What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? What if we look closely at what does not appear central, or appears peripherally, or does not appear at all, viewing ellipses, outliers, absences, and outtakes as significant? Eccentric Modernisms places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the author’s earlier studies of Gertrude Stein and other lesbians who participated in transatlantic cultural exchanges between the world wars, this book moves in a different direction, focusing primarily on the gay men who formed Stein’s support network and whose careers, in turn, she helped to launch, including the neo-romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and writer-editor Charles Henri Ford. Eccentric Modernisms shows how these “eccentric modernists” bucked trends by working collectively, reveling in disciplinary promiscuity and sustaining creative affiliations across national and cultural boundaries.

"'What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? What if we look closely at what does not appear central, or appears peripherally, or does not appear at all, viewing ellipses, outliers, absences, and outtakes as significant?' Eccentric Modernisms places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the author's earlier studies of Gertrude Stein and other lesbians who participated in transatlantic cultural exchanges between the world wars, this book moves in a different direction, focusing primarily on the gay men who formed Stein's support network and whose careers, in turn, she helped to launch, including the neo-romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and writer/editor Charles Henri Ford. Eccentric Modernisms shows how these 'eccentric modernists' bucked trends by working collectively, reveling in disciplinary promiscuity, and sustaining creative affiliations across national and cultural boundaries"--Provided by publisher.

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

Drawing from recent research that seeks to expand our understanding of modernism, this volume offers practical pedagogical approaches for teaching modernist literature and culture in the twenty-first century classroom.

Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.