20th-century Literature and Modernism

How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others’ autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily, and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word ‘empathy’), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response. Attending closely to the detail of literary texts—to literary depictions of gesture, movement, and rhythm, to literary explorations of the bodily and of transcendence—this book argues that central to modernism was an ideal of sympathy that was morally complex, but that was driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel. Offering new readings of major literary texts, and original research into their historical contexts, this book also sets modernist texts alongside recent discussions of emotion and cognition. It offers a fresh reading of literary modernism, and it suggests how modernism might continue to unsettle our thinking about feeling today.

This book explores what happens when poets identify vernacular language with the spirit of transnational modernity. It asks whether vernacular poetries are doomed to be provincial or implicitly xenophobic. And it explains how modernist poets created new “synthetic vernacular” discourses in order to reimagine the relations among people, their languages, and the communities in which they live. This book begins with introductory chapters on the formal, literary‐historical, and ideological implications of “synthetic vernacular” writing. It then offers five case studies of Scottish, English, Caribbean, African‐American, and Anglo‐American poetries from the high modernist period through the 1990s. It combines discussions of critical theory and political history with extended analysis of poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamau Brathwaite and T. S. Eliot, Melvin B. Tolson and Harryette Mullen, and Mina Loy. In doing so, it produces a new interpretation of Anglophone modernism that disrupts the literary‐critical antinomy between “national” and “transnational” aesthetic and ideological values. Describing how poets make “synthetic vernacular” poems out of a disordered medley of formal and linguistic parts, this book explains how poetic modernism is shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of twentieth‐century history, in which the nation‐state's status as a primary mediator of cultural and political identity comes under unprecedented pressure but does not break.

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

Though literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe literary history owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that form the core of the idea of technological development. No real surprise: putting progress at the center of historicity is one of the things that makes us modern. But if you think like a modern person then it's very hard to ever really make a good case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. This book makes that case. It does so by rethinking from the ground up our concepts of literary history and progress, redescribing the history we know (or think we know) in a new language that requires us to be far more worldly and global in our arguments about literary change. To do, so, the book begins with an argument that literature is a world-creating activity. Connecting the cosmographical imagination to the historical shifts in world-view caused by the Columbian discoveries and Copernican revolutions, the book shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form.

This book reevaluates twentieth-century literature and culture by studying the interrelations between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism. Each modernist formation is explained through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Conrad's canonical profile in literary histories of English modernism is placed side by side with Rhys's contested position in postcolonial accounts of Caribbean writing and Pramoedya's prominent role in the history of Indonesian anti-colonial nationalism. The different models of reading at the heart of each writer's fiction lead to a reassessment of transnational modernism. The book argues that each passage of literature becomes the site of a contest between competing genealogies of modernism and modernity. Re-examining the linguistic and literary coordinates of Anglophone modernist studies, and combining the insights of Caribbean writers and theorists with recent work in Indonesian studies, the book outlines the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology and resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.

Is Irish history at the dawn of the twenty-first century still, as Stephen Dedalus quipped, a nightmare? With the demise of the Celtic Tiger, the collapse of the housing bubble, and the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, Ireland is an island looking for a new story. This book argues that queer culture has a vital role to play in the creation of a reinvigorated national image for the Republic and for Northern Ireland. Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Roger Casement, and James Joyce, the author reveals how these writers deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. Turning to Ireland’s postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill, the book shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization. Irish queer aesthetics operate as both a mode of self-making and a novel form of social labor linked to modern transformations of capitalism. Situating his work in relation to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the author brings together the disparate fields of queer theory and theories of empire to promote Irish culture’s contributions to a more just world order. This book engages an array of sources and media to make an original contribution to Irish and modernist studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of economic and aesthetic value.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, this book traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habit, continuity, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. They developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including “habit,” “institution,” “prediction,” and “bigness,” the book offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein’s characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; or how institutions in James’s novels-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-manage to shape and influence the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism’s legacy.

As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which reached its reading public almost two decades later, A la recherche du temps perdu was being written against a backdrop of momentous historical events in France. This book seeks to establish the nature of Proust’s engagement with many of the social and national issues of the day, from his early public campaigning, pre-1908, first as a Dreyfusard and then as an opponent of the separation of Church and State in 1905, through to the mature writer’s reflection, channelled through his novel, on key ideological issues: the new patterns of leisure and social mobility, the First World War and xenophobic nationalism, and continuing evidence of class-based politics in the immediate post-war period. By reconstructing attitudes to class and nation as articulated not just by Proust but by his contemporaries (Bourget, Barrès, Daniel Halévy, Benda, and others), the book attempts to gauge his volatile responses to these issues. In this regard, A la recherche functions as a capacious warehouse in which antagonistic social attitudes are voiced and tested, often, crucially, in ironic, ambivalent ways by Proust’s Narrator and characters. Analysis of the incremental composition of the novel further helps reveal the multiple styles of response to social antagonism that Proust’s work throws up. What emerges is a complex image of Proust as a free-floating iconoclast and radical commentator, a social conservative and fitful defender of class hierarchy, and a writer who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted social-class compartmentalization.

A la recherche du temps perdu occupies an undisputed place in the unfolding intellectual history of the ‘moi’ in France. There is, however, a general tendency in writing on this novel to celebrate the wonders of the moi sensible uncritically. This effaces all that is morally dubious or frankly experimental about Proust’s account of selfhood. It denies the rigour with which Proust tries to understand exactly why it is so difficult to explain one’s own actions to another. The great party scenes, for example, or the countless digressions, read like manuals on how acts of self-justification take place. Proust, however, is not merely interested in some kind of taxonomy of excuses, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and Schadenfreude. He wants to know why self-justification tends to be interpreted as indicative of moral or psychological weakness. He asks himself whether self-justification informs isolated moments of everyday existence or whether it endures in an overall conception of self that lasts an individual’s lifetime. He investigates whether it dictates the functioning of an entire social group. Can we decide, he asks, whether justifying one’s self should be written off as morally repugnant, or taken seriously as evidence of moral probity?