European Journal of American Culture - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2009

This article looks at transatlantic modernist intertextuality and identifies African American influences and voices in the writing of Virginia Woolf. While comparisons between Woolf and the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer have occasionally been made in transatlantic studies of the matrix of modernism, little attention has been paid to the possibility of more direct or precise connections and intertexts. This essay offers a reading of a precise intertext between Woolf and Toomer and suggests further citations by Woolf of African American writing.

With the advent of transnationalist literary studies and its emphasis on questioning naturalized versions of nationalism, the idea of Cather as the celebrant and elegist of American values is ready for revision. Indeed, recent scholarship which has disinterred the political aspects of Cather's writing informs such new readings as it reveals a writer cogitating and critically engaging with the realities of social, political and cultural change. This article will examine some of the ways which Willa Cather compulsively appropriated and reinvented aspects of European culture to advance her own aesthetic designs. One purpose of this article is to shed light on established versions of American cultural nationalism. Another is to suggest, through close textual examples from Cather's work, that the author's conceptions and depictions of national identity emerged through engagement with a transatlantic imaginary.

Critics of early twentieth-century American modernism traditionally divide its key literary figures into two camps: the cosmopolitan exiles who expatriated themselves from the United States, and those who stayed at home. However, recent studies have challenged such dichotomies in the modernist canon, and drawing on the emerging field of transatlantic literary studies, this article investigates Contact, a specialized little magazine edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon which has been frequently characterized as an exclusively national(ist) project. My argument is that Contact actually represents a sophisticated expression of localist modernism, a specific element of the transatlantic avant-garde that emerged (rather than diverged) from an international network of artist-run journals in the early twentieth century. Using a combination of literary-historical analysis, textual studies practices and extensive archival research, this article focuses on the Advertising Number, a special issue of Contact that has until now been overlooked by critics. Albert Einstein's arrival in America initiated a heady collision of avant-garde poetics, mainstream print culture and global economics in the pages of New York's little magazines. In the Advertising Number, Williams enlisted his literary milieu, including a surprising contribution from the exile Ezra Pound, to explore a pivotal cultural moment in the evolution of the transatlantic avant-garde.

This article identifies a revisionist critical tradition that argues for the existence of an indigenous English poetic line which, allied to a formally conservative poetry in the United States, forms an Anglo-American anti-modernist front. Central to this critical approach is the figure of Edward Thomas, whose work appears to demonstrate the continuity of traditional poetic form in the face of the historical cataclysm of World War One and the formal challenges of modernism, and whose literary relation with Robert Frost appears to exemplify an Anglo-American partnership in opposition to the modernist pairing of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. By subjecting Thomas's work to a transnational analysis, this article reveals the ideologies which underlie this critical approach. It contends instead that Thomas should be read as a Welsh writer who opens English literature to modernist influences, and promotes writers from Ireland and the United States who are interested in re-appropriating the English language on behalf of their culturally dominated nations. As a case history in transnational modernism, this article thereby exposes the limitations of the Anglo-American anti-modernist critical tradition, showing in particular how, in anglicizing Britain and attempting to make anglophile American culture pre-eminent within the United States, it misses the literary significance of other national relations.

In this article, I investigate the matrix of transatlantic literary exchange in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) in order to suggest how the novel's rehabilitation of an international decadent aesthetics constitutes a radical challenge to the American literary establishment in the post-war. I begin by identifying the figures of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Swinburne as the key constellation for Nabokov in his plotting of Lolita's ambivalent engagement with the ethics of temporality and artistic autonomy. I then go on to situate Lolita's composition within debates current in the American academy from the late 1930s to the early 1950s over the value of decadent aesthetics within the modernist project and anxieties over Poe's place within American national literary culture. Read alongside the critical writings of T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate and the New Criticism, Lolita emerges as the risky reinstatement of a transatlantic decadent tradition, in which the failure of temporal and ethical containment disrupts a dominant narrative of modernism's history in American letters.