Thomas S. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231169424
- eISBN:
- 9780231537889
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169424.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction argues that late modernism undergoes an outward turn to everyday life to conceptualize world systemic disorder.
The introduction argues that late modernism undergoes an outward turn to everyday life to conceptualize world systemic disorder.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from ...
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Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.Less
Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Thomas Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231169424
- eISBN:
- 9780231537889
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169424.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should “turn the reader’s and writer’s attention outwards from himself to the world.” Combining historical, ...
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In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should “turn the reader’s and writer’s attention outwards from himself to the world.” Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.Less
In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should “turn the reader’s and writer’s attention outwards from himself to the world.” Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.
Margery Palmer McCulloch
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634743
- eISBN:
- 9780748651900
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634743.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the ...
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This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.Less
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
C.D. Blanton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199844715
- eISBN:
- 9780190231590
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844715.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and 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 ...
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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
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.
Duncan White
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198737629
- eISBN:
- 9780191801051
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737629.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Lara Vetter
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813054568
- eISBN:
- 9780813053219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813054568.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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.
Emily Ridge
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474419598
- eISBN:
- 9781474434621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419598.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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 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.
Tyrus Miller
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198749394
- eISBN:
- 9780191869754
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198749394.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
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 ...
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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
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.
Lara Vetter
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813054568
- eISBN:
- 9780813053219
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813054568.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
When World War II appeared imminent, the modernist writer known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declined offers of refuge and chose to remain in London. As devastating as this noncombatant experience was, ...
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When World War II appeared imminent, the modernist writer known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declined offers of refuge and chose to remain in London. As devastating as this noncombatant experience was, as a Londoner during the Great War H.D. had learned how prolific she could be during periods of war. A Curious Peril attends to the critically ignored fiction and nonfiction she penned in the aftermath of the Second World War, arguing that our neglect of the narrative prose of this period of her career has bolstered an incomplete portrait of her oeuvre. Though H.D. is not typically considered a “political” thinker, this postwar work brings her interest in the otherworldly to bear on the material, political world—the world of imperialism, nationalism, and perpetual war. Abandoning for a short period the ancient classical settings for which she is best known, H.D. is seemingly impelled by the experiences of the early 1940s to produce a spate of writings in which the history of modern Europe takes center stage, writings that are molded into and by innovative and hybrid forms and genres that ultimately critique the ethical paradigms that had guided her before the war. Her postwar work marks a definitive shift from the modernist to the late modernist, gesturing at crucial points to the postmodern. As such, this experimental body of work—born in the trauma of world war, composed by a writer with acutely ambivalent national ties—constitutes a vital case study for current theorizing of late modernism.Less
When World War II appeared imminent, the modernist writer known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declined offers of refuge and chose to remain in London. As devastating as this noncombatant experience was, as a Londoner during the Great War H.D. had learned how prolific she could be during periods of war. A Curious Peril attends to the critically ignored fiction and nonfiction she penned in the aftermath of the Second World War, arguing that our neglect of the narrative prose of this period of her career has bolstered an incomplete portrait of her oeuvre. Though H.D. is not typically considered a “political” thinker, this postwar work brings her interest in the otherworldly to bear on the material, political world—the world of imperialism, nationalism, and perpetual war. Abandoning for a short period the ancient classical settings for which she is best known, H.D. is seemingly impelled by the experiences of the early 1940s to produce a spate of writings in which the history of modern Europe takes center stage, writings that are molded into and by innovative and hybrid forms and genres that ultimately critique the ethical paradigms that had guided her before the war. Her postwar work marks a definitive shift from the modernist to the late modernist, gesturing at crucial points to the postmodern. As such, this experimental body of work—born in the trauma of world war, composed by a writer with acutely ambivalent national ties—constitutes a vital case study for current theorizing of late modernism.
C.D. Blanton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199844715
- eISBN:
- 9780190231590
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844715.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound’s “poem including history” to conceive a negated ...
