Local Authors Past and Present
Work in progress here -- the field is richer than first envisioned. We hope to incorporate past authors (Marianne Moore, Jean Craighead George, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and so on), present authors/illustrators (Amy Bates, Megan Lloyd-Thompson, Adrienne Su, Kim van Alkemade, Sherry Knowlton, and so on), and books from authors who knew the Valley well and wrote about events here (Lois Lenski, Lois Lowry, Conrad Richter, and so on). We will organize them with category headers for better searching and annotate them with the particulars as we work on this. Keep checking!
Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II
Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment.
Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.
Claire Seiler is associate professor of English at Dickinson College.