Browse by Subject: Literature

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.”  

Known in Cuba as a poet, essayist, translator, and professor, Saldana won the prestigious Nicholas Guillen Award for Distinction in Poetry in 1998 and the La Rosa Blanca Prize for La Noche, a children's book, in 1989. Before her death in 1999, most of her work had appeared in Spanish exclusively in Cuba with only scattered translations. This collection emphasizes her construction of a personal and poetic autobiography to reveal the identity of one of the best Afro-Caribbean poets of the twentieth century.

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.

From the vast complexities of a world in which synesthesia is our natural translator, Allan Peterson’s poems convey the consistent message that the ordinary isn’t. Selected from books and chapbooks covering almost thirty years of writing, Peterson’s work draws heavily from landscapes like the Gulf Coast, the sciences, history, and the author’s background in visual arts.

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.

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.  

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.

This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on the role of habits of thought in shaping attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. 

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.

In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II.