Hart Crane's Queer Modernist Aesthetic

Through close readings of a wide range of his poems, prose, letters, and manuscripts, this book shows how Hart Crane created an alternative form of literary modernism, queering modernist experience. It goes beyond representations of sexuality in the texts to show how Crane employs queerness as an intellectual strategy in order to engage with and interrogate a number of modernist concerns.
 
Whilst the study engages with debates current within modernist studies, such as geography, spatial form, the material world, and the influence of technology, it also shows how recent concepts within queer theory such as the antisocial thesis and debates over temporality can help us to read Crane's work differently. The book challenges existing versions of Crane as a 'difficult' poet, and suggests the means by which other queer modernists might be re-read in light of this discussion of Crane's work.

Niall Munro is Lecturer in American Literature and Twentieth-Century British Literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Introduction: Relationality
1.American Decadence and the Creation of a Queer Modernist Aesthetic
2.Abstraction and Intersubjectivity in White Buildings
3.Spatiality, Movement, and the Logic of Metaphor
4.Temporality, Futurity, and the Body
5.Empiricism, Mysticism, and a Queer Form of Knowledge
6.Queer Technology, Failure, and a Return to the Hand
Conclusion: Towards a Queer Community
Notes
Bibliography
Index