American Modernism (Re)Considered

by Robert C. Hauhart (Editor), Jeff Birkenstein (Editor)

Overview

What exactly is modernism and who are modernist writers? What distinguishes American modernism from its European counterpart?

American Modernism (Re)Considered questions the principal distinction between modernism and other genres/movements/styles in literature through new critical readings of canonical modernist texts alongside texts which pose a problem for modernism due to their ambiguous, if not marginal, relation to some of its predominant tenets. It asks: Is modernism characterized principally by a transition from older forms (like naturalism and realism) to a style that is new, innovative, and experimental? Is it found in shared understandings and alignments regarding the nature and purpose of art? Is it identifiable by modernists' treatment of various central themes – including as a reaction to modernity; as a response to the Boer and World wars; as an interrogation of Britain's empire and its dissolution – and how these events fragmented modern life? Or is it all of the above?

Contributors discuss a wide range of texts – by authors such as Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne Carson, Wallace Stevens, Américo Paredes, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot – to challenge the aesthetic, social, and temporal boundaries of modernism in America. Through original close readings of these texts, American Modernism (Re)Considered subjects modernism to new interrogations and offers new answers to questions that remain contemporary even as they harken back to its height of popularity and interest in the mid-1920s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765126844
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/07/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jeff Birkenstein is Assistant Professor of English at Centralia College, USA. His publications include The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It's a Mad World (2013) and Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the "War on Terror" (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Robert C. Hauhart, Ph.D., J.D. is Professor in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin's University, USA. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Food and the American Dream in American Literature (forthcoming), The Lonely Quest: Constructing the Self in 21st Century American Life (2019), and Social Justice in American Literature (2017).
Robert C. Hauhart, Ph.D., J.D., is a Professor in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin's University, Lacey, WA (USA). He is the author or co-editor of twelve books and numerous published papers in sociology, law, literature, and education journals. In literature, Professor Hauhart is a student of twentieth century American literature and, in particular, American Dream themes in American literature. He is the co-editor, with Jeff Birkenstein, of six volumes: American Writers in Exile (Salem Press 2015); Social Justice in American Literature (Salem Press 2017); European Writers in Exile (Lexington Books 2018); Connections and Influences Between the Russian and American Short Story (Lexington Books 2021); Significant Food: Critical Readings to Nourish American Literature (University of Georgia Press 2024); and Consuming the American Dream (forthcoming, University of Tennessee Press). In sociology, Professor Hauhart is a recognized scholar of the American Dream.
Jeff Birkenstein is an Assistant Professor of English at Centralia College, USA. Birkenstein's major interests lie in American Literature post-1865, American and world short story, the short story sequence, and cultural and food criticism. He is the co-editor of nine titles, including American Modernism (Re)considered (Bloomsbury, 2025), Significant Food in American Literature, (2024), Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short STory (2021), and Social Justice and American Literature (2017).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Modernism/Not Modernism
Robert C. Hauhart, Saint Martin's University, USA
Part I: A Preoccupation with Language and Interiority
1. Was Hemingway a Modernist? Disenchantment, Interiority, and Stream of Consciousness in His 1920s European Novels
Robert C. Hauhart, Saint Martin's University, USA
2. Nella Larson and the Interior Lives of African American Women in Passing and Quicksand
Kimberly Smith, Elizabeth City State University, USA
3. Loss and Mourning in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night
Rossie Artemis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Part II: Collisions of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality
4. “You've found that out too”: Modernism in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun
Andrea Tinnemeyer, The College Preparatory School, USA
5. The Strange Career of Coleman Silk: The Human Stain as Jim Crow Narrative
Durthy Washington, LitUnlocked LLC, USA
6. Mexican-American Generation Authors on the U.S. Color Line
Melanie Hernandez, California State University, Fresno, USA
7. 400 Years of Apocalyptic Rage: New Modernist Depictions of Racial Justice in the Last Novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes
Kimberly Drake, Scripps College, USA
Part III: Forms of Performance, Artistic Expression, and Literary Images
8. Revisiting Langston Hughes' Modernist Poetry
Asma Dhouioui, University of Carthage, Tunisia
9. “The still point of the turning world” in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as a Key to Modernist Literature Inspired by the String Quartet
Kiyoko Magome, University of Tsukuba, Japan
10. “The image of one fatal word”: Verbal-Visual Crisscrossings in e.e. cummings' Experimental Modernism
Bowen Wang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
11. Images Reimagined: Modernist Photography, and the Short Story
Jeff Birkenstein, Centralia College, USA and Ericka Birkenstein, Independent Scholar, USA
Part IV: Transitioning: Expectations, Explorations, and Genders
12. The Betrayals of Passing
Luis Alberto Cortés, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA
13. Modernism's Ghostly Men
David Magill, Longwood University, USA
14. Reconstructed Citizen Ladies: Celia Madden and Edna Pontellier as Precursors to Modernism and Modernity
Richmond Adams, Independent Scholar, USA
15. Modernism and the Quantified Self in Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep
Molly Mann, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA
16. “Makings of the Sun”: Phenomenal Perception in Stevens, Merleau-Ponty, and Anne Carson's Ancient Greek Poets
Angus Cleghorn, Seneca Polytechnic, Canada

Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

This book is a useful and fresh assessment of American modernism. It reconsiders familiar works, themes, and forms in comparison with unfamiliar ones, and in so doing, introduces lesser-known writers and works into the archive. The composite effect is a reminder to readers of the stunning breadth as well as the broad inter-artistic scope of American modernism, and of modernism more generally.” —Monika Kaup, Professor of English, University of Washington, USA

From the Publisher