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9780231197083

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Field-changing books are ones that offer a new mode of thinking, way of seeing, or practice of reading-a clearly original or powerfully reimagined method. Modernism at the Beach does just that, shifting the ground of our critical assumptions and perspectives by encouraging us to encounter the modernist beach much like William Blake might: To see a world in a grain of sand. -- Diana Fuss, author of <i>Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy</i> Hannah Freed-Thall has written an exquisite book about the modernist beach, a liminal and littoral space where queer ecology guides literary history. An itinerary featuring Virginia Woolf, Rachel Carson, Claude McKay, and Samuel Beckett recreates on a structural level the offbeat intimacies and wayward encounters that each of Freed-Thall's close readings so vividly illuminates. You'll feel the ocean breeze, but you won't think of beach-reading the same way again. -- Aarthi Vadde, author of <i>Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2014</i> By spotlighting a common yet neglected setting of twentieth century literature, this revelatory book lights up modernism anew. The seashore, Freed-Thall shows us, is at once a cultural fantasy of commodified leisure, an emblem of ecological violence, and an experimental site of nonnormative modes of being. To the country and the city we must now add the beach -- Dora Zhang, author of <i>Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel</i>

Field-changing books are ones that offer a new mode of thinking, way of seeing, or practice of reading-a clearly original or powerfully reimagined method. Modernism at the Beach does just that, shifting the ground of our critical assumptions and perspectives by encouraging us to encounter the modernist beach much like William Blake might: To see a world in a grain of sand. -- Diana Fuss, author of <i>Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy</i>

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Hannah Freed-Thall is an associate professor of French literature, thought, and culture at New York University. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (2015).

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