Appalachian Modernism

Appalachian Modernism argues that instead of being stuck in time as it is so often characterized, Appalachia experienced the same forces of modernization as the rest of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, during the period of roughly 1900-1945, Appalachia produced novels, poems, buildings, and bureaucracies that stand as significant works of American modernism and reflect the changing Appalachian culture and landscape that created them. Some of these were written or crafted by people outside Appalachia about Appalachia, some by artists who remained in the mountains. These works, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; Martha Graham and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring; Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; James Still’s River of Earth; James Agee’s A Death in the Family; and the planning and construction projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority, have been analyzed as works of modernism or of Appalachia, but rarely have they been presented as examples of Appalachia’s being a location of modernism. This dissertation recognizes Appalachia as a location of modernism; expands the canon of Appalachian Literature to include examples of modernism and experimental works inspired by modernism; and broadens the Appalachian Studies idea of Appalachia to include a wider range of art and experience. Modernism offers Appalachian Studies a conceptual framework to develop the Appalachian identity beyond victim or survivor of economic and environmental aggression. Modernism complicates Appalachian Studies’ binaries such as insider/outsider, Appalachian/American, authentic/stereotypical, and perpetrator/victim. Appalachia offers a modernism that both relies upon and reshapes the idea of and the reality of nature; defines and deconstructs the idea of home; and struggles to preserve an old way of life while embracing change.