Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
29 - Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
US Modernism in Europe
from Part III - Situating US Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2023
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Machine Age helped usher in the literary experiments of modernism in a very practical sense by increasing international travel and correspondence exponentially in the early twentieth century. This chapter explores the idea of “being American” in Europe by charting the two-way traffic of modernists and avant-gardes across the Atlantic. Drawing on a diverse range of vanguardists (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bob and Rose Brown, Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams), it examines how motifs of technology, popular culture, and racial difference were often read through the lens of American exceptionalism. In both expatriate forums (such as Broom, transition, and various literary salons) and “homegrown” projects (including Contact, Fire!!, and Others magazines), these writers harnessed the nervous energies of the Machine Age to complicate and proliferate, rather than consolidate, modernist canons and formations.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism , pp. 493 - 510Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023