American Expatriate Fictions and the Ethics of Sexual Difference

Abstract

At the same time that Breton, Joyce and Faulkner were redefining the symbolic centres of modernism in the interwar period, another diverse group of writers and artists was exploring metropolitan cultural centres as a means for exploring the aesthetics and ethics of cultural and sexual difference. As the next chapter discusses, many European writers, including Franz Kafka and Federico García Lorca, were attracted to mythologising America (and especially New York) as a site of creative possibility. Conversely, another major transatlantic trend was for American writers to embark on the ‘dangerous pilgrimage’ (as Malcolm Bradbury calls it) of leaving their homeland, either permanently in the case of Gertrude Stein or temporarily for Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, as a rejection of what they deemed to be the worst excesses of American Progressivism.1 Unlike many Europeans burdened by the geographical proximity of war, for these American writers and others, such as Ezra Pound, Anaïs Nin and Djuna Barnes and the African-American poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, Europe, and more specifically Paris, became the primary imaginative site of cultural transformation in the early twentieth century.KeywordsGender IdentityEuropean CulturePrimitive IdentityAmerican WriterGender DichotomyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.