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This book examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound’s “poem including history” to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review’s totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic’s critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war’s onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.’s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud’s Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such.Less
This book examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound’s “poem including history” to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review’s totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic’s critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war’s onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.’s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud’s Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such.
W. David Soud
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198777779
- eISBN:
- 9780191823213
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198777779.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Poetry
The General Introduction establishes the study as one bridging literary criticism and theology and provides the conceptual scaffolding for the book as a whole. After opening with a statement of scope ...
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The General Introduction establishes the study as one bridging literary criticism and theology and provides the conceptual scaffolding for the book as a whole. After opening with a statement of scope and terminology, it delineates a few key contextual issues: theories of secularization and the sacred, liberal Protestantism, the mystical revival, Theosophy, changing understandings of the poetic self from Romanticism and Symbolism through modernism, and the question of ‘late modernism’. The Introduction closes with a meditation on the challenges posed by linking the disciplines of theology, history of religions, and literary criticism. Citing both George Steiner’s taxonomy of forms of difficulty, which will be used as a hermeneutic device throughout the book, and Bruno Latour’s reflection on religious discourse as a ‘manner of speech’, it addresses the more empathic aspect of such scholarship.Less
The General Introduction establishes the study as one bridging literary criticism and theology and provides the conceptual scaffolding for the book as a whole. After opening with a statement of scope and terminology, it delineates a few key contextual issues: theories of secularization and the sacred, liberal Protestantism, the mystical revival, Theosophy, changing understandings of the poetic self from Romanticism and Symbolism through modernism, and the question of ‘late modernism’. The Introduction closes with a meditation on the challenges posed by linking the disciplines of theology, history of religions, and literary criticism. Citing both George Steiner’s taxonomy of forms of difficulty, which will be used as a hermeneutic device throughout the book, and Bruno Latour’s reflection on religious discourse as a ‘manner of speech’, it addresses the more empathic aspect of such scholarship.
Andrew Goldstone
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199861125
- eISBN:
- 9780199332724
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861125.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Four treats what may be the most radical autonomy fiction of all, the claim to a semiotic freedom by which the artwork refuses to refer to the real. This version of autonomy is crucial to the ...
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Chapter Four treats what may be the most radical autonomy fiction of all, the claim to a semiotic freedom by which the artwork refuses to refer to the real. This version of autonomy is crucial to the poetics of Wallace Stevens and the late modernist essays of Paul de Man. In Stevens’s work, the figure of tautology enacts this hermetic refusal to relate poetry to anything other than itself: “My intention in poetry,” Stevens once wrote, “is to write poetry.” And yet Stevens’s poetry never deploys tautology without invoking the shared social and linguistic context in which those tautologies acquire their difficult sense. The figure of tautology likewise takes on an unexpected significance in de Man’s signal theory of literary non-referentiality: for de Man, too, tautology leads to a version of autonomy which connects literature to its historical setting through the refusal of reference. The chapter analyzes de Man’s tautology-theory in terms of both his modernist literary-historical roots and his academic-institutional context; his resemblance to Stevens becomes intelligible as a shared modernist pursuit of an autonomous literary language that nonetheless generates correspondences between itself and its contemporary social circumstances.Less
Chapter Four treats what may be the most radical autonomy fiction of all, the claim to a semiotic freedom by which the artwork refuses to refer to the real. This version of autonomy is crucial to the poetics of Wallace Stevens and the late modernist essays of Paul de Man. In Stevens’s work, the figure of tautology enacts this hermetic refusal to relate poetry to anything other than itself: “My intention in poetry,” Stevens once wrote, “is to write poetry.” And yet Stevens’s poetry never deploys tautology without invoking the shared social and linguistic context in which those tautologies acquire their difficult sense. The figure of tautology likewise takes on an unexpected significance in de Man’s signal theory of literary non-referentiality: for de Man, too, tautology leads to a version of autonomy which connects literature to its historical setting through the refusal of reference. The chapter analyzes de Man’s tautology-theory in terms of both his modernist literary-historical roots and his academic-institutional context; his resemblance to Stevens becomes intelligible as a shared modernist pursuit of an autonomous literary language that nonetheless generates correspondences between itself and its contemporary social circumstances.
