Literature and Exile: American Writers in Paris

Module code: EN7132

American writers have always had a tense relationship with Europe and in the mid-nineteenth century they began to distance themselves from European culture for failing to address their own national circumstances. However, by the early twentieth century writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin sought to blend elements of American and European writing in their effort to embrace the international spirit of modernism. Paris proved particularly exciting for these writers as a cultural metropolis that represented artistic and sexual freedom in an age of American Prohibition, mass commercialism and political intolerance. Within this cultural context, this MA special subject explores a range of creative work by Americans living in Paris after World War I, focusing on issues of exile, pessimism, experimentation and sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s, before moving to address pressing racial questions after World War II in the work of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. The module is framed by a number of early twenty-first century texts that revision the ‘Americans in Paris experience’ from a contemporary perspective.