Modernism at the beach queer ecologies and the coastal commons Freed-Thall, Hannah creator author. text bibliography Criticism, interpretation, etc. Literary criticism. Literary criticism. nyu 2023 2023 monographic eng print ix, 275 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. "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."-- Introduction : the beach effect -- Constructing the beach -- Off-season -- Littoral choreographies -- Coastal map -- Proust's leap -- "Gambling fever" -- Beach bodies -- "Nous avons regardé" -- Intertidal Woolf -- Waste land -- Imagined geographies -- Domestic arrangements -- Tidal visions -- "Mrs. Ramsay on the beach" -- Carson's quiet bower -- Thinking small -- Postal meter -- "Wee beasts" -- McKay's dream port -- Port effects -- Vagabond picturesque -- Pier effects -- Tidewrack, Beckett to Sunde -- Drift -- Fatigue -- "Female solo" -- Waiting room. Hannah Freed-Thall. Includes bibliographical references and index. Beaches in literature Seashore in literature Literature, Modern 20th century History and criticism Modernism (Literature) Queer theory Ecocriticism Beaches in literature Ecocriticism Literature, Modern Modernism (Literature) Queer theory Seashore in literature 1900-1999 fast PN56.B34 F74 2023 809/.9336 Modernism at the beach Freed-Thall, Hannah. New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] (DLC) 2022023853 Modernist latitudes 9780231197083 023119708X 9780231197090 0231197098 9780231551977 2022023852 DLC 220718 20230503142538.4 in00004719748 eng