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Introduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

The introduction argues that late modernism undergoes an outward turn to everyday life to conceptualize world systemic disorder.

Introduction. Rerouting Irish Modernism: Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Imperative of Cosmopolitanism

Mark Quigley

in Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in ... More

This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in postcolonial contexts. Arguing that Irish writers’ late modernism implodes the anthropological object anchoring the primitivism of high modernist thought, the chapter discusses the conceptions of “anthropological modernism” offered by Gregory Castle, Jed Esty, and Marc Manganaro and explains how considerations of Irish late modernism shed new light on the projects of “the new modernist studies” and analyses of “global” modernism. Tracing the different ways that scholars as varied as Richard Ellmann, Terry Eagleton, Robert Crawford, and Rebecca Walkowitz have framed the relationship between modernism and cosmopolitanism through the work of Irish writers such as Joyce and Yeats, the chapter also explores how a sustained engagement with Irish studies, postcolonial studies and recent developments in Beckett scholarship helps to produce a more richly nuanced account of modernism’s different moments and the ways that postcoloniality shapes the transition to a distinct set of late modernist aesthetic practices and the subsequent rise of postmodernism.Less

Sean O’Faoláin and the End of Republican Realism

Mark Quigley

in Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

This chapter examines the early work and thought of Sean O’Faoláin who as a writer of fiction, criticism, biography and cultural and social commentary produced a volume of writing from the 1920s to ... More

This chapter examines the early work and thought of Sean O’Faoláin who as a writer of fiction, criticism, biography and cultural and social commentary produced a volume of writing from the 1920s to the 1940s that largely defined the contours of Ireland’s early postcolonial literature and sought to chart a path for a generation of writers emerging in the shadow of Joyce and Yeats. Considering O’Faoláin’s early novels and historical biographies in concert with his role as editor of the crucially important Irish cultural review, The Bell, the chapter explores the rich complexity of the literary, political, and intellectual debates animating Irish literary magazines and cultural reviews during the 1930s and ‘40s. Challenging the standard critical account of this generation of Irish writers as aesthetically impoverished and retrograde, the chapter argues that O’Faoláin develops a strategically anachronistic realism that serves as a late modernist corrective to an excessive naturalist tendency he diagnoses in Joycean modernism. The chapter explores how O’Faoláin’s early writings illuminate how postcolonial modernism is shaped by the ongoing clash of institutional and insurgent nationalist expressions only to be re-shaped in turn by the new globalized power structures that emerge more prominently in the wake of World War II.Less

Unnaming the Subject: Samuel Beckett and Postcolonial Absence

Mark Quigley

in Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

This chapter builds on recent scholarship exploring the historical and material dimensions of Beckett’s thought and aesthetics, especially as they relate to postcoloniality and the geopolitical ... More

This chapter builds on recent scholarship exploring the historical and material dimensions of Beckett’s thought and aesthetics, especially as they relate to postcoloniality and the geopolitical re-alignments of the post-World War II era. Focusing particularly on his essays and his 1950s novel “trilogy,” the chapter examines how Beckett develops a radically new vision of the novel as part of a crucially important critique of subjectivity that marks the transition between late-modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Tracing the relationship between this transition and a broader shift within postcoloniality from an era of late-imperial nationalisms to one of an incipient globalization, the chapter considers how Beckett’s handling of form helps bring into relief distinct phases of postcoloniality that are often blurred together. At the same time, the chapter illuminates how Beckett’s unrelenting inscription of absence at the heart of twentieth-century literary aesthetics constitutes part of a broader initiative within Irish late modernism that encompasses the spare accounts of the Blasket Island writers along with Beckett’s more well-known engagements with Joyce and Irish modernist poetry.Less

Against the Machine: Imagists, Symbolists, Journalists, Diplomats, and Spies

Rebecca Beasley

in Russomania: Russian culture and the creation of British modernism, 1881-1922

The final chapter of Russomania explores how the war and the Russian revolutions of 1917 transform the role of Russian literature for British-based writers. The first part of the chapter examines ... More

