Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature - Hardcover

Kara Watts (editor), Molly Volanth Hall (editor) & Robin Hackett (editor)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813056284 ISBN 13: 9780813056289

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2019

Synopsis

Affective Materialities breaks ground by reexamining modernist theorizations of the body, opening up artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation.

Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster, alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen.

Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today.

About this title

About the Author

Kara Watts is instructor of English at the University of Rhode Island.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813056284
• ISBN 13: 9780813056289
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240