By the beginning of the twentieth century, short-story writing in the US was well established as a form of efficient literary production along the lines that Edgar Allan Poe had established sixty years earlier. One way of understanding the American modernist short story is as an attempt to reinvent the form by restoring the balance that Poe had once advocated: not to forget technique but to make it work again in the service of art understood as both an expressive and an elite activity. This chapter considers some of the ways in which American short-story writers can usefully be said to have developed, modified, or put into question the modern principle of efficiency.

Latin America’s Black newspapers and magazines were sites for both dissemination and extensive discussion of literature and the arts.Culture was no less important to Black editors and writers than politics or social commentary. The papers published numerous stories, poems, and serializations of novels. They included profiles of important Black artists, writers, and musicians and debated the quality of their work.Their efforts to alert readers to the existence and the achievements of Black cultural creators simultaneously created space for the development of Black cultural theory and arts criticism. This chapter includes several creative works, an extended review of a long-form poem, reporting on the lives and deaths of individual authors, and an account of a female cook whose aspirations to become a writer were never realized.Other articles provide probing reflections on the relationship of Blackness to artistic expression, and on what it meant to be a Black artist.

It’s hard times. The stock market climbs to a precipitous height while farmers sing, "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Cotton prices are down, and they sing about it. Railroad strikes fail, and they sing about it. The Scopes Monkey Trial pits science against superstition, and they sing about it. The musical Show Boat breaks the Broadway color line, but Black blues singers still sing of their own invisibility in a racist culture. Arguments rage over primitivism in Black musical culture. Blind Lemon Jefferson takes on the inhumanity of capital punishment, and many more sing against the unjust execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. There is trouble sung on the Ford production line and in rural holdouts resisting the coming dominance of the automobile. But modernity has arrived with a vengeance – not least in the form of the “Flapper” and the “New Girl,” a subject of worry in the more macho sectors of song. On the Gastonia front line, the striking textile worker and balladeer Ella May Wiggins takes a fatal bullet in the chest, and in Spanish Harlem, Rafael Hernández Marín composes his “Lamento Borincano,” Puerto Rico’s own “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

This chapter provides a fresh, detailed and historicised account of ‘high’ Modernism and its relationship to the Gothic, c.1910–1936. It explores the various ways in which Modernist theories of the aesthetic – the novel, the short story, Imagist poetry – shaped Gothic Modernist representations. Many Modernists overtly despised dark Romanticism – Wyndham Lewis derided the ‘beastly and ridiculous spirit of Keats’ lines’ and Virginia Woolf was quick to dismiss ‘the skull-headed lady’ of the Gothic Romance. Instead, their work privileges an aesthetics of finitude and inference over any use of overtly supernatural machinery. ‘Modern’ accounts of psychology shape these representations of anxiety and entrapment but so, too, do authorial theories of the aesthetic. By reading the work of a range of important Modernist contributors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster and May Sinclair, this chapter suggests that the most enduring examples of Modernist Gothic are found in the mode’s representations of haunting, the unconscious and the dead.

The Anthropophagic movement, of 1928-1929, was the most systematic and concerted effort within Brazilian modernism to address the concept of primitivism. Yet, contrary to much that has been written about it and in contrast with other modernist ventures, it largely skirted issues of blackness and Afro-Brazilian identity. The scholarly literature has tended to reduce the movement to Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, and has therefore failed to comprehend its broader scope. The chapter focuses on Antropofagia’s relationship to race and primitivism and discusses the distinction the anthropophagists made between the savage, as a Freudian trope, and the primitive, as an ethnological one. The differing positions of 1920s modernists towards Afro-Brazilian religions and samba are revealing of subtle ideological distinctions. The intersection of class and race became a central concern for communist observers like French poet Benjamin Péret. For writer Mário de Andrade, on the other hand, the quest for autochthonous cultural forms led to a focus on folklore that romanticized ideals of national and racialist identities. The high modernist paradigm, as it eventually took shape after the late 1930s, tended to ignore the needs of subaltern populations or else appropriate them and erase them in favour of a nationalist project.

The prevailing paradigm of modern art in Brazil still revolves around the Modern Art Week of 1922, in São Paulo, and the self-professed avant-gardes that derived from that event. What came immediately before it is usually relegated to a limbo status, as neither modern nor non-modern. The introduction casts doubt upon the widely accepted category pre-modernism, questioning its validity as a historical construct. Evidence demonstrates that alternate modernisms existed in the Brazilian context prior to 1922. Chief among these is a variant of modernism linked to the rising urban culture of music, dance, theatre, humour, graphics and cinema in Rio de Janeiro. The relative lack of scholarly interest in mass culture has led to a tendency to overstate the impact of erudite expressions in literature, fine art and architecture. Other arenas of cultural production have been systematically overlooked, including ones to which Afro-Brazilian artists made important contributions. This skewed perspective subtly elides how elite practitioners often appropriated subaltern identities to reinforce their own claims to modernity, vis-à-vis their European counterparts. The book proposes to examine the conflicts between primitivism and nationalism, modernism and archaism. Rethinking these tensions in the Brazilian context helps make sense of divergent models of modernism elsewhere.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

This chapter explores the controversial relationship of magical realism to indigeneity from its beginnings in indigenismo in mid-twentieth century Latin America to that of contemporary indigenous writers in Australia and the Americas. It reveals that the relationship of magical realism to both indigeneity and indigenous writing is fraught with cultural politics that reflect the political challenges faced by indigenous communities in relation to settler culture. This is explored in three parts: firstly, through considering the appropriation of indigenous ideas and motifs into early magical realist; secondly, through the propensity of critics in postcolonial studies to identify works by indigenous writers incorporating traditional stories as magical realist; and finally, through the writing of Alexis Wright (Waanyi) and Eden Robinson (Haisla), who create a new direction in magical realism that is embedded in local indigenous cultural systems and simultaneously draws upon the transcultural hybridity within contemporary indigenous life.

All historical applications of formal economic models require justification – not merely within their own closed system of logic, but in a wider historiographical context which includes serious and thoughtful substantivist critiques of the formalist enterprise more generally and especially of applied economic theory. Even if new institutional economics is not the solution, are there other ways Roman economic historians might use economic theories to better understand the economic choices made by the inhabitants of the ancient world as well as the embedding contexts which channeled such choices? History and economics, despite fundamental differences embedded in each discipline, can meaningfully and symbiotically intersect. Economics offers Roman historians valuable and helpful organizing concepts, so long as these concepts are used within an agenda of historical understanding.