Ethnic modernisms

Description:

"This book explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Delia Caparoso Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural "ethnic identity" often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism, which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: African Americans in literature,  American literature,  Criticism and interpretation,  Emigration and immigration in literature,  Ethnic groups in literature,  Expatriation in literature,  History,  History and criticism,  Immigrants in literature,  Jews in literature,  Modernism (Literature),  Women and literature,  Women authors,  American literature, women authors,  American literature, history and criticism, 20th century

People: Anzia Yezierska (1880?-1970),  Jean Rhys,  Zora Neale Hurston

Places: United States

Times: 20th century