The Little Art Colony and US Modernism

Abstract

Explores the little art communities and their aesthetic products in the early twentieth century Historicizes and theorizes the role and function of the little art community as a geo-social formation Comparative, place-based study of three semiperipheral (non-metropolitan) sites New readings of major authors Jeffers, O’Neill, and Lawrence Interdisciplinary methodology based in primary source analysis Challenges a center-periphery model of modernist activity and literary-aesthetic production and instead emphasizes a network-based, collaborative model This book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Alongside a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity – the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown and Taos – the book offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence. Geneva M. Gano tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages, revealing a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects and ideas between the country and the city and producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.