San Antonio College Library

This volume provides an authoritative overview of the achievements of American literary modernism in its social and cultural contexts. A chronology of key events is offered, and an up-to-date bibliography of further readering organised by chapter topics.

"At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), author Donna M. Cassidy appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark later art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region - the North Atlantic folk, the Maine coast, and Mount Katahdin - producing work that demands an interpretive...

"In the years between the two world wars, the enormous vogue of "things Mexican" reached its peak. Along with the popular appeal of its folkloric and pictorialist traditions, Mexican culture played a significant role in the formation of modernism in the United States. Mexico and American Modernism analyzes the complex social, intellectual, and artistic ramifications of interactions between avant-garde American artists and Mexico during this critical...

"In Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, Marcia Brennan examines how Stieglitz and the critics drew on early twentieth-century discourses on sex and the psyche, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, to characterize the artworks of the Stieglitz circle. Critics routinely described the often highly abstracted paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth as transparent displays...

This work probes the works of two seminal figures in turn-of-the-20th century American arts and letters to tell a larger story: the complex birth of American modernism.

"Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized...

"From the outset of her career, Georgia O'Keeffe credited her introduction to modernism as deriving in part from a reproduction of a pastel by Arthur Dove she saw around 1913. By this time Dove was well established as the foremost modernist artist in America, yet O'Keeffe herself would later become a source of renewal for his work." "In this book, author Debra Bricker Balken provides the first investigation into the interrelationship between these...

"Why is Walt Whitman's face as familiar as his poetry? In answering this question, Ruth Bohan tells a story of self-invention and portraiture. Whitman approached successive editions of Leaves of Grass as opportunities to establish close, dynamic links between his poetry and visual representation. Bohan shows as well that Whitman, who sought out friendships with numerous artists, left a legacy absorbed after his death into the fabric of American modernism....