The final chapter of Russomania explores how the war and the Russian revolutions of 1917 transform the role of Russian literature for British-based writers. The first part of the chapter examines debates about Russian and French literature in The Egoist, the home of imagist poetry. It focuses in particular on the emergence of style as a key criterion of literary modernity, championed by the editors Richard Aldington and T. S. Eliot, and the process of its rejection as materialist by Egoist contributors, John Cournos and John Gould Fletcher. Their aesthetics take on a particular, anti-Bolshevik pertinence in the wake of the October Revolution, which Cournos witnessed as a member of the Foreign Office’s propaganda bureau in Petrograd. The chapter surveys British knowledge of the Russian revolutions and early Soviet culture, and analyzes the literary response they elicited..Less

The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

C.D. Blanton

in Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

This book originates in the tension between Ezra Pound’s identification of the epic as “a poem including history” and Georg Lukács’s claim that modern epic is a poetic impossibility, in the ... More

This book originates in the tension between Ezra Pound’s identification of the epic as “a poem including history” and Georg Lukács’s claim that modern epic is a poetic impossibility, in the contradiction of a poetics that must include a historical totality it cannot adequately represent. It suggests that the interwar period also witnesses the emergence of a dialectically negated epic mode, alongside and against works like The Cantos, formed on the model of what Lukács terms reification and oriented toward the conceptualization of an abstract but real and determinate totality. Indeed, late modernism, it argues, is best grasped not merely as a periodizing term, but also as modernism’s own formal logic of negation.Less

Contexts

Duncan White

in Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace

This chapter begins by considering Nabokov’s strange position in literary history, caught between modernism and postmodernism. To literary historians of modernism he always appears to come too late ... More

This chapter begins by considering Nabokov’s strange position in literary history, caught between modernism and postmodernism. To literary historians of modernism he always appears to come too late while he is often considered as a writer who anticipated aspects of postmodernism without being a postmodernist himself. This chapter therefore makes the case for considering Nabokov as a late modernist. In doing so it makes the argument that late modernism should be considered a product of specific historical post-war contexts: the growth of the book industry, the institutional canonization of high modernism, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. The chapter goes on to show how these contexts resonated with Nabokov’s own literary aesthetic, shaping the way he thought about and wrote his fiction.Less

Modernity's Edge: Speaking Silence on the Blaskets

Mark Quigley

in Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

This chapter examines the Gaelic autobiographies emerging from the Blasket Islands in the late 1920s and early 1930s and argues that they offer a crucial reassessment of the modernist aesthetic ... More

This chapter examines the Gaelic autobiographies emerging from the Blasket Islands in the late 1920s and early 1930s and argues that they offer a crucial reassessment of the modernist aesthetic framework developed by Yeats and Synge for the Irish Literary Revival. Focusing on The Islandman (An tOileánach) by Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Twenty Years A-Growing (Fiche Bliain ag Fás) by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, the chapter explores how the Blasket writers dismantle the Revival’s concepts of Gaelic primitivism while developing a remarkably thoroughgoing late modernist critique of subjectivity. The chapter also traces how the Revival’s geographic, linguistic, and class categories shape political and intellectual discourses in the postcolonial era as elements of the Gaelic periphery are re-worked into fetishes of “tradition” by the postcolonial state. Reconsidering how the Blasket texts have historically been mobilized in support of this vision of an authentic and unconscious “tradition,” the chapter shows how careful attention to autobiographical form reveals the Blasket writers’ remarkably insightful interrogations of this elaboration of “tradition” in ways that carry significant implications for our understanding of Irish modernism’s development and for a broader understanding of how primitivism helps to anchor conventional notions of a modernist artistic consciousness.Less

Introduction

Lara Vetter

in A Curious Peril: H.D.'s Late Modernist Prose

The introduction describes H.D.’s traumatic experience of World War II and its aftermath, documenting her heightened interest in global politics from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, as well as her ... More

The introduction describes H.D.’s traumatic experience of World War II and its aftermath, documenting her heightened interest in global politics from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, as well as her abandonment of a lifelong pacifist stance in the face of rising Nazism. Taking into account the scope of her entire career, the Introduction suggests a shift from static to more dynamic modes of writing, culminating in the historical fiction and epic poetry that dominate the postwar years. It contextualizes her work within the context of scholarship on late modernism, including other work by women of the period on gender and imperialism, and concludes with a summary of the book’s chapters.Less

