Description
Book SynopsisRevisits the theme of alienation in modernist literature, finding an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile. Explores examples drawn from the cultural groupings of the New Negro movement, Parisian expatriates in the 1920s, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall.
Trade Review“González’s work to break down the divide between queer-of-color critique and antisocial queer approaches is well overdue and should make further antisocial queer-of-color analyses available. It’s also clear that turning to a category like that of the misfit could relieve queerness of the impossible demand to be about all forms of marginality.”
—Ben Nichols American Literary History
“Misfit Modernism tends to the ‘misfit’ structures of feeling of intersectional modernist authors before the full efflorescence of identity politics. In the process, it puts antisociality, negative affect, and arrested agency on the map for queer of color critique. In a series of brilliant and sensitive ‘immanent readings,’ González demonstrates how such negative affects respond to the dilemma of the misfit’s ‘double exile’—a sense of nonconformity and unbelonging with dominant and minoritarian cultures alike.”
—Kadji Amin,author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
“This wide-ranging book celebrating some of modernism’s most perplexing and pleasurable misfits stages an original conversation between the new modernist studies, queer-of-color critique, theories of intersectionality, and narratology. It pushes the growing field of queer modernist studies in new and exciting directions.”
—Benjamin Bateman,author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival
Table of ContentsPreface: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Modernist Misfit; Antisocial and Intersectional
1. Methodology: Immanent Reading
2. Narrating the Psychology of a “Despised Mulatto” in Larsen’s Quicksand
3. Affective Realism: Feeling like a “Total Misfit” in Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
4. Narrating the Mood of the Underdog in Rhys’s Quartet
5. Isherwood’s Impersonality: “Nonconformist” Queer Relationality in A Single Man
Coda: Two Forms of Feeling like a Misfit
Notes
Bibliography
Index
