Modernism at the beach : queer ecologies and the coastal commons / Hannah Freed-Thall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Freed-Thall, Hannah, author.

Series:

Modernist latitudes.

Modernist latitudes

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Beaches in literature.

Seashore in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Queer theory.

Ecocriticism.

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2023]

Summary:

At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance--a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices--including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing--as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.

Contents:

Introduction: The beach effect

Constructing the beach

Off-season

Littoral choreographies

Coastal map

Proust's leap

"Gambling fever"

Beach bodies

"Nous avons regardé"

Intertidal Woolf

Waste land

Imagined geographies

Domestic arrangements

Tidal visions

"Mrs. Ramsay on the beach"

Carson's quiet bower

Thinking small

Postal meter

"Wee beasts"

McKay's dream port

Port effects

Vagabond picturesque

Pier effects

Tidewrack, Beckett to Sunde

Drift

Fatigue

"Female solo"

Waiting room.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Freed-Thall, Hannah Modernism at the beach

ISBN:

0231551975

9780231551977

OCLC:

1374540923