The Cambridge History of American Modernism

Book excerpt: "The Cambridge History of American Modernism collates 37 essays on one of the most innovative periods of American literary history, making it the most extensive volumes on U.S. modernism to date. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized U.S. modernism that ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein U.S. modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations"--