1st Edition

Modernism in the Green Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture

By Julia E. Daniel, Margaret Konkol Copyright 2020
    234 Pages
    by Routledge

    234 Pages
    by Routledge

    Modernism in the Green traces a trans-Atlantic modernist fascination with the creation, use, and representation of the modern green. From the verdant public commons in the heart of cities to the lookout points on mountains in national parks, planned green spaces serve as felicitous stages for the performance of modernism. In its focus on designed and public green zones,Modernism in the Green offers a new perspective on modernism’s overlapping investments in the arts, politics, urbanism, race, class, gender, and the nature-culture divide. This collection of essays is the first to explore the prominent and diverse ways greens materialize in modern literature and culture, along with the manner in which modernists represented them. This volume presents the idea of "the green" as a point of exploration, as our contributors analyze social-organic spaces ranging from public parks to roadways and refuse piles. Like the term "green," one that evokes both more-than-human natural zones and crafted public meeting places, these chapters uncover the social and spatial intersection of nature and culture in the very architecture of parks, gardens, buildings, highways, and dumps. This book argues that such greens facilitate modernists’ exploration of how nature can manifest in an era of increasing urbanization and mechanization and what identities and communities the green now enables or prevents.

    Introduction

    Julia E. Daniel and Margaret Konkol

    Section 1: Green Grounds

    "Free Land": Central Park and Racial Erasure in the Proslavery United States

    Allison Siehnel

    Hospital, Parlor, Fresco, Posey: Metaphors for Parks in the Public Lectures of Frederick Law Olmsted

    Julia E. Daniel

    Modernist Picturesque: Representing Urban Green Space on London Transport Posters, 1908-1940

    Nora Kuster

    By Chicago, For Chicago? Listening for the City in the Creation of Grant Park Music Festival

    Katherine Brucher

    Section 2: Green Texts

    A Modernist Walk in the Park with Virginia Woolf

    Bonnie Kime Scott

    Green Agoraphobia: Architectural Cures in Baudelaire and Kafka

    Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss

    Park Blues: Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, and the Park Ballad

    Margaret Konkol

    A More-Than-Human Green: National Parks and Animality in Marianne Moore’s "An Octopus"

    Hatley Clifford

    The Way of the Road: Travelling through Yosemite National Park in Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography

    Maxwell Woods

    The Imagination’s Meadows in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All

    Michael D. Sloane

    Biography

    Julia E. Daniel is an Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University. Her research interests include modern American poetics and urban ecocriticism, as seen in her book Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. Her work has also appeared in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, Modern Drama, and Critical Quarterly.

    Margaret Konkol is an Assistant Professor of American literature and digital humanities at Old Dominion University. She is completing a book "Modernizing Nature: Modernist Poetry, Gender, Race, and Civic Space" which discusses poetry’s role in civic debates about the naturalness of rapidly modernizing gender and race hierarchies which were on display in public parks and gardens. Her essays and review essays appear in Hybrid Pedagogy, Modernism/modernity, Paideuma, and Textus: English Studies in Italy.