The intersection between space and narrative has often aroused critical interest, especially in the cross-fertilization of language and imagination. In Modernist avant-garde culture this activity was particularly intense and turbulent. Not only did science and technology undergo sudden and rapid developments in the early twentieth century, but the powerful geopolitical movements of the time effectively redrew the maps of the Western world. The essays in this collection address the ways in which three generations of British and American artists responded to these ontological changes, as they were both literally and metaphorically ‘thrown’ on the roads.
Drawing upon a new geographical awareness in the work of critics such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Arjun Appadurai, Edward Soja and Doreen Massey, this book invites the reader to explore the disrupted territories of Modernism. It offers readings of places as diverse as William Faulkner’s Mississippi, Virginia Woolf’s Thames, Ford Madox Ford’s Romney Marsh, W.H. Auden’s islands, Christopher Isherwood’s alternative Berlin and Ruben Martinez’s transfrontera. The writers in the volume explore a geography of edges, borders and trails and investigate the aesthetic modes fashioned by nomadic practices.