Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

This chapter examines the reception of philosophies of the sublime in European painting of the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many painters took up subjects that echo descriptions of the sublime offered by Burke, Kant, and other philosophers, prompted by art critics who attempted to apply the idea of the sublime to art. The chapter focuses on artists who engaged with three facets of the sublime that had become recurrent concerns of British and German philosophical aesthetics: (1) vastness, captured in landscapes of towering mountains and the open ocean; (2) power, expressed through the imagery of volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters; and (3) violence, depicted in paintings of animal conflict.

This chapter explores the literary 1890s as a stage where new character types were established and exploratory formations of narrative emerged. Before the radical turn into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. The work of Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather sowed seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. Thus, Chopin was fascinated by the human margin, by varieties of behavior that suggested new configurations of sensuality and transgression. Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, developing a stripped-down realism that connected “the real” to a documentary discourse. In Cather’s early writing a fascination with female performance was allied to an interest in European movements such as Aestheticism and Symbolism. Linking both subjects, her focus on a sensory writing pointed forward to a modernist fascination with embodiment.

This chapter traces the modernist short poem’s hauntings by the lyric, most particularly in thinking through what came to be regarded as problems of emotion and expressive subjectivity within the discursive strains defining the modernist lyric, especially as clustered around a poetics of impersonality. The “lyric discontent” of modernism marks multiple modalities energizing modern American poetry’s varied points of emergence in the 1910s and 1920s – particularly associated with women and African American poets – among which the distrust of emotion and embrace of impersonality endured contested influence in defining the modernist lyric. Locating this discontent in the years concurrent with early articulations of modern poetry’s extinction of personal emotion and expressive subjectivity – roughly the mid-1910s to early 1920s and before New Criticism takes hold – invites consideration of poetry’s exploration of affective constructions of subjectivity that grapple with elements of emotion, expressivity, and the lyric gaze.

This chapter surveys literary criticism during the high phase of modernism with special focus on major critics’ conflicting attitudes toward reality. I show that the word reality is of central importance in our understanding of the era’s literary culture. Critics largely agreed that reality is the best touchstone to test the worth of a literary work, but they disagreed over what made some literary works more real than others. Their contrasting definitions of reality resulted in different ways to construct the literary canon.

Jazz is a music that did not merely inspire works of literature; in many cases it aspired toward the literary. Drawing from Ralph Ellison’s impulse to praise the jazz rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as containing a “range of allusion [that] was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong,” this chapter offers an overview of the aesthetic, thematic, and political motivations of jazz and modernist literature from blues and ragtime to the emergence of bebop. In exploring jazz as one of the “forms” of American modernism, I attend to the experimental formal variations in the poetry and prose of a wide range of authors, including Sterling Brown, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and others, but also to the radical form of the blues by Louis Armstrong, W. C. Handy, and Bessie Smith.

This chapter considers the uses of sublime blockage for science. The sublime was, on the one hand, a prod for precision and, on the other hand, a nod to skepticism and mystery, potentially ennobling an otherwise mechanical science. The chapter shows how astronomers, biologists, chemists, electricians, and natural historians and neurologists exploited sublime blockage either to elevate science above crude mechanism or butchery or to engage in skepticism so that it could arguably further scientific research. Such engagement with blockage paved the way for Franz Anton Mesmer’s quackery along with Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to defeat it, but quackery proved to be a more robust foe than anticipated.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.

The story of modernism and/in the US could do worse than begin in August 1967, when Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicagoan, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, and recent convert to the Black Arts Movement – read occasional poems at two dedication ceremonies for two very different pieces of public art in her home city. Her first reading was of “The Chicago Picasso” at the unveiling of an unnamed, 50-foot-tall Pablo Picasso sculpture outside Chicago’s Civic Center, a building that – then as now – housed most of Cook County’s circuit courts. Brooks’ invitation came from Chicago’s formidable mayor, Richard Daley, who cemented his notoriety the following year by orchestrating the heavy-handed policing of the combustive 1968 Democratic convention. For Brooks, the Picasso sculpture was art with a capital “A.” As she put it in her poem, “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.”

This chapter reexamines the role urbanization played in the emergence of literary modernism in the US. The development of the skyscraper in the 1880s and increasing, and increasingly diverse, migration patterns at the turn of the twentieth century transformed Chicago and New York into important economic and cultural centers, where new literary voices and new modes of literary expression soon flourished. This chapter explores the significance of the skyscraper, that most American of architectural forms, on modernist poetry and prose fiction, as well as the ways cities enabled authors to create and navigate complex, intersecting networks of literary community. Harriet Monroe and Claude McKay serve as exemplary representatives of the modernist literary cultures that took shape in – and sometimes between – Chicago and New York, respectively.

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.