Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

American modernist writers'' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the ''masculine'' with the ''feminine''. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially ''femin...