Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism

Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, the author defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (‘high’) modernism. In this dialogical study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American modernists (D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather) with the works of Mexican, Native American, and Chicano writers (Mariano Azuela, John Joseph Mathews, and Americo Paredes) who engaged with modernist theories and practices. In the process he uncovers a unique intercultural aesthetic produced in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico aimed at modernizing the ‘native’ literary traditions of the Americas. Addressing issues of migration, cultural identity, and ethnography, Border Modernism is a major contribution to current debates over the origins and development of American literary modernism and a new model for transnational and intercultural reconstructions of American literary history.