Modernism at the Beach - (Modernist Latitudes) by Hannah Freed-Thall (Paperback)

About the Book

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book reveals the beach as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Hannah Freed-Thall offers new ways of understanding modernism.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2024 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association

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 performance--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 practices--including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing--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.

Review Quotes

Freed-Thall is remarkably attentive to histories of queer sexuality both within these texts and as part of the cultural milieu in which they are produced, a testament to both her exhaustive archival work and dazzling talent at close reading.-- "Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory"

Her brilliant and rich critical readings are reparative.-- "Woolf Studies Annual"

Modernism at the Beach creates important inroads between modernist studies and environmental humanities. It offers a rich archive that documents beaches' many, often contradictory faces and histories. Perhaps its greatest strength lies in the difficult, sometimes unresolved questions it raises about queer ecologies and environmental commons; such questions are a gift to scholars seeking new ground in these blossoming fields.--Austin Lillywhite "ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"

Modernism at the Beach is an outstanding book. Freed-Thall covers expansive ground - and coast - yet chooses her critical texts carefully and concisely, weaving a range of literature, art, culture, and critical theory together effortlessly. Timely and original, creative and profound, Modernism at the Beach is essential reading for modernists and ecocritics alike.--Annie Williams "The British Society for Literature and Science"

Welding queer theory to ecological philosophy, and drawing on a unique archive of modernist art and literature . . . Freed-Thall argues convincingly for a timely reconceptualization of the modernist beach as a multitudinous 'stage' for reimagining non-hierarchical social structures, for inventing new modes of sexuality and gender identity, and for attuning oneself to more-than-human and multi-scalar environmental forces.--James Reath "Modernist Cultures"

Modernism at the Beach offers a marvelous, tenacious, imaginative, revelatory discussion of the place of the beach in modern culture. In its energetic, all-encompassing writing, its wide erudition, its advocacy and sensitivity, the book is gorgeous to read. It changes how the shoreline is felt and known.--Emma Wilson, author of Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image

By spotlighting a common yet neglected setting of twentieth-century literature, this revelatory book lights up modernism anew. The seashore, Freed-Thall shows us, is at once a cultural fantasy of commodified leisure, an emblem of ecological violence, and an experimental site of nonnormative modes of being. To the country and the city we must now add the beach.--Dora Zhang, author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel

Field-changing books are ones that offer a new mode of thinking, way of seeing, or practice of reading--a clearly original or powerfully reimagined method. Modernism at the Beach does just that, shifting the ground of our critical assumptions and perspectives by encouraging us to encounter the modernist beach much like William Blake might: "To see a world in a grain of sand."--Diana Fuss, author of Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy

Hannah Freed-Thall has written an exquisite book about the modernist beach, a liminal space where queer ecology guides literary history. An itinerary featuring Virginia Woolf, Rachel Carson, Claude McKay, and Samuel Beckett recreates on a structural level the "offbeat intimacies" and wayward encounters that each of Freed-Thall's close readings so vividly illuminates. You'll feel the ocean breeze, but you won't think of beach-reading the same way again.--Aarthi Vadde, author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2014

Neither home nor away, land nor water, city nor countryside, war-torn nor peaceful, private nor public, the beach is a territory where a different kind of sunlight falls on social, corporeal, and emotional realities. Freed-Thall shows us how and why modernists were drawn to the in-between realm of the beach, a place where they could, perhaps more than anywhere else, fully interrogate and reimagine the world in all its aspects.--Barry McCrea, author of Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe

These works provide a timely reminder that we all remain at the mercy of the riptide currents rising inexorably around us.--Ian Ellison "Times Literary Supplement"

This exceptionally lucid, elegantly written book elaborates an innovative argument about the role of the beach in modernist literary and artistic works. Drawing on and interrelating queer studies, ecocriticism, aesthetic theory, and modernist criticism, Freed-Thall's luminous and incisive readings move gracefully across scales and between aesthetic objects to produce a kaleidoscopic, shifting portrait of shores and beaches.--Margaret Ronda, author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

This gorgeously written book, interspersed with arresting photographs, has much to offer those interested in modernism, oceanic studies, queer studies, and ecocriticism.--Sari Edelstein "H-Environment, H-Net Reviews"

About the Author

Hannah Freed-Thall is an associate professor of French literature, thought, and culture at New York University. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (2015).