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Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures

Transatlantic Avant-GardesLittle Magazines and Localist Modernism

By Eric B White

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£24.99

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

Provides an alternative account of the modernist transatlantic

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes offers a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism. Complimenting recent studies of modernist expatriates, Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place ‘located’ figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the 'global design' of literary modernism. Focusing on artist-run 'little magazines' (including Others, Contact, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Fire!!, and Pagany) and selected fine press publications and mainstream periodicals, White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into 'exile' and 'localist', or 'regionalist' and 'cosmopolitan', factions. Thus, the book proposes a version of localist modernism that prioritises issues of geographic and textual 'location' to deliver a 'networked' approach to American modernism in the transatlantic context. Combining literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes provides a new reading of the specialised literary networks that interrogated the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic. Key Features:

  • Provides a new account of the literary avant-gardes that questioned the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity
  • Complements modernist studies of American expatriates
  • Combines literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism to deliver a ‘networked’ reading of American modernism in the transatlantic context
  • Proposes a version of ‘localist modernism’ that prioritises issues of geographic and textual ‘location’ in transnational literary studies

Reviews

White’s rich archive of evidence drawn from transatlantic little magazines will prove extremely valuable to both modernist and American periodical studies.
A comprehensive and rewarding study of the contents, graphics, and marketing of the influential little magazines at the center of the localist and transatlantic incarnations of modernism. The study does full justice to the range and—as White shows, complexly interdependent-- personal, political and aesthetic agendas behind their origins and editorial agendas.
In bringing American modernism back home, and exposing the cosmopolitan contours of modernism in the American grain, Eric White makes an important intervention into contemporary scholarship. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes is required reading for scholars of American modernism and its material culture.
Important and far-reaching.
[T]he sensitive research, reader-attuned writing style, and scholarly precision with which White tackles a vast subject [offers] a synoptic overview of the tangled networks of periodical production while carefully deconstructing the paradigms affiliated to them. The result is a comprehensive, probing study whose far-reaching conclusions destabilize the familiar tropes of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘identity’, and pave the way for more materialist, multi-disciplinary methodological approaches to the little magazines that, as White states, ‘helped consolidate the modernist canon’ (209).
The major monograph on little magazine networks for 2013 is undoubtedly Eric B. White’s excellent Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. [...] In a year with extraordinary work on the little magazines, White’s project stands out for its attention to the complex regionalism that circles back to transnational migrations and distribution networks that both nourish the little magazines’ bigness in New Modernist studies and attend to their deus loci, or said differently (to quote Williams), to ‘re-awakened genius of place’ (p. 207).
This brilliantly written monograph offers a stimulating study of the transatlantic movement of little magazines produced throughout the modernist period and expertly chronicles the dynamic collaborations that formed and reformed the avant-garde in multiple transatlantic locations. [...] [A] thorough reading and re-reading of his book will aide a greater appreciation and keener understanding of the collaborative network that infused transnational modernism. It’s an essential volume for any modernist scholar and will prove an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students studying the literary avant-gardes.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Abbreviations and Notes on Sources; Prologue; i.i ‘A Core About Which / Not a Box Inside Which Every Item’: Little Magazines and the Modernist Transatlantic; i.ii Locational Poetics and Geographical Materialism; i.iii ‘The Locality is the Only Universal’: Distinguishing Localist Modernism; i.iv The Advance Guard Magazine; i.v Conclusion; Chapter 1: Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village; 1.1 Introduction; 1.2 A New Washington Square: The Greenwich Village Nexus and the ‘Marketplace-to-be’, 1913-16; 1.3 American Free Verse: Ridgefield’s Magazines, Imagist Print Cultures, and the Ascent of Others; 1.4 Love Songs and Rogue Traders: Others, Rogue, and Transatlantic New York; 1.5 ‘Native by Influence If Not by Species’: Others and American (Market) Places; 1.6 The ‘Competitive Number’ and the Limits of ‘Otherness’; 1.7 Conclusion; Chapter 2: The Vortex of the Page: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis and the Modernist Problem of Place; 2.1 Introduction; 2.2 A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound’s Journey from Image to Vortex; 2.3 The Other’s Vortex: William Carlos Williams’s Transatlantic Backgrounds; 2.4 ‘The Crowd Master’: Blast and Wyndham Lewis’s Urban Spaces; 2.5 Conclusion: Transatlantic Vorticism; Chapter 3: ‘Backgrounds and Extensions’: The Ascent of Localist Modernism; 3.1 Introduction; 3.2 ‘Literary Americanism’: The Seven Arts and the New Regionalism; 3.3 Local Alternatives: The Soil and the ‘End’ of Others; 3.4 The Afterlives of Others; 3.5 The Edges of America: Localist Poetics in Contact; 3.6 ‘The Impact of Experience’; 3.7 Conclusion: ‘Broken By the Contact’; Chapter 4: Location, Location, Location: America, Relativity, and ‘the New Science of Advertising’; 4.1 Introduction; 4.2 Hook, Line, and Sinker: ‘25¢ = Advertising Number’; 4.3 ‘Don’t Imagine That I Think Economics Interesting’: Ezra Pound and the Actual World; 4.4 ‘St. Francis Einstein’ in the ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’; 4.5 ‘Jazz Opera Americano’: American Identity Abroad; 4.6 Conclusion: ‘But if it Ends/The Start is Begun’; Chapter 5: Secessions and Symposia: American Identity and Transatlantic Colour Lines in Modernist Magazines; 5.1 Introduction; 5.2 Closed Circuits and Missed Contacts: American Identities in Secession; 5.3 ‘Declension from Unanimity’: S4N and Unanimisme; 5.4 The New Negro Renaissance and the ‘Crucible’ of Harlem; 5.5 Railroaded: The Spatial Poetics of Fire!!; 5.6 Conclusion; Chapter 6: New Localism, Late Modernism, and America’s Unfinished Spaces; 6.1 Introduction; 6.2 Localist and Dadaist Legacies, 1924 to 1928; 6.3 The Atlantic Canon: the transatlantic review and The Exile; 6.4 Blues and the Margins of Modernity; 6.5 The Voyage to Pagany and the Rebirth of Localism; 6.6 ‘Hand to Mouth, Eye to Brain Existence’: A Return to Contact; Epilogue.
About the author

Eric B White

Eric White is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, he has taught at the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Edinburgh, and has held fellowships at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Oxford. Eric is PI and co-founder of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology Project, which re-imagines modernists’ inventions using Augmented Reality.

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