LeMenager, StephanieCraven, Bob2022-10-042022-10-042022-10-04https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27634Why has Appalachia been written out of the story of modernism? Current scholarship on American modernism’s geography proposes a bipartite model: proximal modernism in the North, a movement based in New York and Chicago concerning life in an urban zone, and distal modernism in the South, as a dispersed movement concerning life in an agrarian zone. Yet participating in another regional stream of modernism are Appalachians, a third group, whose homeland was defined neither by urbanism nor agrarianism, but was developed along a third developmental path: extractivism. This developmental model restructured state governments and laws to enlarge the region’s capacity to produce wood, minerals, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Extractivism is thoroughly examined in works by Appalachians. This dissertation focuses on two such works, arguing that they reveal another, as yet overlooked, stream of modernism. Written on frontlines of industrial resource extraction, Gauley Mountain (1939) by West Virginian poet Louise McNeill and Folk Songs of the Hills (1947) by Kentucky musician Merle Travis make modernist interventions in form and content yet have never been classed as modernist, mostly going unnoticed by literary scholars. To better understand why this the case, I compare each of these two critically neglected figures with a historical contemporary who, at one point or another, did become established as a canonical modernist: Travis, with the undisputed “master of modernism” Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), a New Orleans musician sixteen years older than Travis but facing a similar turning point in style with his Town Hall Concert (1947); McNeill, with New York City poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), writer of The Book of the Dead (1938), who has been venerated in recent decades as a significant twentieth-century American writer. Close readings of these works, and their critical fates, reveal the geographic and regional indexing of cultural value in modernist studies. Specifically, uneven economic development positioned Appalachia within the cultural spheres of thirties poetry and forties music in a certain way, as a source not only of natural resources, but of cultural resources as well. Appalachian Moderns therefore works to widen our appreciation of American modernism’s geographic and historical dynamics.en-USAll Rights Reserved.canonenergymodernismmusicpoetryresource extractionElectronic Thesis or Dissertation