Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Modernist Latitudes)

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, Hannah Freed-Thall reveals the beach as a surprisingly generative setting for literature and art. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, __Modernism at the Beach__ offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature. "The beach is modernity's dreamscape. Emerging as a privileged site of leisure in the era of industrial capitalism, the seashore is often imagined as a paradisaical zone of exception-a space of sensory intensity, relaxation, and democratic possibility. As a stage for queer and non-hegemonic forms of desire, perception, and sociability, and as an ecological site of exceptional dynamism, the beach is a crucial but neglected setting for twentieth-century literature and art. In The Beach Effect, Hannah Freed-Thall reads various works with a coastally attuned eye drawing on both formal and eco-critical approaches. She argues that the beach is crucial to modernism and twentieth-century literature as a reflection of impermanence that is inhospitable to plot and narrative and instead functions as a stage for new encounters between language and sensation in which style comes into view. In separate chapters, Freed-Thall considers how the seashore becomes a laboratory for queer desire and of modernist aesthetic form in Proust's In Search of Lost Time; a refuge for domesticity in the work of Woolf and others; a space for misfit intimacies in Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea; and a place of sexual encounter in Claude McKay's Banjo and the works of 70s NYC artists. The concluding chapter looks at contemporary site-specific art works that examines the beach as a site of environmental devastation"-- Provided by publisher 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.