Midcentury suspension : literature and feeling in the wake of World War II / Claire Seiler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Seiler, Claire, author.

Series:

Modernist Latitudes

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (303 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

New York, New York State : Columbia University Press, 2020.

Summary:

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Midcentury Problem

Chapter One. The Timely Suspensions of Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring

Chapter Two. W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus

Chapter Three. Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett Waiting in the Middle

Chapter Four. The Sonic Suspensions of Frank O’Hara

Afterword

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-231-55094-4

OCLC:

1141991588