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John Fagg teaches at the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. He has published in Journal of American Studies, American Literary Realism, American Art and European Journal of American Culture. John’s research explores American art and literature around 1900 and asks “how did the nineteenth century become the twentieth century?” His current research project is titled Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1900-1940.

Neoteric Art: What gave you the idea to combine Stephen Crane and George Bellows for your new book titled “On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism”?

John Fagg: Although they never met, you can imagine Crane and Bellows getting on pretty well. They were both drawn to New York City, both loved baseball, and both had big appetites for new experiences that could feed into their work. But that isn’t why I brought them together. My interest was initially sparked by the way that they occupy similar positions in the respective histories of American literature and art. They tend to perform a similar role in overviews of these disciplines, marking the point at which realism becomes less stable, and gives way to forms of modernism. I wanted to explore that sense of them as transitional figures in more detail, to think about what it means to have a one foot in the nineteenth century and one foot in the twentieth. I see Crane’s writing and Bellows’s painting as coming from a moment when old ways of thinking and representing ceased to fit with the pace, scale and complexity of modern life, but new methods had not yet coalesced. Across their careers, and, most interestingly, often within the space of a single text or image, Crane and Bellows created work that sought to disentangle itself from nineteenth-century traditions while also looking forward to twentieth-century innovations. The aim is certainly not to push these figures into the modernist canon, but I do think that looking at them in this context offers new ways of thinking about their art and, at the same time, illuminates our understanding of cultural change and the emergence of modernism in America.

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