TY - BOOK ID - 138054138 TI - Modernism at the beach : queer ecologies and the coastal commons PY - 2023 SN - 9780231197083 023119708X 9780231197090 0231197098 PB - New York Columbia University Press DB - UniCat KW - Beaches in literature KW - Seashore in literature KW - Literature, Modern KW - Modernism (Literature) KW - Queer theory KW - Ecocriticism KW - History and criticism UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:138054138 AB - "The beach is modernity's dreamscape. Emerging as a privileged site of leisure in the era of industrial capitalism, the seashore is often imagined as a paradisaical zone of exception-a space of sensory intensity, relaxation, and democratic possibility. As a stage for queer and non-hegemonic forms of desire, perception, and sociability, and as an ecological site of exceptional dynamism, the beach is a crucial but neglected setting for twentieth-century literature and art. In The Beach Effect, Hannah Freed-Thall reads various works with a coastally attuned eye drawing on both formal and eco-critical approaches. She argues that the beach is crucial to modernism and twentieth-century literature as a reflection of impermanence that is inhospitable to plot and narrative and instead functions as a stage for new encounters between language and sensation in which style comes into view. In separate chapters, Freed-Thall considers how the seashore becomes a laboratory for queer desire and of modernist aesthetic form in Proust's In Search of Lost Time; a refuge for domesticity in the work of Woolf and others; a space for misfit intimacies in Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea; and a place of sexual encounter in Claude McKay's Banjo and the works of 70s NYC artists. The concluding chapter looks at contemporary site-specific art works that examines the beach as a site of environmental devastation"-- ER -