Eric B White - Böcker

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the collaborative networks that sprang up within and between these publications, the book delves into correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and unfinished projects to explore frequently overlooked points of contact between European and American avant-gardes.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

A revisionist account of technology’s role in the aesthetics, spaces and politics of transatlantic avant-gardesExplores of a range of key avant-garde formations in the modernist transatlantic period, from the Italian futurists and English Vorticists to the Dada-surrealist and post-Harlem Renaissance African American experimentalistsExplores writers’ and artists’ inventions as well as their texts, and involves them directly in the messy transductions of technology in cultureDraws on previously unknown photos, manuscripts and other evidence that reveals the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘reading machine’ – a cross-disciplinary, meta-formational, and transnational project that proposed to transform the everyday act of readingReading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett and Ralph Ellison, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown's 'reading machine' and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett and Ralph Ellison, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change.