The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-century American Literature - Tapa blanda

Soto is a clever and convincing reader of modernist prose and makes a fair case for the value of the generational model. [His book] beats notions of 'ages' or 'epochs', because it is organic and bridges individual and collective historiography, while also allowing for the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous, the coexistence of multiple generations in time and space. - Modern Language Review ""[The Modernist Nation's] historical span is impressive, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin.... One of Soto's contributions is to continue the work of thinking about race in conjunction with American nationality.... Soto takes 'seriously the assertion that American writers imagine their craft as a kind of childbirth, a figure of speech long connected to artist creation. Such an idea leads him to consider writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams in whose work he finds frequent analogies between writing and procreation."" - Donna M. Campbell, American Literary Scholarship ""The Modernist Nation constructs a history of modernist literary movements and their labels as a way of detailing the improvisational qualities of American identity.... Soto's....work is an important contribution to American literary studies because [it illustrates] how racial and ethnic experiences make claims on the shape of our cultural traditions and critical practices.... Soto's evaluations are valuable because he sees the traps of essentialist thought in movement labels."" - Walton Muyumba, electronic book review

The Modernist Nation examines why America's modern literary movements have come to be characterized as "generations" and "renaissances," such as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation or the Harlem, Southern, and San Francisco Renaissances. The metaphor of rebirth, Michael Soto argues, offered and continues to offer American writers a kind of shorthand for imagining American cultural history, especially as a departure from Old World (English) trappings. Soto highlights the interracial dynamics of American literary movements, touching on authors as varied as James Weldon Johnson, Malcolm Cowley, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Kerouac. After assessing the origins of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, Soto traces the rise of the "bohemian artist" narrative, and demonstrates how a polyethnic cast of writers and critics constructed American literary production in terms of symbolic rebirth.