This chapter moves through three clear stages. First, the initial sections highlight some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory (including Badiou, Deleuze, and Marcuse); and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of (what the chapter terms) philosophical modernism. Second, the chapter tarries with a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the “apocalyptic view of the world,” and it brings these remarks into dialogue with the work of a number of other literary and philosophical figures, including Gertrude Stein, Günther Anders, and Theodor Adorno. Third, and finally, although Wittgenstein’s remarks on apocalypse appear in his private, postwar notebooks, they nevertheless provide us with a crucial link to his later philosophy, specifically Philosophical Investigations and this is what I turn to in the last sections of the chapter. In the Investigations, it is not simply the language of the book that we might describe as apocalyptic, but also, and more importantly, the fundamental conception of philosophy that we find therein. This returns us to the view of philosophical modernism previously outlined.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

In the years following Richard Wright’s death in 1960, fellow author Margaret Walker created a somewhat vengeful portrait of the author, one that characterized his literary aspirations as tied to his aspersion for African American women authors. This essay shows how Wright worked alongside African American women writers and could be quite helpful to them – even though he never acknowledged a debt to black women writers or white women writers (like Stowe), with the exception of the modernist Stein. The “antagonistic cooperation” found in his relationships with Hurston, Walker, Brooks, and other women authors ultimately demonstrates African American literature’s gradual enrichment through variety if not fellowship.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).

During the First World War some of the most prominent Americans who aided France through their writing and charity work were expatriate women, many finding creative freedom and economic opportunities there that they lacked in the United States. Mildred Aldrich, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Atherton, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher advocated on behalf of France, believing that fuller American support for France might help relieve the human suffering they saw before them and, more idealistically, preserve the civilization they found represented in France. These women wrote journalism, propaganda, academic studies, and sentimental prose, none of which are easily disentangled from each other as all are meant to convince, educate, or persuade readers to a particular point of view. They take as their subjects the wide variety of human issues that circulated around war, its impact on civilian life, the effects of invasion and occupation, injury and loss of life, and larger questions about inherited values and human responsibility in the face of suffering.

In “Correspondence and the Everyday Hemingway,” Verna Kale and Sandra Spanier examine what letters as opposed to literary biography reveal about a writer. As two guiding forces behind the Letters Project – the collaborative effort producing a multivolume scholarly edition of Hemingway’s correspondence, which published its first volume in 2011 and is not scheduled to conclude until 2043 – Kale and Spanier are in a unique position to assess how the correspondence’s availability has expanded our notions of quotidian Hemingway. As they note, there has always been an interest in Hemingway’s letters: as early as 1930, correspondents attempted to sell their letters from him to collectors to cash in on his fame. But his private correspondence wasn’t officially available until 1981 with Carlos Baker’s Selected Letters, a book that immediately impacted Hemingway scholarship. That volume, however, collects less than 10 percent of the 6,000 letters catalogued by the Hemingway Project and gives disproportional attention to 1922–1926 and 1952, somewhat distorting impressions of his life and career; nearly 85 percent of the material the Project will gather has never been published before.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.