Explores the regional contexts of literary modernism, reading international aesthetics through local cultures
Where did literary modernism happen? In this book, a range of scholars seek to answer this question, re-evaluating the parameters of modernism in the light of recent developments in literary geography as well as literary history, examining an array of different literary forms including novels, poetry, theatre, and 'little magazines'. The volume identifies and appraises the local attachments of modernist texts in particular geographical regions and also interrogates the idea of the 'regional' in light of the alienating displacements of transnational modernity.
The essays collected here make fresh interventions in the field of modernist studies and acknowledge the legacies of regional modernisms for post-war representations of place and landscape. Individual essays discuss canonical figures (W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence) as well as more marginal or lesser-known writers (Dylan Thomas, Hugh MacDiarmid, J. M. Synge, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Alfred Orage, Leo Walmsley, Lynette Roberts, Michael McLaverty, and Basil Bunting) from across Britain and Ireland.
About the Author: Neal Alexander lectures in English literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Ciaran Carson: Space, place, writing (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and co-editor (with David Cooper) of Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool University Press, 2012). He has published on twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and Irish writing in the journals Textual Practice, Contemporary Literature, and Irish Studies Review.
James Moran is head of drama at the University of Nottingham and is the author of a number of books and articles about the literature of Ireland and the cultural history of the English midlands, including Staging the Easter Rising (Cork University Press, 2005), Irish Birmingham: A History (Liverpool University Press, 2010), and The Plays of Seán O'Casey (Methuen, 2013). He also presents the regular book-club feature on BBC Radio Nottingham.
