On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism)

The writer Stephen Crane (1871 1900) and the painter George Bellows (1882 1925) each wrestled with issues specific to their own fields. But both also have much in common: their works contain residual traces of earlier idioms, register the growing influence of mass culture, and pre-empt the formal strategies and experiments pursued by later modernists.

John Fagg tells their stories in alternating chapters that highlight the common vocabularies of art and literature: ellipses, frames, and aphorisms in Crane s writing, and Bellows s use of anecdote, schema, and clich . Chapter Two, for example, locates the narrative form of the anecdote in Bellows s depictions of New York scenes, highlighting the ways painting isolates and relays small stories. Re-crossing the disciplinary divide, Chapter Three uses the visual metaphor of narrative framing to probe Crane s New York sketches. By identifying analogous formal and thematic concerns in painting and literature, Fagg offers a broad conception of cultural and aesthetic change that transcends the specifics of either medium. Crane s and Bellows s comparable traits, and their complex relationship to modernism, are cast in terms of a wider cultural response to the urban environment, the mass media, and other modern developments circa 1900.