The Introduction surveys the range and diversity of engagements with the sublime across different areas of enquiry, genres of cultural productivity, and national traditions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. It explores the close links between ‘the sublime’ and ‘the Romantic’ in academic discourse before outlining the history of ‘the Romantic Sublime’ as a critical construct. It argues for a potential disconnect between what scholars have called ‘the Romantic Sublime’ and how the sublime might actually have been produced, encountered, experienced, and understood during the Romantic period. A selection of key Romantic-period engagements with the sublime are discussed, as are the major scholarly histories of the topic, from the early twentieth century to the present day.

Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

The work and lives of modernist writers were extensively chronicled by the mass media, enabling Americans to develop an active interest in even the most radical literary developments in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway and the cultural developments that enabled their success in specific decades. All were American celebrities. The lives of each were profiled in periodicals, their style was parodied, their faces graced the covers of popular magazines, and all had relationships with Hollywood and filmmaking. Other modernists were subject to this public interest as well, including Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. None were immune to the broad changes in the marketing and promotion of books and authors that facilitated a lively, robust mainstream knowledge of writers as popular as Hemingway or as difficult as Gertrude Stein, blurring distinctions between low-, middle-, and highbrow writers.

This chapter examines the ‘Critical sublime’ as developed by Kant in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in his Kritik der Urteilskraft. It interprets Kant as adumbrating three features that later become central tropes of the Romantic characterization of sublimity: the sense that its source and ultimate value lie beyond everyday experience; that it involves the subject, rather than any external object, as the immediate and direct object of consciousness; and that the paradigmatically natural phenomena and their qualities that ostensibly excite the experience are less important than the contemplative relationship one takes to them. Consideration of each in turn gives the chapter its narrative structure and divides it into three main sections, ‘Transcendence and the Phenomenal Self’, ‘The Moral Subject Within’, and ‘The “Objects” of Nature and Art’. The discussion concludes with a brief observation on the proto-Romantic sentiment that Kant expresses in his view of poetry and the arts.

This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.

This chapter considers Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems in light of the various difficulties they pose to readers interested in thinking of them in formal and also in generic terms (however broadly construed). I suggest that each of them might be understood as individual attempts to resist intellectual, critical, and hermeneutic recourse to any such generalization per se. A salient feature of these “modernist” “American” “long poems” consists in a variable but tenacious schedule of negations: of literary conventions, of readerly expectations, of internal consistencies, and, ultimately, of any sense of an ending whatsoever. I reflect upon the implications of negation and excess when discussing “long poems” by three straight, white male poets, especially in a context as institutional as a Cambridge History.

While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

This chapter examines the common forms and themes of American dramatists and theater practitioners in the early twentieth century. The primary visual characteristic of plays by the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neal Hurston, and Thornton Wilder is a realistically depicted dwelling-place precariously nested within a larger, stylized evocation of the natural world. While the dwelling is most often a house, it can also be a boat, a back garden, a Pullman car, a wooded clearing, or even a street corner.  In these dwelling-places, what is social and natural, or artificial and real, remains distinct, but merges at the borders of both the stage and the stage dwelling. By depicting a domestic interior vainly fortified against a natural yet also theatrical exterior, American dramatists make compelling drama and theater out of the boundary between human and inhuman. I call this genre of American drama “fragile realism.”

This chapter reconsiders modernism as a cultural movement from below generated by the rise of a new left-wing, working-class, and radical gathering of writers inspired by world events from the Russian Revolution to the surge of trade unionism. The chapter puts into conversation scholarship on radical American writing with writings on African American and feminist modernisms. The chapter considers what was unique about the form and content of modernist experiment by writers with openly progressive and radical political commitments.

Southern modernism, including later incarnations precipitously labeled postmodern, has been broadly characterized by two often contradictory streams: the pastoral, beginning with the plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and the racial surreal, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s sly ripostes in his conjure tales. Both respond to the region’s long history of racialized labor exploitation, running from the plantation through Walmart and FedEx, from Parchman through the nation’s current carceral system. As labor sociologists, the new historians of capitalism, and literary scholars such as Michael North have shown, these literary traditions and the history to which they respond do not constitute some quaint exception within ongoing American modernism and modernity but remain central to it, from the plantation house to the Westin Bonaventure and from Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, and Welty to William Styron, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

When we think of US modernist presses, a series of images comes to mind: Horace Liveright, who issued T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land alongside bestselling novels and popular theater plays; Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche, who promoted the new African American literature and original crime fiction by Dashiell Hammett; B. W. Huebsch, who published Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, but also radical political texts. This chapter focuses on the diversity of American modernist presses – from avant-garde imprints to long-established houses, from limited editions to inexpensive reprints. The period between the wars has been mythologized as a “golden age.” This chapter scraps the gold to reveal a more nuanced picture of the publishing landscape. As Bennett Cerf (the owner of the Modern Library) declared, flamboyant but dysfunctional houses had no chance of surviving: publishing was a business, and the fun and excitement of discovering new authors would always compete with the necessity of making a profit.

Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.

This chapter considers the early modern ‘prehistory’ of the Romantic sublime. It considers the sublime as a type of experience of the natural world that far preceded its formal articulation, taking as examples the volcanic encounters of the Scottish traveller William Lithgow (c. 1582–c. 1645) and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). The natural philosopher Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) has often been identified as an originator of the Romantic sublime; this chapter casts him instead as a lynchpin. He was not the first to ‘see’ the great in nature; instead, his theory challenged the theological foundations of many early modern sublime experiences, paving the way for a theory of the sublime that could move beyond the divine. Above all the chapter argues for the value of the vocabulary of sublime experience to describe encounters with the natural world before the Romantic sublime.

This chapter builds on recent scholarship uncovering the ways in which, just as there are modernisms, there are also regionalisms, and the two terms are not flipsides of the modernity coin but the same “side” of its Möbius strip, oscillating between op-position and co-position. More specifically, it focuses on the ways modernist debates over new versions of “culture” reshaped regionalism. New versions of “cultural pluralism,” arising out of interdisciplinary conversations among artists, anthropologists, geographers, and critics, were deployed in opposition to the homogenized, industrial nation-state. In these arguments, deployed by figures such as Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Edward Sapir, the unit of culture is both local and transnational, arising from the past but crucially oriented toward the future. These intertwined arguments of cultures, regions, and literary form are shared across key “communities of cultural interest” in the period, in particular the Southwest of Mary Austin and Native writers such as John Joseph Matthews and D’Arcy McNickle, and the South(s) of John Crowe Ransom and Zora Neale Hurston.

This chapter first walks readers through Kant’s critical theory of the sublime before tracing this Kantian sublime in a selection of German Romantic-period cultural texts. One of Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea, and Heinrich von Kleist’s equally awesome review of it, are read through a (post-)Kantian lens. The chapter then explains how Kant’s model of the sublime was decisively re-interpreted by Friedrich Schiller, whose idea of the ‘pathetic-sublime’ made the concept amenable to poetics, particularly so with respect to tragedy and questions of free will and fate. The chapter closes with a discussion of the sublime in German Romantic-period music, focusing on Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, with the words of the final chorus from Schiller’s Ode to Joy.