How did Great Britain, which entered the twentieth century as a dominant empire, reinvent itself in reaction to its fears and fantasies about the United States? Investigating the anxieties caused by the invasion of American culture-from jazz to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-during the first half of the twentieth century, Genevieve Abravanel theorizes the rise of the American Entertainment Empire as a new style of imperialism that threatened Britain's own.

In the early twentieth century, the United States excited a range of utopian and dystopian energies in Britain. Authors who might...

Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled...

The Poetry of the Americas offers a lively and detailed history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America, spanning three decades from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II through the Cold War cultural policies of the late 1960s. Connecting works by Martin Adan, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia de Burgos, Ernesto Cardenal, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Jose Lezama Lima, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, Octavio Paz, Heberto Padilla, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Feinsod...

Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization witnessed dynamic exchanges between writers and anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic. Watson analyzes writers who engaged professionally with anthropology-Barbara Pym, Ursula Le Guin, Saul Bellow, Edouard Glissant-and anthropologists who adopted literary forms-Laura Bohannan, Michel Leiris, and Claude Levi-Strauss.

Building on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a new account of the relationship between photography and modernist writing-revealing the conceptual space of literary modernism to be radically constructed around the instability of female bodies.

Drawing on a critical framework informed by queer theory and psychoanalysis, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival offers a new definition of survival, one that means more than merely the continuation of life. This book creates a literary archive of counterarguments to the conventional Darwinian evolutionary protocols of survival in early 20th century thought.

Out of Context disrupts the notion of static context, instead proposing a transhistorical approach to literature, revealing that the significance of literature is in its moments of surprising reception.