American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation

This is a study on the premise that expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of Spicer’s peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalised interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism and modernism.