This chapter traces how Langston Hughes (1901–1967) documented the Black experience in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movemen and some key legacies of the Black world building he pursued by engaging with social justice and political activism. To this end, the chapter details overlooked correspondence to reveal the mentoring Hughes provided to Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Amiri Baraka. These letters illuminate the unmistakable confidence Hughes instilled in both Brooks and Walker while the often overamplified tension between Hughes and Baraka quietens into a spirit of working admiration among equals.

A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.

The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

Carpentier was an expert on architecture: his father was a French architect and as a student the future novelist attended the University of Havana’s School of Architecture. Though he wrote extensively about Cuban architecture – most notably in The City of Columns – he barely discussed the Modern movement which was so influential in Havana’s building boom during the 1950s. This blind spot is puzzling, especially when we consider that the novelist lived in Paris, read L’esprit nouveau, and was familiar with the writings of Le Corbusier. This chapter explores why Carpentier deliberately avoided writing about the modern architecture that transformed the Vedado district of Havana in the decade before the Cuban Revolution by examining the built environments that appear in The City of Columns and The Chase.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

The interwar era was a formative period in Elizabeth Maconchy’s development as a composer, and much can be gleaned through a cross section of British musical circles between the First and Second World Wars. The endemic misogyny of the time, which affected the prospects of both earlier and contemporaneous female composers, had a profound impact on what opportunities were available to her as well as how her works were received. Many of the connections she made at this time – such as those forged with her professors and fellow students at the Royal College of Music – would endure for the rest of her career. Maconchy was interested in both continental modernism and Irish and Welsh nationalism, involved in the Macnaghten and Lemare concert series – which provided much-needed performance opportunities for young composers – as well as the pageant Music for the People, which furthered left-wing political causes such as anti-fascism, anti-racism, and class consciousness.

This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

This chapter considers concert-going audiences in mid twentieth-century England, with a focus on the conditions Maconchy faced. Structured along the phases of her career, the chapter traces the evolving socio-cultural and historical factors that shaped audience reception of her work. The account reveals how gender biases, geographical isolation, and the limited infrastructure for contemporary music hindered her visibility and accessibility. It discusses how her music was often mischaracterized as complex and inaccessible, overshadowing its emotional expressiveness. Despite obstacles, including her tuberculosis and motherhood, Maconchy established a loyal audience, particularly among women’s networks, broadcasting and small concert series, though her broader appeal remained constrained by societal biases. The chapter ultimately illustrates how the interplay of audience composition, media influence, and institutional support contributed to the reception of Maconchy’s music, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for recognition faced by women composers in a male-dominated field.

This essay assesses Bowen’s relationship to the English author D. H. Lawrence, and suggests that in view of the chronological overlap in their careers, the latter was effectively a contemporary as well as a forerunner. Bowen regarded Lawrence as a major author but also identified with him as an ‘outsider’ to cosmopolitan English literary circles. Both novelists are transitional figures, comfortable with the novelistic legacies of nineteenth-century fictional realism but moving towards formal experimentation, while tuning their work to modernist preoccupations with psychology and sexuality. Their interests aligned in the exploration of female subjectivity and the shifting gender politics of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s landmark novel Women in Love, with its programmatic positioning of two sisters caught between the inherited shapes of English Victorian romance and the pull of a modern European independence, provides a persuasive template for Bowen in her structured pairings of women across several works, including an unpublished story titled ‘Women in Love’. The two writers are linked, finally, by their respective responses to the world at war, with Bowen hailing Lawrence as a guide to her literary navigation of wartime London.

As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.

Elizabeth Bowen began her career in a period of profound literary upheaval, as some of the most prominent writers of the era attempted to reorient literary fiction away from the social world and towards subjective life. Bowen subscribed to a modernist understanding of literary fiction as fundamentally concerned with investigating and representing the nature of human experience. But if she subscribed to a humdrum humanism that saw little difference between how people experienced the world in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth, she also had an acute sense of the historical variability of writers’ techniques for representing human behaviour. This essay tracks how Bowen’s feelings about modernist modes of experiential description evolved over her career, from her enthusiastic embrace of them in the 1920s to an increased scepticism about their monomaniacal application from the late 1930s onwards – a shift reflected in the changing prominence of stream-of-consciousness styles of writing over her oeuvre. Bowen’s later thematisation of the limits of modernist methods and gradual retreat from them is born not of an aversion to innovation, but of a desire to generate effects that these methods alone are unable to create.

This chapter explores Elizabeth Bowen’s career as a literary critic, which is a significant but often overlooked aspect of her writing life. Focusing on her two published essay collections – Collected Impressions (1950) and Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (1962) – as well as a series of uncollected book reviews and articles that appeared in a wide range of British and American newspapers and journals, this chapter examines Bowen’s distinctive approach to criticism and traces the development of her public persona as a critic, particularly from the late 1940s onwards. While it is well documented that Bowen’s prodigious critical output was driven in part by financial necessity, her writing in this domain demonstrates a sensitivity to atmosphere and a deep interest in better understanding the craft of writing. A reviewer who kept the common reader in mind, Bowen above all else conveyed to her readers the sense of being a reasonable judge with varied taste. This chapter assesses Bowen’s enduring critical legacy and argues that her contributions to literary journalism merit sustained attention within the broader histories of twentieth-century criticism.

This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s core arguments – specifically, that studying the reception of ancient architecture at the world’s fairs at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco furthers our understanding of the complex and possibly conflicting and contradictory ways in which the ancient world and its architecture were understood in the United States between 1893 and 1915. The appropriation of classical architecture for museums and fine art galleries emerges as a major theme. While classical architecture could be used to justify empire and institutional racism, it could also symbolize democracy and cultural sophistication. The fluidity and flexibility of ancient architecture underscore why it was so widely and creatively adapted in the United States. The physical legacy of these fairs – the buildings that survived and the parks – is also considered. In addition, the conclusion discusses the decline of ancient architecture as one of the most potent ways in which fair organizers expressed their cultural, political, and economic goals; the rejection of historical forms was vital to the birth of architectural Modernism. In sum, neo-antique architecture at American world’s fairs helped the nation and various cities to forge imagined ties to a glorious past, frame the present, and envisage the future.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.