Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on a vast archive, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence.
Trade ReviewA brave, challenging, and incredibly stimulating account of where modernist studies might go next. This book should be read and debated widely. In many ways it turns the 'new' of modernism into the 'now.' A book that emphatically, and in the very best possible way, provokes. -- Andrew Thacker, Nottingham Trent University, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms In this bold and brilliant book, Susan Stanford Friedman calls for a radical rethinking of the spatial and historical parameters of modernism. Learned and expansive, generous and generative, formally inventive and extraordinarily exhilarating to read, Planetary Modernisms will set intellectual agendas for years to come. -- Rita Felski, University of Virginia, editor of New Literary History This is one of the most exciting and consequential books of modernist scholarship in recent decades. Susan Stanford Friedman boldly crosses the boundaries between world-historical and literary scholarship, between criticism on twentieth-century and pre-1500 literature, between feminist and global scholarship, and between postcolonial and modernist studies. Passionate, provocative, and energetically argued, Planetary Modernisms will generate animated debate and fresh scholarship. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics This book is bound to spark intellectual discussion for years to come. World Literature Today [Planetary Modernisms] brings together more than a decade of influential polemics and provocations... Their collective arrival in book form provides a valuable occasion to revisit, reflect, and reassess. -- Christopher Bush Modernism/modernity A thought experiment that invigorates the field of modernist studies by altering its scales of time and place. -- Laura Winkiel Contemporary Women's Writing [An] important new book. -- Rebecca L. Walkowitz Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Friedman has added immeasurably to our stock of images by which modernity can be recognized and to the series of locations where it might be found. -- Bruce Robbins Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Planetary Modernisms makes a signal contribution to the multi-disciplinary study of modernism and offers an incisive engagement with the planetary turn in the humanities and human sciences. Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Part I. Rethinking Modernist Studies 1. Definitional Excursions 2. Planetarity Part II. Rethinking Modernity, Scaling Space and Time 3. Stories of Modernity: Planetary Scale in the Longue Duree 4. Figures of Modernity: Relational Keywords Part III. Rethinking Modernism, Reading Modernisms 5. Modernity's Modernisms: Aesthetic Scale and Pre-1500 Modernisms 6. Circulating Modernisms: Collages of Empire in Fictions of the Long Twentieth Century 7. Diasporic Modernisms: Journeys "Home" in Long Poems of Aime Cesaire and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conclusion. A Debate with Myself Notes Bibliography Index
