Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism

by Eric White

Overview

Provides an alternative account of the modernist transatlanticTransatlantic Avant-Gardes offers a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism. Complimenting recent studies of modernist expatriates, Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place 'located' figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the 'global design' of literary modernism. Focusing on artist-run 'little magazines' (including Others, Contact, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Fire!!, and Pagany) and selected fine press publications and mainstream periodicals, White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into 'exile' and 'localist', or 'regionalist' and 'cosmopolitan', factions. Thus, the book proposes a version of localist modernism that prioritises issues of geographic and textual 'location' to deliver a 'networked' approach to American modernism in the transatlantic context. Combining literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes provides a new reading of the specialised literary networks that interrogated the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748681594
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Eric White is Senior Lecturer at the Oxford Brookes University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements viii

Abbreviations and Notes on Sources xii

Prologue 1

1 Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village 19

2 The Vortex of the Page: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis and the Modernist Problem of Place 50

3 'Backgrounds and Extensions': The Ascent of Localist Modernism 81

4 Location, Location, Location: America, Relativity and 'the New Science of Advertising' 110

5 Secessions and Symposia: American Identity and Transatlantic Colour Lines in Modernist Magazines 140

6 New Localism, Late Modernism and America's Unfinished Spaces 173

Epilogue 208

Notes 211

Index 260

Editorial Reviews

A comprehensive and rewarding study of the contents, graphics, and marketing of the influential little magazines at the center of the localist and transatlantic incarnations of modernism. The study does full justice to the range andas White shows, complexly interdependent-- personal, political and aesthetic agendas behind their origins and editorial agendas. -- Christopher MacGowan, College of William and Mary

In bringing American modernism back home, and exposing the cosmopolitan contours of modernism in the American grain, Eric White makes an important intervention into contemporary scholarship. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes is required reading for scholars of American modernism and its material culture. -- Lee M. Jenkins, University College Cork. Notes and Queries, Vol. 61, no 2

This brilliantly written monograph offers a stimulating study of the transatlantic movement of little magazines produced throughout the modernist period and expertly chronicles the dynamic collaborations that formed and reformed the avant-garde in multiple transatlantic locations. [...] [A] thorough reading and re-reading of his book will aide a greater appreciation and keener understanding of the collaborative network that infused transnational modernism. --Paul R. Cappucci, Georgian Court University, William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (Spring 2014)
It's an essential volume for any modernist scholar and will prove an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students studying the literary avant-gardes.

[T]he sensitive research, reader-attuned writing style, and scholarly precision with which White tackles a vast subject [offers] a synoptic overview of the tangled networks of periodical production while carefully deconstructing the paradigms affiliated to them. The result is a comprehensive, probing study whose far-reaching conclusions destabilize the familiar tropes of 'space', 'place', and 'identity', and pave the way for more materialist, multi-disciplinary methodological approaches to the little magazines that, as White states, 'helped consolidate the modernist canon' (209). --Louise Kane, University of Birmingham, The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies (2014)

White's rich archive of evidence drawn from transatlantic little magazines will prove extremely valuable to both modernist and American periodical studies. -- Melissa Girard, Loyola University Maryland, American Periodicals, 26(1)

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