Oblique Strategies and Experimental Fictions

Julia Jordan

in Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies

The writers that are the subject of this book have begun to assume increasing importance, gaining in readership, scholarly attention, and critical significance. Yet it has not so far been possible to ... More

The writers that are the subject of this book have begun to assume increasing importance, gaining in readership, scholarly attention, and critical significance. Yet it has not so far been possible to understand their tonal and formal particularity in its full relation to late modernism, which has recently been defined less as a periodizing hypothesis and more as a distinctive set of aesthetic and philosophical concerns of its own. In this introductory chapter, Oblique Strategies proposes a new reading of these writers, as not merely defined by certain formal effects, including the self-consciously opaque or abstruse, the non-linear, jump-cut, or typographically virtuosic, but arguing that this particular strain of late modernism is best understood as constituted by their thematic and philosophical concern with accident and indeterminacy. Here the book makes the case for these writers’ collective sense of themselves as writing modernist fiction after modernism, with all the belatedness, uncertainty, and paradoxical urgency—aesthetic, philosophical, and stylistic—that obtains.Less

“Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”: Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “New” Britain

Ashley Maher

in Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State

Though the cross-medium modern style advocated by Herbert Read and Stephen Spender aimed to bring good design to political as well as aesthetic structures, the Ministry of Information mobilized ... More

Though the cross-medium modern style advocated by Herbert Read and Stephen Spender aimed to bring good design to political as well as aesthetic structures, the Ministry of Information mobilized modernist rhetoric for propaganda during World War II. British authors such as Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas scripted films promoting the “new Britain” to be achieved through architecture-led revolution, yet the politicization of style and wartime fears of double agents meant that Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood turned the intense focus on style to their own work. Bowen used the “swastika arms of passage leading to nothing” of the mock-Tudor Holme Dene to scrutinize her memory-laden, late modernist writing, while Orwell and Isherwood directed their attention to streamlined glass and steel structures to contemplate the potential duplicity of their seemingly candid vernacular style.Less

‘Have you anything to declare?’: Portable Selves on Trial

Emily Ridge

in Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light

The final chapter of the book directs attention to questions of identity and selfhood. If modernism witnessed the rise of a culture of portability, what did this mean for understandings of literary ... More

The final chapter of the book directs attention to questions of identity and selfhood. If modernism witnessed the rise of a culture of portability, what did this mean for understandings of literary character, and how did such understandings alter over the course of the interwar period? This chapter documents the development of late modernist suspicion of portable otherness as this is conveyed through interrogative appraisals of portable property. Such a development coincides with the sudden pervasiveness of the literary figure of the customs official from the late 1920s. This is a figure shown to share the psychoanalyst’s eye for the repressed contraband: ‘Have you anything to declare?’ As the chapter shows, this question of self-declaration becomes a critical one in conceptions and re-conceptions of character from modernism to late modernism. The chapter culminates with a reading of Henry Green’s autobiographical Pack My Bag (1940) in conjunction with his fictional Party Going (1939), both published around the outbreak of the Second World War.Less

The Continuities of Late Modernism: Before and after Beckett

Tyrus Miller

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

This chapter presents an extension of the scope of fictional writings that have been previously considered under the aegis of late modernism and some dialogical qualification of the historicizing ... More

This chapter presents an extension of the scope of fictional writings that have been previously considered under the aegis of late modernism and some dialogical qualification of the historicizing framework implied by that term. A key development in recent criticism and the historical study of modernism is the steady increase in the number, complexity, and specificity of narratives about modernism’s development. Moreover, a certain historiographic ‘constructivism’ has become necessary to account for and mediate between overlapping, complementary, and somewhat contradictory histories of modernist culture with different national, linguistic, temporal, gender, and ethnic boundaries. This chapter places new emphasis on the positive role of late modernism in bridging the literary changes of mid-century, and accordingly downplay the idea of a putative ‘postmodernism’ on the other shore of a late modernist ‘transition’. It argues that late modernism embodies a paradoxically enduring mode of progress-in-ending.Less