Product Overview
From Follett
Includes bibliographical references and index.;Introduction: Geographical encounters, modernist geopoetics -- Academic and popular geography: global connections, environmentalist style -- The "terraqueous" globe: Walt Whitman and the cosmological geography of Humboldt and Somerville -- African diasporic re-placing: race and environment in the poetry of Helene Johnson and Langston Hughes -- (Trans) nation, geography, and genius: Gertrude Stein's geographical history of America -- H.D.'s trilogy as transnational palimpsest -- Conclusion.;Print version record. Rebecca Walsh connects a range of American modernist poets to the work of well known American geographers such as Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Churchill Semple, as well as to the National Geographic magazine. This book considers the role of academic and popular forms of geography in shaping the experimental poetic modernism of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D.
From the Publisher
The Geopoetics of Modernism is the first book to illuminate the links between American modernism and the geographic discourse of the time. Rebecca Walsh explores Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and H.D.s engagements with contemporary geographic theories and sourcesincluding the cosmological geography of Alexander von Humboldt and Mary Somerville, the environmental determinism of Ellen Churchill Semple, and mainstream textbooks and periodicalswhich informed the formal and political dimensions of their work. Walsh argues that the dominant geographic paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave authority to experimental writers who were breaking with other forms of authority, enabling them to create transnational forms of belonging on the exhilarating landscape of nations, continents, and the globe. By examining modernism alongside environmental determinist geography, she maps a poetic terrain where binaries such as west versus non-west or imperial center versus colonial periphery are destabilized. The Geopoetics of Modernism reveals the geographic terms through which American modernist poetry interrogated prevailing ideas of orientalism, primitivism, and American exceptionalism.