Transatlantic Avant-gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism

This is a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism, concentrating on expressions of cultural localism in the modernist transatlantic. Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the ‘global design’ of literary modernism. He focuses on artist-run ‘little magazines’, including Others, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Contact, Firell, and Pagany together with fine press publications and mainstream print culture. White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into ‘exile’ and ‘localist’, or ‘regionalist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, factions. It provides a new account of the specialised literary networks that questioned the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic. It complements modernist studies of American expatriates. It combines literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism to deliver a ‘networked’ account of American modernism in the transatlantic context.It proposes a version of ‘localist modernism’ that prioritises issues of geographic and textual ‘location’ in transnational literary studies.