Modernism and Race

The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.

Introduction; 1. Germanism, the modern and 'England' - 1880–1930: a literary overview Len Platt; 2. 'All these fellows are ourselves': Ford Madox Ford, race, and Europe Max Saunders; 3. 'Tis optophone which ontophanes': race, the modern and Irish revivalism Kaori Nagai; 4. Generating modernism and New Criticism from anti-Semitism: Laura Riding and Robert Graves read T. S. Eliot's early poetry Donald J. Childs; 5. Race, modernism, and the question of late style in Kipling's racial narratives David Glover; 6. Atlantic modernism at the crossing: the migrant labours of Hurston, McKay, and the diasporic text Laura Doyle; 7. Claude McKay in Britain: race, sexuality and poetry Howard J. Booth; 8. Wyndham Lewis and the modernists: internationalism and race David Ayers; 9. Until Hanandhunagan's extermination': racialized histories of the world - Joyce and China Finn Fordham; 10. Race, gender, and the Holocaust: traumatic modernity, traumatic modernism Phyllis Lassner; Index.

The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, positioning race, as opposed to 'the West', at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. The essays in this 2011 collection represent a major contribution to this important theoretical development.

Len Platt is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London.