At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusiv...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Freed-Thall, Hannah (Author)
Format:	Electronic eBook
Language:	English
Published:	New York, NY Columbia University Press [2023]
Series:	Modernist Latitudes
Subjects:	LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century Beaches in literature Ecocriticism Literature, Modern > 20th century > History and criticism Modernism (Literature) Queer theory Seashore in literature
Online Access:	DE-12 Volltext
Summary:	At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance-a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness.The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices-including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing-as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world.Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought
Item Description:	Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Mrz 2023)
Physical Description:	1 Online-Ressource
ISBN:	9780231551977
DOI:	10.7312/free19708