Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford

The history of literary modernism reflects the twentieth century's diasporas and displacements, the construction and reconstruction of national cultures and alliances. This essay examines the retrospective construction of the idea of "modernism" in the late 1950s and 1960s, in tandem...

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Main Author: Stan Smith
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Universidad de Zaragoza 1999-12-01
Series:Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies
Online Access:https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/view/11233
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author Stan Smith
author_facet Stan Smith
author_sort Stan Smith
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description The history of literary modernism reflects the twentieth century's diasporas and displacements, the construction and reconstruction of national cultures and alliances. This essay examines the retrospective construction of the idea of "modernism" in the late 1950s and 1960s, in tandem with the Americanisation of English culture and the academic institutionalisation of the modernist impulse. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), first introduced the term to British culture, under the influence of the Nashville journal The Fugitive, edited by Ransom, Davidson and Tate between 1922 and 1925. The concept for a while took root in the Oxford coteries around W. H. Auden in the later 1920s, but thereafter went underground until the late 1930s, when it was again invoked to characterise the Auden generation and the configuration it made with that of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats. Auden's departure for the United States in 1939 heralds the end of an essentially mid-Atlantic Anglophone "modernism". Not until the 1960s, however, with the simultaneous privileging of the concept of "postmodernism", does the name become generally applied, in retrospect, to a movement already in process of being superseded. Both Graves and Auden by this time have become exemplary instances of the client relationship of British and Irish modernism to a specifically American discourse.
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spelling doaj-art-1c62b1fadb4640bdb5ae0beb87da447c2025-08-20T02:36:28ZengUniversidad de ZaragozaMiscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies1137-63682386-48341999-12-012010.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199911233Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to OxfordStan Smith0Nottingham Trent University The history of literary modernism reflects the twentieth century's diasporas and displacements, the construction and reconstruction of national cultures and alliances. This essay examines the retrospective construction of the idea of "modernism" in the late 1950s and 1960s, in tandem with the Americanisation of English culture and the academic institutionalisation of the modernist impulse. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), first introduced the term to British culture, under the influence of the Nashville journal The Fugitive, edited by Ransom, Davidson and Tate between 1922 and 1925. The concept for a while took root in the Oxford coteries around W. H. Auden in the later 1920s, but thereafter went underground until the late 1930s, when it was again invoked to characterise the Auden generation and the configuration it made with that of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats. Auden's departure for the United States in 1939 heralds the end of an essentially mid-Atlantic Anglophone "modernism". Not until the 1960s, however, with the simultaneous privileging of the concept of "postmodernism", does the name become generally applied, in retrospect, to a movement already in process of being superseded. Both Graves and Auden by this time have become exemplary instances of the client relationship of British and Irish modernism to a specifically American discourse. https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/view/11233
spellingShingle Stan Smith
Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies
title Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
title_full Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
title_fullStr Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
title_full_unstemmed Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
title_short Lineages of "Modernism", or, how they Brought the Good News from Nashville to Oxford
title_sort lineages of modernism or how they brought the good news from nashville to oxford
url https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/view/11233
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