One of the most pivotal developments in contemporary literary and cultural studies is the investigation of space and geography, a trend which is proving particularly important for modernist studies. This volume explores the interface between modernism and geography in a range of writers, texts and artists across the twentieth century. Cross-disciplinary essays test and extend a variety of methodological approaches and reveal the reach of this topic into every corner of modernist scholarship. From Imagist poetry and the Orient to teashops and modernism in London, or from mapping and belonging in James Joyce or Joseph Conrad to the space of new media artists, this remarkable volume offers fresh, invigorating research that ranges across the field of modernism. It also serves to identify the many exciting new directions that future studies may take. With groundbreaking essays from an international team of highly-regarded scholars, Geographies of Modernism is an important step forward in literary and cultural studies.

This volume explores the interface between modernism and geography in a range of writers, texts and artists across the twentieth century.

This volume explores the interface between modernism and geography in a range of writers, texts and artists across the 20th century.

Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it was expressed in the non-Western world; the contradictions at the heart of modernization (in revolutionary and nationalist settings, and with respect to race and nativism); and modernism's imagined geographies, "pyschogeographies" of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

Grouped into 21 thematic sections, this collection provides theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in different directions. It provides an understanding of the complex intersections of gender with an array of social identifications.

The first full-length account of modernism from the perspective of literary geography.

The Geopoetics of Modernism is the first book to illuminate the links between American modernism and the geographic discourse of the time. Rebecca Walsh explores Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and H.D.’s engagements with contemporary geographic theories and sources—including the cosmological geography of Alexander von Humboldt and Mary Somerville, the environmental determinism of Ellen Churchill Semple, and mainstream textbooks and periodicals—which informed the formal and political dimensions of their work. Walsh argues that the dominant geographic paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave authority to experimental writers who were breaking with other forms of authority, enabling them to create transnational forms of belonging on the exhilarating landscape of nations, continents, and the globe. By examining modernism alongside environmental determinist geography, she maps a poetic terrain where binaries such as west versus non-west or imperial center versus colonial periphery are destabilized. The Geopoetics of Modernism reveals the geographic terms through which American modernist poetry interrogated prevailing ideas of orientalism, primitivism, and American exceptionalism.