American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

The essays in Modernism and Mourning examine the work of mourning in modernist literature, or more precisely, its propensity for resisting this work. Drawing from recent developments in the theory and cultural history of mourning, its contributors explore the various ways in which modernist writers repudiate Freud's famous injunction to mourners to work through their grief, endorsing instead a resistant, or melancholic mourning that shapes both their themes and their radical experiments with form. The emerging picture of the pervasive influence of melancholic mourning in modernist literature casts new light on longstanding critical arguments, especially those about the politics of modernism. It also makes clear the pertinence of this literature to the present day, in which the catastrophic losses of 9/11, of retaliatory war, of racially motivated genocide, of the AIDS epidemic, have made the work of mourning a subject of widespread interest and debate. Patricia Rae is Head of the Department of English at Queen's University.

How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam. Will Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.

#MeToo and Modernism offers a blend of cultural, historical, literary, and pedagogical responses applied to the themes behind today’s ongoing #MeToo Movement. This volume is organized into four sections: a three-part chronological response in which scholars analyze literary understandings of how ripples of the #MeToo Movement began to emerge in Modernist literature, followed by a pedagogical section on how to incorporate such teachings in university classrooms. Editors Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan foreword the collection with an introduction answering the question of why such a volume is necessary in today’s educational landscape. The introduction summarizes the current scholarship regarding #MeToo and Modernism, while also uncovering the omissions, particularly in approaching nonbinary or queer writers, as well as writers of color, that still exist; as a response, many of these essays attempt to approach these gaps. Furthermore, the introduction shows how more traditional Modernist writers--including Woolf, Forster, Wells, and Joyce--served as forerunners of early glimmers of the #MeToo Movement in Modernist Literature.

Reconsiders the relationship between the Great War and modernism through women's literary representations of deathProvides the first sustained study of death and commemoration in women's literature in the wartime and postwar periodOffers a reconsideration of the relationship between the First World War and literary modernism through the lens of women's writing Considers the literary impact of the vast mortality of the First World War and the culture of war commemoration on British and American women's writingOne of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, this book provides the first sustained study of women's literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.

From the Harlem and Southern Renaissances to postcolonial writing in the Caribbean, Race and New Modernisms introduces and critically explores key issues and debates on race and ethnicity in the study of transnational modernism today. Topics covered include: · Key terms and concepts in scholarly discussions of race and ethnicity · European modernism and cultural appropriation · Modernism, colonialism, and empire · Southern and Harlem Renaissances · Social movements and popular cultures in the modernist period Covering writers and artists such as Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marcus Garvey, Édouard Glissant, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson, the book considers the legacy of modernist discussions of race in twenty-first century movements such as Black Lives Matter.

This new Companion offers a sample of innovative approaches to interpreting and appreciating William Faulkner in the twenty-first century.