Series: Modernist Latitudes

The labour of literature is often thought of as a specialised craft, distinct from everyday work. In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan traces an alternative vision of writing and the writer, arguing that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labour and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways...

Modernism and the Middle Passage challenges the typical perception of modernism as solely focused on the new and immediate, disregarding historical catastrophes. In truth, the transatlantic slave trade profoundly influenced the works of both Black and white writers. This book uncovers how modernists engaged with the Middle Passage, thereby disrupting Western concepts of time and space, race and gender, and...

What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of “cultural awakening” implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present...

In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed...

At the beach, bodies converge with the elements, and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of...

It is commonly believed that Stalinism ended a vibrant period in Soviet avant-garde art and literature. The triumph of socialist realism, in this view, curtailed experimentation with aesthetic form and replaced it with a call for clarity, accessibility, and ideological conformity. But Stalin’s formula “national in form, socialist in content” gave artists an opening for officially sanctioned formal innovation—as long...