Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums.
Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world.
Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.
Author(s): Scott Ortolano
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 296
City: London
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction Of Titanics, wars, downturns, and Downtons: Popular modernism and its
Part 1: New Visions of Popular Modernism
1. Gentry modernism: Cultural connoisseurship and midcentury masculinity, 1951–1957
2. Modernism, operetta, and Ruritania: Ivor Novello’s Glamorous Night
3. Fine art on the airwaves: Radio drama and modern(ist)mass culture
4. “I’m gonna be somebody,” 1930: Gangsters and modernist celebrity
5. Charlie Chaplin, Walter Benjamin, and the redemption of the city
Part 2: Legacies of Popular Modernism
6. “Catch a wave”: Surf noir and modernist nostalgia
7. Alien pleasures: Modernism/hybridity/science fiction
8. Josephine Baker’s contemporary afterlives: Black female identity, modernist performance, and popular legacies of the Jazz Age
9. A hitchhiker’s guide to modernism: The futuristic Fordisms of Aldous Huxley, Brian O’Nolan, and Douglas Adams
Part 3: Resonances of Popular Modernism in the Twenty-First Century
10. Smokescreens to smokestacks: True Detective and the American sublime
11. Of modernist second acts and African-American lives: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Wire, and the struggle against lockdown
12. Don Draper’s identity crisis and Mad Men’s modernist masculinity
13. A century of reading time: From modernist novels to contemporary comics
14. Hemingway’s console: Memory and ethics in the modernist video game
Afterword
Notes on contributors
Index
