Midcentury Suspension : : Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II / / Claire Seiler.

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 liter...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
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Place / Publishing House:New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2020]
©2019
Year of Publication:2020
Language:English
Series:Modernist Latitudes
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource
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Other title: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
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.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780231550949
9783110710977
9783110704716
9783110704518
9783110704747
9783110704532
DOI:10.7312/seil19468
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Claire Seiler.