The first American surrealist poet, a prolific literary editor and a seminal influence on the New York School of poetry, Charles Henri Ford was a key figure in the transition from late modernist to postmodern culture in America. Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism is the first book-length scholarly study of this important literary figure. Drawing on new archival research – including explorations of Ford's correspondence with the likes of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Parker Tyler, and many others – the book explores the full impact of Ford's contribution to 20th-century American literary culture.

What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging. Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright’s magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen’s writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City. Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.

Focussing upon both canonical figures such as Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Stein and emergent themes such as Christian modernism, intermedial modernism, queer Harlem Renaissance, this volume brings together previously unseen materials, from various archives, to bear upon cutting-edge interpretation of modernism. It provides an overview of approaches to modernism via the employment of various types of primary source material: correspondence, manuscripts and drafts, memoirs and production notes, reading notes and marginalia, and all manner of useful contextualising sources like news reports or judicial records. While having much to say to literary criticism more broadly, this volume is closely focused upon key modernist figures and emergent themes in light of the discipline's 'archival turn' – termed in a unifying introduction 'achivalism'. An essential ingredient separating the above, recent tendency from a much older and better-established new historicism, in modernist studies at least, is that 'the literary canon' remains an important starting point. Whereas new historicism 'is interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents' and tends toward a 'parallel study of literature and non-literary texts', archival criticism tends toward recognised, oftentimes canonical or critically-lauded, writers, presented in Part 1. Sidestepping the vicissitudes of canon formation, manuscript scholars tend to gravitate toward leading modernist authors: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Part of the reason is obvious: known authors frequently leave behind sizeable literary estates, which are then acquired by research centres. A second section then applies the same empirical methodology to key or emergent themes in the study of modernism, including queer modernism; spatial modernism; little magazines (and online finding aids structuring them); and the role of faith and/or emotions in the construction of 'modernism' as we know it.

An important study of African American contributions to contemporary American poetry. Aldon Nielsen's book Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997) was a ground-breaking work of scholarship that examined modern and postmodern developments in the work of African American poets since the Second World War and their contributions to both African American culture and American modernism. Integral Music extends the terms of the studies begun in Black Chant through a more in-depth look at the work of key writers and poets in the decades following the Second World War. While Nielsen examines anew such key figures as Amiri Baraka, he also provides the first extended studies of significant but often overlooked figures in African American poetry, such as Russell Atkins and Stephen Jonas. His essay on Bob Kaufman points toward the critical intersection of poetry and jazz in African American letters, as does his essay on performance poet Jayne Cortez. Nielsen's studies in this volume affirm the importance and centrality of African American poets to American intellectual life and international, modernist, and postmodernist poetry today.

Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Suárez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Suárez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism’s major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Suárez shows, what’s at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

Praised unflinchingly by Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, this stunning work, first published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press, Paris, is a non-judgemental depiction of gay life and men who earn their living there, told through characters like Julian (modeled on Ford) and Karel (based on Tyler).

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.