Kin Aesthetics: Boxing and the Public Arenas of Modernism

In July of 1892, the city of New Orleans legalized a form of prizefighting using gloves, known commonly as boxing. The act would begin the movement of the sport's epicenter from England to America, and set into motion the commercialization which aided boxing's dramatic rise in popularity and social acceptance in America and abroad. In turn, I argue, boxing would inform the aesthetics of modernist writers in Europe searching for ways to mediate violence. Grounded in the shared spaces, cultures, and practices of literary modernism and boxing, Kin Aesthetics pivots recent investigations into modernism and mass culture toward questions of social crisis, and argues for a new, ultimately globalized, understanding of modernism's adversarial culture.;Literary modernism's relationship to commercialized cultures such as boxing has long been understood as its most intimate and fraught reckoning with the status of art in modernity. Challenging a longstanding perception of modernism's formal difficulty as hostile toward commercialized culture, "Kin Aesthetics" argues that modernist writers aestheticized boxing's violence and conflict in order to respond to the often brutal exigencies of their shared modernity: the ravages of the First World War and empire, as well as gender and racial inequities. Across four chapters covering authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, and others, I aim to show how modernism's trials in pugilistic writing were less the collapse of a high/low divide or cultural transgression and more a set of novel claims about the ways that modernist writing could signify in the public sphere.;The impact of American boxing culture on Eurocentric modernism not only challenges still-prevalent assumptions about modernism's elitism, but raises important questions about how we conventionally talk about American culture's global reach in the twentieth century. The modernism of Joyce, Pound, Loy, and others, represents a moment when embracing resistance, not resisting its embrace, was at the core of American mass culture as a global phenomenon.