Ben Hutchinson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198767695
- eISBN:
- 9780191821578
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Epilogue summarizes the argument of the book in terms of its reconception of modern European literature as ‘late’. Placing this argument in the context of both late modernism and postmodernism—as ...
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The Epilogue summarizes the argument of the book in terms of its reconception of modern European literature as ‘late’. Placing this argument in the context of both late modernism and postmodernism—as well as that of the postwar emergence of comparative literature as a discipline—it focuses on the work of W.G. Sebald as an example of the ‘vertigo’ of the contemporary perspective. Haunted by modernity, Sebald’s dense prose style suggests not just the writing of lateness, but also writing as lateness; it thus raises the stakes of Adorno’s definition of late works as ‘catastrophes’ beyond the individual artist’s life (late style), beyond even a particular epoch (late modernism), to modernity as a whole (lateness).Less
The Epilogue summarizes the argument of the book in terms of its reconception of modern European literature as ‘late’. Placing this argument in the context of both late modernism and postmodernism—as well as that of the postwar emergence of comparative literature as a discipline—it focuses on the work of W.G. Sebald as an example of the ‘vertigo’ of the contemporary perspective. Haunted by modernity, Sebald’s dense prose style suggests not just the writing of lateness, but also writing as lateness; it thus raises the stakes of Adorno’s definition of late works as ‘catastrophes’ beyond the individual artist’s life (late style), beyond even a particular epoch (late modernism), to modernity as a whole (lateness).
Benjamin Kohlmann
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198715467
- eISBN:
- 9780191783197
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198715467.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction argues that hesitations over the political project of thirties writing – what could be called the “apolitical unconscious” of 1930s literature – are foundational to that writing ...
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The introduction argues that hesitations over the political project of thirties writing – what could be called the “apolitical unconscious” of 1930s literature – are foundational to that writing itself, and that much politicised literature of the decade was produced in direct engagement with these artistic uncertainties. The left-wing literature of the 1930s occupies positions outside the radical demands for art as a form of propaganda, on the one hand, and for literature’s retreat from the sites of political action, on the other. These anxieties do not compromise the political project of thirties left-wing literature, but they suggest its complexity and in turn complicate the terms on which criticism of the period should be premised.Less
The introduction argues that hesitations over the political project of thirties writing – what could be called the “apolitical unconscious” of 1930s literature – are foundational to that writing itself, and that much politicised literature of the decade was produced in direct engagement with these artistic uncertainties. The left-wing literature of the 1930s occupies positions outside the radical demands for art as a form of propaganda, on the one hand, and for literature’s retreat from the sites of political action, on the other. These anxieties do not compromise the political project of thirties left-wing literature, but they suggest its complexity and in turn complicate the terms on which criticism of the period should be premised.
Gayle Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231178563
- eISBN:
- 9780231542982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231178563.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction (“What passes ...
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Analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction (“What passes with thee?”). This chapter argues that Hemingway’s creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War, but a comparative reading of the fates of the languages associated with the rising US and declining Spanish empires—a reading that reaches back to their moments of interpenetration in the 1600s. Rogers calls Hemingway’s mode of dialogue in the novel “structural Spanglish,” a form of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently and argues For Whom the Bell Tolls makes a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. Briefly examination of several texts that belong in this new genealogy, by Malcolm Lowry, Felipe Alfau, and Ben Lerner.Less
Analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction (“What passes with thee?”). This chapter argues that Hemingway’s creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War, but a comparative reading of the fates of the languages associated with the rising US and declining Spanish empires—a reading that reaches back to their moments of interpenetration in the 1600s. Rogers calls Hemingway’s mode of dialogue in the novel “structural Spanglish,” a form of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently and argues For Whom the Bell Tolls makes a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. Briefly examination of several texts that belong in this new genealogy, by Malcolm Lowry, Felipe Alfau, and Ben Lerner.
