The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.

This chapter considers how strategies for representing the skyscraper indexed competing understandings of the nature of organization, a term with multiple valences in the early twentieth century. Whether one judged skyscrapers to be hideous blights or rapturous delights, few in the period failed to marvel at the powerful technic of organization marshaled by and for its mass. But to whom should its beholders credit that technic proved a harder matter to resolve. Descriptions of skyscraper construction by builder William Starrett and writers John Dos Passos and Willa Cather mark an oscillation between viewing this structure’s organization as an art, showcasing not just the skill but also the beauty of capital’s captivating choreography of bodies and materials used to materialize these structures, and organization as a politics, the active mobilization of laborers to resist modes of capitalistic organization by revealing the invisible and unaesthetic exploitation disguised by capitalism’s breathtaking arrangements.

This chapter introduces the wide range of music bound up with the sublime in the Romantic period. This is a time often associated with the triumph of music – and especially ‘autonomous’ instrumental music – as the most sublime of the arts, and with a canon of overwhelming, ground-breaking, transgressive works by great (mostly German) composers. These associations are important, not least as a way of understanding the unease and sometimes controversy that has surrounded the musical sublime since the later twentieth century. Yet equally important to understanding the sublime in the Romantic period is to look beyond monumental instrumental compositions to see how smaller-scale genres and vocal music, alongside performers, listeners and other agents, shaped and contested the sublimity of music, sound and hearing, and left an indelible mark on the broader aesthetic category of the sublime itself.

This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.

This chapter explores the contribution made to American modernism by the “little magazine” format in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century. It focuses upon three key examples: The Little Review (1914–29), edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; Broom (1921–4), founded by Harold Loeb; and Partisan Review (1934–2003), first edited by Wallace Phillips and Philip Rahv. The chapter explores the transnational connections articulated by each magazine, demonstrating in particular how questions of the relationship between the avant-garde and politics dominated their contributions to American modernism.

One of the major aesthetic and philosophical frameworks that has been used to represent and think about the modern environmental crisis is the sublime. This chapter traces how a tradition of the sublime traceable directly to Romantic literature and culture has been used to conceptualize both the forms of nature that we should cherish, such as particular landscapes, and the forms of nature that we should shrink from, such as extreme weather events. The chapter also addresses how in the twenty-first century the sublime, and specifically a ‘Romantic sublime’ based mainly on Kant’s writings, has been condemned as an aesthetic that assumes a distance between human and nonhuman, and which creates a false impression that humans can transcend or solve the environmental crisis. Finally, the chapter considers whether a Romantic eco-sublime might still have a useful role in helping us to think about the nonhuman world and our relationship with it in a time of crisis.

This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

This chapter examines the remarkable growth in the popularity of mountain climbing in Britain during the Romantic period, as adventurous fell-walkers went in search of the sublime. Mountain summits were increasingly seen as the ultimate sublime location and ascent as a near-guaranteed way to experience psychological as well as physical elevation. The chapter explores the links between mountains and the sublime in the period’s aesthetic theories before examining how the literature of British domestic tourism described the sublime pleasures of ascents to British summits. It investigates the relationship between the presentation of sublime experiences on British mountains and those on the higher peaks of the Alps and traces the emergence of Snowdon in Wales, Skiddaw in the Lake District, and Ben Lomond in Scotland as pre-eminent British sublime locations. It shows how, as summits became more crowded, thrill-seeking climbers increasingly ventured to more remote and dangerous locations to experience the sublime.

The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

Late modernism in the US, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1960, is characterized by two simultaneous yet contradictory developments. In one, the techniques and, to a lesser extent, themes of international literary modernism continued to infuse America’s literary bloodstream, diversifying, spreading, and becoming part of the common artistic vocabulary, particularly for underground or countercultural movements. But at the same time, the major institutions of elite culture in the US such as publishers, universities, book-review magazines, and even foundations and the government gradually and then wholeheartedly adopted it in the 1950s and rewrote its history to create a kind of “official” modernism. If late modernism was a set of techniques bereft of a mission, Cold War modernism then voided the modernist project of any urgency or sociopolitical critique, reframing it as the highest expression of the self-satisfied liberal society that avant-garde modernism had always reviled.

Scholars have canonically understood Surrealism as having arrived in the Americas in two principal waves: the first involved the interwar discovery of a largely French avant-garde movement by poets, little magazines, and art-world figures in the US and Latin America; the second describes the influx of European “exiles” who crossed the Atlantic as war refugees during World War II. Surrealism was not, however, a solely Parisian or European movement that washed up on American shores. This chapter proposes instead that “Surrealism” designates a multifarious set of poetic and artistic practices invented by and within the Americas, in exchange with European and non-European arts and ideas. The chapter traces some of the refractions and reverberations of Surrealism throughout the Americas, offering a survey of American surrealisms – from Buenos Aires to Fort de France, from Mexico City to Chicago, from Lima to New York City – that disclose a complex set of intercultural reflections and negotiations among modernist poets, artists, and thinkers.