Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

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the collaborative networks that sprang up within and between these publications, the book delves into correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and unfinished projects to explore frequently overlooked points of contact between European and American avant-gardes.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