20th-century Literature and Modernism

This study provides the first comprehensive historicization of Joyce’s writings from 1898 to 1915 in relation to the distinct phases of British-Irish history during the period—1898–1903, 1904–6, 1906–12, 1912–15—and their shifting currents. It also pays close attention to the (sometimes different) historical contexts on which the works focus. The young Joyce emerges, in a new and distinctive intellectual portrait of him, as a very particular, modern kind of ‘strong spirit’ (to use his term), a late colonial artist passionately committed to freedom and justice for Ireland, yet also a radical doubter, rigorously sceptical about any prospect of their realization. At the turn of the century, with a concept of ‘national resurgence’ much in the Irish air, Joyce meditates on art as a distinctive form of anti-colonial and emancipatory project. His early essays espouse a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment within a colonial culture. However, the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution in 1903, the election of 1906, and the Third Home Rule Bill crisis of 1912 call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the ‘Triestine Writings’, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to the problematics of Irish emancipation by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it. The result is a set of varied, extremely subtle and complex, or ‘labyrinthine’, structures of thought anticipating the extraordinary aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

J. M. Synge’s dramatic career, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almost exactly coincided with the years of Edward VII’s reign. Those years have long been studied in a British context, but this is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge’s work—including a new sociological awareness, the rise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the arts and crafts movement, Irish classical music, and comedic writing by Somerville and Ross—this collection shows how the Revival’s preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the late imperial world. Although Synge is best known as a dramatist, this book concentrates on his prose and the ethnography of his photographs, the work in which his engagement with Edwardian Ireland can be most significantly seen. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge’s writings and photography display a romantic resistance to modernity alongside their more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. It is through this ambivalent modernity that his work continued to haunt not just advocates like W.B. Yeats but even Synge’s critics, including Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge through their own work. This book aims to change readers’ sense of Synge’s significance, and by doing so to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.

This book is a literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Trying to avoid hindsight and drawing on a wide range of literary texts, this book offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. It examines both literary portrayals of Jews by Gentile writers — whether antisemitic, friendly, or ambivalent — and efforts to reinvent Jewish identities by the Jews themselves, in response to antisemitism culminating in Zionism. The author deals with German-Jewish relations comprehensively and over a long period of literary history.

The history of the Irish minority Traveller community is not analogous to that of the ‘tinker’, a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by 16th-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J. M. Synge’s influential The Tinker’s Wedding was pivotal to this ‘Irishing’ of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure’s cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge’s empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-Independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labelled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the ‘tinker’ fantasy. Such change shapes contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Travele as lovable ‘white trash’ rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the ‘tinker’ is much more central to Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognized.

This book studies 20th-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, this book complements these by presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent. This book explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of ‘elsewhere’. It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of travel (and travel literature) across the 20th century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early 20th-century reflection on travel and exoticism and Albert Kahn's ‘Archives de la Planète’, the book goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroën 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of Nicholas Bouvier and the ‘Pour une littérature voyageuse’ movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature.

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siècle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development – never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.

This book examines old age as it was culturally constructed in the 19th century. It begins with the agitated relations set in motion when the increasing number of elderly people unable to provide adequately for themselves found it necessary to contend with sciences which would classify them, arts which would represent them, and a state which was slow to adopt measures of support. The book analyzes illuminating moments in these relations which are displayed variously in narrative form, social policy and cultural attitudes. It considers the centrality of institutions and of the generational divide; it traces the power and powerlessness of age through a range of characters and individuals as distinct from one another as Dickens's inebriated nurse, Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; it studies specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions attached to aging and the complexities of representing age in pictorial and statistical “portraits.” The chapters are organized around major literary works set alongside episodes and artifacts, diaries and memoirs, images and inscriptions, that produced (and now illuminate) the construction of old age through Victoria's long reign. The argument demonstrates that if old age became for the Victorians such a conspicuous public topic and problem, it also became an intensely private preoccupation. The social formation of old age created terms, images, and narratives that lone individuals used to fashion the stories of their lives. The book is intent to respect the specificity of aging: not only the wide diversities of circumstance (rich and poor, urban and rural, watched and forgotten, powerful and dispossessed) but also the distinct acts of representation by novelists, painters, journalists, sociologists and diary-keepers.

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of games: chess, Scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play. This book studies this central theme in Nabokov, and the first work apart from Boyd's critical biography to draw in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, only collected and republished in 1999 to 2000, and on highly restricted archival material in New York and Washington. It argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and indeed that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. It traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As it does so it demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and Alexander Pope and the humanist tradition of the literary game. As such it provides what is the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for and influence on contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard.