Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture

by Shapiro, Stephen; Barnard, Philip; Mason, Emma; Knight, Mark

• ISBN13: 9781474238731
• ISBN10: 1474238734
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-02-09
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Bringing together new accounts of the pulp horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the rise of the popular early 20th-century religious movements of American Pentecostalism and Social Gospel, Pentecostal Modernism challenges traditional histories of modernism as a secular avant-garde movement based in capital cities such as London or Paris. Disrupting accounts that separate religion from progressive social movements and mass culture, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard construct a new Modernism belonging to a history of regional cities, new urban areas powered by the hopes and frustrations of recently urbanized populations seeking a better life. In this way, Pentecostal Modernism shows how this process of urbanization generates new cultural practices including the invention of religious traditions and mass-cultural forms.

Author Biography

Stephen Shapiro is Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including How to Read Marx's Capital (2008) and The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (2012).

Philip Barnard is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. He has published 11 books as author, editor or translator and is the Textual Editor for the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Editions.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Modernism's Combined and Uneven Development
2. Speaking in Tongues: American Pentecostalism's Mixed-Race Urbanism
3. Slavery and Writing American History: H.P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction
4. Social Gospel and the Revolt of the Middle Classes
5. Modernism's World-System: Paralanguage/Affect/Capitalism
Bibliography
Index