Modernism at the Beach : Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons Paperback / softback

by Hannah Freed-Thall

Part of the Modernist Latitudes series

Paperback / softback

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Description

At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light.

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art.

An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performanceâ€”a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection.

With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practicesâ€”including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathingâ€”as radical experiments in perception and sociability.

Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.