edition

Ideal for readers new to Ulysses and written with a depth of knowledge that scholars have found invaluable, “Ulysses” Unbound is a clear and comprehensive guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece from one of the foremost Dublin-based Joyce experts.

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Joyce and the Law

Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day.

 

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James Joyce's Painful Case

Demonstrating that one story from James Joyce’s Dubliners is not only a turning point in that book but also a microcosm of a wide range of important Joycean influences and preoccupations, Cóilín Owens examines the dense intertextuality of “A Painful Case.”