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A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.

This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.

The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’

Like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author Alfred Bester started his career as a pulp writer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path to the field’s highest honor than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF only intermittently yet, as a result, developed a distinctive, outsider approach that opened up avenues for cutting-edge vanguards such as New Wave and cyberpunk. Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of modernist and decadent authors, shaped his groundbreaking approach to science fiction. During the 1950s, Bester crossbred pulp aesthetics and high style to explosive effect, producing landmark novels and stories that crackled with excess and challenged the assumptions of Golden Age science fiction. His focus on language as a plot device and a tool for world-building, and his use of modernist style in the service of science-fictional extrapolation left the field changed forever. The book argues that what Bester brought to SF was not a radically new template but an idiosyncratic self-reflexivity about the writing and reading protocols of the genre that put the field into a highly productive and transformative dialogue with itself.

Approaching the period of 1880 to 1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly “new” works of art, this collection treats the century’s long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values—those of past, present, and the imagined future. Navigating established literary modes as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the “modern,” turn-of-the-century authors continually negotiated ideological boundaries, treating the century’s long turn as a period ripe for experimentation. Essays in the collection, which range across topics such as canonicity, advice literature, Native American education, companionate marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, and the Harlem Renaissance, stress the hybridity born of multiple historical investments. As the authors of this collection demonstrate, the literature from the century’s turn is irreducible to the characteristics either of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries; rather, it is literature of dual practices and multiple values that embodies elastic qualities of historical plurality – a true literature in transition.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

Misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional conflicts that she believed were the cause of her tumultuous moods, her inexplicable behaviour and her writer’s block. This study rereads White’s writing within the context of manic-depressive illness to show how the misdiagnosis of her illness shaped the identity narratives White constructed in her life-writing and then used as the basis of her strongly autobiographical fiction. White’s self-narratives have skewed critical interpretations of her work; at the same time, her fiction has not been studied as expressive of affective disorder. By contextualising White’s work within the contexts of manic-depression and narrative identity, this study proposes a new model for reading White; documents the complex interplay of biological, psychological and environmental factors involved in affective disorder; and historicises the diagnosis and treatment of White’s illness in medical, psychoanalytic and Catholic contexts.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.

This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.

At Fault: James Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University argues that American universities have lost their way and that the works of James Joyce will put them back on the scent. In American university education today, an excess of caution has led to a serious error in our education system. To be “at fault” is to have lost one’s path: the university’s current crisis in confidence can be addressed by attending to the lessons that Joyce teaches us. Joyce models risk-taking in all three areas of the academic enterprise: research, teaching, and service. His texts go out of bounds, resisting the end, pushing beyond themselves. Joyce writes in an outlaw language, and the acknowledgment of failure is written into every right action. At stake is the enterprise of humanism: without an appreciation of error, and an understanding of infinite possibility, the university will calcify and lose its right to lead the nations of the world. The book draws upon the author’s thirty years of teaching experience to demonstrate what works in the classroom when teaching Joyce and makes a powerful contribution to debates on interdisciplinarity and university teaching. There are chapters on centrifugal motion, gramophones, elephants, fox-hunting, philately, brain mapping, and baseball: a compendium of approaches befitting the ever-expanding world of James Joyce.

In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. This study explores the agency of fashion in modern literature. Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik’s dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing—and objectification of individuals—in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.

Challenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s.Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle’s Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed’s analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.

Becoming Virginia Woolf is the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s early diaries. Her first 12 diary books are explored in depth and her development as a diarist traced. The book offers close readings of each of the 12 diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other early diaries; and (3) as it intersects with her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) This method lays bare, not only Woolf’s development as a diarist, but also—an extra dividend—as a public writer. It shows how she becomes the writer so widely revered today. Becoming Virginia Woolf offers a new approach to Woolf biography as well: her life as she marked it in her diary from age 14 to 36. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. As Woolf’s first two decades as a diarist unfold, interwoven as she read them are 15 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary and her public prose.

“After the Race” registers James Joyce's personal anxieties and rivalries on the verge of his emigration from Dublin. In the figure of Villona, the detached and gifted musician, Joyce sketches his first self-portrait, heralding the dawn of his own literary career as “the poet of my nation.” The story reflects the radical nationalist perception articulated by Arthur Griffith that the staging the Gordon Bennett Cup Race and King Edward VII's visit in July 1903 were both designed to upstage the centennial celebration of Robert Emmet's rebellion. The story allegorizes these Anglo-Irish tensions within the Great Game of global politics. The technique of the story—its design, use of free indirect discourse, multivalent language, significant silences, and cunning allusions—assimilates elements from its author's rhetorical education and invokes precedents from Ovid, Villon, Dumas, Dolmetsch, and the Irish oral tradition. The story therefore documents Joyce's multiple affinities with the mainstream of European literature and with the popular movement to revive native cultural practices. On the moral and philosophical planes, the story invokes the Pauline criticism of pagan materialism while brilliantly parodying the vacuous calculations of Theosophy. This apprentice exercise exhibits many of Joyce's permanent themes and is demonstrably a sophisticated political and philosophic work written in the shadow of Dante's Divine Comedy.

This book offers a new perspective on one of the most puzzling questions faced by Shaw scholars—how to reconcile the artist's individualist leanings with his socialist Fabian ideals. The book does this by viewing Shaw as a maverick whose approach was impossible to duplicate and grew out of his unique artistic temperament, his outlook, and his vocation. Shaw's activities in promoting the Fabians' goals of advancing social democracy were highly distinctive. He effectively used calculated irritation as an attention-getting tactic; he relied on devices that he had formulated as a creative rhetorician, rather than on the academic principles that were second nature to most of his fellow Fabians; and he devised and championed the use of indirect means to “persuade the world to take our ideas into account in reforming itself.”