Revolutionary Forms: U.S. Literary Modernism and the Mexican Vogue, 1910-1940

FAIN: HB-289058-23

Geneva M. Gano
Texas State University - San Marcos (San Marcos, TX 78666-4684)

Research and writing for a book arguing that the arts of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) influenced Modernist literature in the United States. 

This scholarly monograph argues that the impact of the Mexican Revolution on the development of modernist literature in the United States was primary and definitive. This wide-ranging, transborder study frames U.S. literary modernism within an American, hemispheric context rather than the Eurocentric paradigm that has long dominated the field. A hemispheric approach to modernist studies highlights a distinctive set of formal and thematic elements. These texts emphasize radical (leftist) political ideologies, celebrate indigeneity and the “folk,” employ a mode of “romantic realism,” rely on simple, lyrical poetic expressions, and are oriented toward a wide and diverse general public instead of a coterie of learned sophisticates. This book examines U.S. writers and artists including Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Edward Weston, Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and Langston Hughes alongside Mexican ones including Mariano Azuela, José Clemente Orozco, and Nellie Campobello.