In 1927, Richard Wright arrived from Mississippi into Chicago, a city where he stayed for ten years, his most formative years as a writer and a period for him of political and intellectual radicalization. It was in Bronzeville, of course, where Bigger was born. Wright educated himself in Chicago within leftist literary circles, among the artists and writers of the John Reed Club, at the George Cleveland Hall Branch library, and through the interracial collaborations of the WPA’s Illinois Writers Project. Wright wrote stories while working on the project, including “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938), and he collaborated on a provocative literary manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). Wright met sociologist Horace Cayton Jr., for whom he wrote a forceful and luminous introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), co-authored by Cayton and St. Clair Drake. A kind of ars poetica, Wright’s introduction illuminates how the conditions of Chicago were also the conditions of European fascism, and how the psychological disorder wrought by racism was connected to the burgeoning struggles for decolonization in Africa. Wright also reveals his commitment to both a Chicago tradition of social realism and the experimental styles of transatlantic modernism.

Much contemporary social science still imagines a “society without culture,” and still works with limited conceptions of institutions that understate their effects.

Affective states and their representational forms have been as crucial to critical constructions of modernism as to the writing we associate with its multiple movements, moments, and legacies. At the confluence of represented feeling and registrations of affect, ambitions of otherwise historically distinct writers come into conversation. To see how this conversation might enhance modernist studies’ critical-affective literacies, this chapter follows a transhistorical rather than a discretely periodized arc, gauging the conceptual challenges and interpretive opportunities that come with close reading affective representation as it interlaces modernism’s stylistic aspirations and political valences. It considers how changing disciplinary priorities are transforming the ways in which modernist studies addresses affect’s critical purchase. And it encompasses both early twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures (Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Storm Jameson, Ian McEwan, and Rachael Cusk) to explore analytical synergies between vocabularies of feeling and evolving strategies of experimental form.

This chapter examines some key developments in Irish-American literary relations from the middle of the century to the 1980s. It begins by arguing that this was a period when Irish-American literary relations acquired a new complexity – in both the reception of the work of Irish writers in the United States and the emergence of a distinctive and authoritative Irish-American voice. It then goes on to examine the distinctive contribution of Irish and Irish-American writers to the development of the short story as a form in the United States, which was a process mediated and galvanised by the literary magazine The New Yorker, the natural habitat of writers such as John O’Hara and Maeve Brennan and, later, Elizabeth Cullinan. The chapter then discusses the expansion of the Irish-American literary canon from mid-century onwards and explores how key figures such as Edward McSorley, James T. Farrell, Mary McCarthy and Mary Gordon sought to engage with or contest influential Irish and Irish-American literary inheritances. These writers’ commitment to social realism invented a new version of Irish-America during these decades of cultural transition, one that often deliberately set itself apart from previous received scripts and mythmaking.