Ulteriori informazioni
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Claire Seiler argues that a sense of suspension¿a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons¿shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.
Sommario
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Midcentury Problem
1. The Timely Suspensions of Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring
2. W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus
3. Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett Waiting in the Middle
4. The Sonic Suspensions of Frank O’Hara
Afterword
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Info autore
Claire Seiler is associate professor of English at Dickinson College.
Riassunto
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.
Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.
Testo aggiuntivo
Seiler does the study of twentieth-century literature a major service . . . Essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century Anglo American literature, Midcentury Suspension performs the impressive feat of examining, in close detail, several works by important Anglo American writers while linking them to each other and to their time through the heuristic of suspension.
