TY - BOOK AU - Seiler,Claire TI - Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II T2 - Modernist Latitudes SN - 9780231194686 U1 - 810.9/005 23 PY - 2020///] CY - New York, NY PB - Columbia University Press KW - American literature KW - 20th century KW - History and criticism KW - English literature KW - Literature and society KW - Great Britain KW - History KW - United States KW - Nineteen fifties KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century KW - bisacsh N1 - 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 N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.7312/seil19468 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780231550949 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231550949/original ER -