The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry [Hardcover]

Suzanne Churchill's well-researched and superbly crafted study is the first book-length treatment of Others, an important and neglected little magazine that served as a laboratory for modernist poetic experimentation. In discussions of influential poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, whose careers Others helped launch, Churchill counters the notion of Modernism as aesthetically self-isolating and socially disengaged. Rather, she traces a correspondence between formal innovation and social change in American modernist poetry and argues that this dimension of modernist formalism is lost when poems are studied in isolation. Others provides a framework for reassessing the scope and significance of modernist formalism. The little magazine not only anchors modernist poetry in a social context but also leads to new insight into major modernist texts. Churchill's commitment to her subject's broad cultural contexts makes her book important for students and teachers of Modernism as well as for those working in the fields of American poetry and poetics, gender studies, queer theory, periodical studies, and cultural studies.Contents: Housing Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Free Verse Movement; Making Space for Others; Interior Designs in Others; William Carlos Williams: The Poetics of Ending; Marianne Moore: The Poetics of 'Conversity'; Mina Loy: The Poetics of Dislodging; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.Suzanne W. Churchill is Associate Professor of English at Davidson College, USA. She is co-editing a collection of essays on Modernism and little magazines, portions of which were published in a special issue of American Periodicals.