{"product_id":"modernism-at-the-beach-queer-ecologies-and-the-coastal-commons-9780231197090","title":"Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eInterweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, \u003ci\u003eModernism at the Beach\u003c\/i\u003e offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah Freed-Thall is an associate professor of French literature, thought, and culture at New York University. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eSpoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism \u003c\/i\u003e(2015).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50453765816594,"sku":"9780231197090","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_74e4d955-6a57-4bea-883e-8a8fac0103b5.jpg?v=1729856294","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/modernism-at-the-beach-queer-ecologies-and-the-coastal-commons-9780231197090","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}