modernism

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: The Cycle of Isolation in Sherwood Anderson’s Modernist Midwest

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: The Cycle of Isolation in Sherwood Anderson’s Modernist Midwest

Loosely based on Anderson’s hometown Clyde, Ohio, Winesburg, Ohio contains twenty-two stories that reference each other―all highlighting specific characters who are bound by their shared feelings of loneliness. This cyclical, self-aware form of storytelling situates Winesburg as an early work of Modernist literature.

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Interplanetary Postcards: Lessons from the Martian School of British Poetry

Emerging in the late 1970s and already diminishing by the early 1980s, Martianism was a short-lived yet influential movement in British poetry. Principally associated with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid*, it derived its name from the title poem of Raine’s second collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), in which the eponymous alien recounts…

THE NEUTRAL CORNER: Nicholas Fox Weber’s “The Bauhaus Group”
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THE NEUTRAL CORNER: Nicholas Fox Weber’s “The Bauhaus Group”

  The neutral corner is one of the two corners of the ring not used by boxers between rounds. It is also the corner a boxer must retreat to after he has floored his opponent. The Neutral Corner was also a bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, that I frequented when at Yaddo in the late…

The Right Words

The Right Words

For my daughter, who just turned two, language is plastic. She pokes it and stretches it to find out what it can do. Joyfully, she tells stories (only some of them true) about her day. She loves to list the parts she and the cat do and don’t have in common. When it comes to…