Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Introduction: New Transatlanticisms

Introduction: New Transatlanticisms David Barnes `In the transatlantic narrative,' wrote Malcolm Bradbury in 1995, `Europe [. . . ] became past to America's present, civilised to America's primitive and pristine, poetic to America's practicality, decadent to America's promise, experienced, or even corrupt, to America's innocence'.1 Is this `transatlantic narrative' still worthy of continued study, and can Bradbury's formulation do justice to the range of `transatlanticisms' that emerged in the period of modernism? As this special issue explores, such sets of transatlantic oppositions were often tested or deconstructed by literary and artistic forms. Transatlantic exchanges were multiple in this period; they were imaginative, mythological, material, and political. Avant-garde or experimental art forms often self-consciously played on sets of preconceived ideas of American `innocence' or European decadence. For instance ­ to take a late example ­ Vladimir Nabokov was well aware that his novel Lolita (1955­9) would be read as a fiction of transatlantic encounter (`Old Europe debauching young America'). In his 1956 afterword to the novel, `On a Book Entitled Lolita', he wrote: I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modernist Cultures Edinburgh University Press

Introduction: New Transatlanticisms

Barnes, David
Modernist Cultures , Volume 11 (1): 1 – Mar 1, 2016
Download PDF
7 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/edinburgh-university-press/introduction-new-transatlanticisms-rskMMmeDdH
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press 2016
Subject
Articles; Film, Media and Cultural Studies
ISSN
2041-1022
eISSN
1753-8629
DOI
10.3366/mod.2016.0122
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

David Barnes `In the transatlantic narrative,' wrote Malcolm Bradbury in 1995, `Europe [. . . ] became past to America's present, civilised to America's primitive and pristine, poetic to America's practicality, decadent to America's promise, experienced, or even corrupt, to America's innocence'.1 Is this `transatlantic narrative' still worthy of continued study, and can Bradbury's formulation do justice to the range of `transatlanticisms' that emerged in the period of modernism? As this special issue explores, such sets of transatlantic oppositions were often tested or deconstructed by literary and artistic forms. Transatlantic exchanges were multiple in this period; they were imaginative, mythological, material, and political. Avant-garde or experimental art forms often self-consciously played on sets of preconceived ideas of American `innocence' or European decadence. For instance ­ to take a late example ­ Vladimir Nabokov was well aware that his novel Lolita (1955­9) would be read as a fiction of transatlantic encounter (`Old Europe debauching young America'). In his 1956 afterword to the novel, `On a Book Entitled Lolita', he wrote: I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other

Journal

Modernist Cultures – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2016

There are no references for this article.