Exoteric Modernisms
Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-4744-5673-9 (ISBN)
Description
This book is an account of how American realism in the Progressive Era contributed to debates about modernity. It uses the anthropological theories of Franz Boas, and Jacques Ranciere's work on aesthetics and politics to develop a mode of reading class and culture that challenges conventional interpretations that pit the two modes of representation in opposition. It paints a picture of the late-nineteenth century, prior to modernism, as an aesthetically exciting, original, and politically radical stage in American life to reinvigorate realism as a radical aesthetic practice, with implications for understandings of American literature both in the past and into the future.
Reviews / Votes
Collins takes his place alongside Amy Kaplan and Walter Benn Michaels as an essential critic of turn-of-the-century American culture. A crucial contribution to studies of race, class, and temporality, this book recaptures the pluralist potentiality of American realism by offering a new literary history of everyday life. A tremendous achievement. -- Gavin Jones, Stanford UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
7 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
318 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-5673-9 (9781474456739)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael J. Collins (he/him) is Reader in American Studies at King's College London where he is Deputy Head of School, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Recent essays on Mark Twain, Claude McKay and W.E.B DuBois have appeared in Textual Practice, English Language Notes and The Palgrave Handbook to Twentieth Century Literature and Science (ed. Priscilla Wald), respectively. He is the author of The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800- 1865 (2016) and is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story with Prof Gavin Jones. He has been the recipient of Arts and Humanities Research Council awards at Masters, Doctoral and Postdoctoral level and a Leverhulme Early Career award.
Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modern Times; Or, Re-Reading the Progressive Era
Culture and Anarchy: Time, Narrative, and the Haymarket Affair
'Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas': Yellow Journalism, the Cuban War of Independence, and cronica modernista
Manacled to Identity: Fugitive Aesthetics in Stephen Crane's Pluralistic Universe
Getting Some of the Way with Undine Spragg: Cosmopolitanism, Ethnography and War Work in the Novels of Edith Wharton
?
Coda: James Huneker, A Decadent Among the Modernists
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modern Times; Or, Re-Reading the Progressive Era
Culture and Anarchy: Time, Narrative, and the Haymarket Affair
'Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas': Yellow Journalism, the Cuban War of Independence, and cronica modernista
Manacled to Identity: Fugitive Aesthetics in Stephen Crane's Pluralistic Universe
Getting Some of the Way with Undine Spragg: Cosmopolitanism, Ethnography and War Work in the Novels of Edith Wharton
?
Coda: James Huneker, A Decadent Among the Modernists
Bibliography
Index