Library Catalog

Midcentury Suspension : Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II /

Seiler, Claire

Midcentury Suspension : Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II / Claire Seiler. - 1 online resource - Modernist Latitudes .

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Midcentury Problem -- Chapter One. The Timely Suspensions of Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring -- Chapter Two. W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, and the Midcentury Anxiety Consensus -- Chapter Three. Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett Waiting in the Middle -- Chapter Four. The Sonic Suspensions of Frank O’Hara -- Afterword -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index

restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


In English.

9780231194686 9780231550949

10.7312/seil19468 doi


American literature--History and criticism.--20th century
English literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Literature and society--History--Great Britain--20th century.
Literature and society--History--United States--20th century.
Nineteen fifties.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century .

810.9/005