Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years. In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits. In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.

In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

How did living abroad inflect writers’ perspectives on social change in the countries of their birth and in their adopted homelands? How did writers reformulate ideas of social class, race, and gender in these new contexts? How did they develop innovations in form and technique to achieve a style that reflected their social and political commitments? The essays in this book show how the “outward turn” that typifies late modernist writing was precipitated, in part, by writers’ experience of expatriation. Late Modernism & Expatriation encompasses writing from the 1930s to the present day and considers expatriation in both its voluntary and coerced manifestations. Together, the essays in this book shape our understanding of how migration (especially in its late twentieth- and twenty-first century complexities) affects late modernism’s temporalities. The book attends to major theoretical questions about mapping late modernist networks and it foregrounds neglected aspects of writers’ work while placing other writers in a new frame.

Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that forms the tail end of the standardisation process (codification and prescription), during which important social changes such as the Industrial Revolution are reflected in the language. Late Modern English is currently receiving a lot of scholarly attention, mainly as a result of new developments in sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics. By drawing on such research the present book offers a much fuller account of the language of the period than was previously possible. It is designed for students and beginning scholars interested in Late Modern English. The volume includes: * a basis in recent research by which sociolinguistic models are applied to earlier stages of the language (1700-1900) * a focus on people as speakers (wherever possible) and writers of English* Research questions aimed at acquiring skills at working with important electronic research tools such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* Reference to electronically available texts and databases such as Martha Ballard's Diary, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

Using increasingly sophisticated databases, this volume explores grammatical usage from the Late Modern period in a broad context.