Results by title

193 books match the query 'Modernism (Literature)' and 4 start with l

cover of Las Raras: Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo

Las Raras

Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo

Sarah Moody

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association–Nineteenth-Century Section, 2025
Premio Victoria Urbano de Monografía Crítica, Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2025 (co-winner)
Segundo Premio, Adela Zamudio Prize, Feministas Unidas, 2025

Las Raras proposes that the Modernistas’ advocacy for a writing style they considered feminine helps us to understand why so few (and perhaps no) women were accepted as active participants in Modernismo. Author Sarah Moody studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and tracks the intellectual networks of Modernismo through periodicals and personal papers, such as albums and correspondence. Buenos Aires, Paris, and Montevideo figure prominently in this transatlantic study, which reexamines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo.

This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, who experienced Modernista exclusion firsthand, deconstructed the Modernista discourse of a modern, “feminine” style, and built literary success in alternative terms. These writers reoriented the discussion about women in modernity to address women’s education, professionalization, and advocacy for social and civic improvements. In this study, Modernismo emerges as both a literary style and an intellectual network, in which style and sociability are mutually determining and combine to form a system of prestige and validation that excluded women writers.

[more]
cover of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism

Libidinal Currents

Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism

Joseph Allen Boone

University of Chicago Press, 1997

From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism.

Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.
[more]
cover of Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity

Lost in Time

Locating the Stranger in German Modernity

June J. Hwang

Northwestern University Press, 2014

June J. Hwang’s provocative Lost in Time explores discourses of timelessness in the works of central figures of German modernity such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Helmuth Plessner, as well as those of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Hugo Bettauer. Hwang argues that in the Weimar Republic the move toward ahistoricization is itself a historical phenomenon, one that can be understood by exploring the intersections of discourses about urban modernity, the stranger, and German Jewish identity.
 
These intersections shed light on conceptions of German Jewish identity that rely on a negation of the specific and temporal as a way to legitimize a historical outsider position, creating a dynamic position that simultaneously challenges and acknowledges the limitations of an outsider’s agency. She reads these texts as attempts to transcend the particular, attempts that paradoxically reveal the entanglement of the particular and the universal.
[more]
cover of Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe

Lost in the Shadow of the Word

Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe

Benjamin Paloff

Northwestern University Press, 2016

2018 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship

Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.
[more]