Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism


Book Description

This study looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes's writing. The main contribution of this innovative and scholarly work is the exploration of the editorial changes that T. S. Eliot made to the manuscript of Nightwood, as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman. The archival research presented here is a significant advance in the scholarship, making this volume invaluable to both teachers and students of modern literature and Barnesian scholars.




In a Strange Room


Book Description

Taking its title from Faulkner's epochal modernist novel, David Sherman's study traces the myriad ways death and its effect on the living defined modernist fiction and verse in England, Ireland, and the U.S. A focus on the disturbing but recurring image of the corpse allows Sherman to consider a range of texts marked by their sense of mortal fragility. Wilfred Owen's war poetry and Virginia Woolf's early novel Jacob's Room illustrate an incipient anxiety over new governmental techniques for efficiently managing the burial of the dead during World War I. Joyce's Ulysses and As I Lay Dying offer opportunities to consider narratives organized by the problem of an unburied corpse. Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, which Eliot edited, demonstrate how modernist writers often respond to death and the loss of corporality with erotic encounters at the moment mortality is most threatened. Two poems by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, in the monograph's concluding section, provide emblems for competing attitudes toward the disposal of the dead in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, In a Strange Room presents a richly textured transatlantic study of a defining aspect of modernist literature and culture.




Civil Antisemitism, Modernism, and British Culture, 1902–1939


Book Description

This book addresses the development of 'civil' anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Britain, a crucial and often critically neglected strand of anti-Jewish rhetoric that, prior to 1934, was essential to the legitimization of proto-fascist political and literary discourses, as well as stylistic practices within literary modernism.




The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land


Book Description

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is often considered to be the most important poem written in English in the twentieth century. The poem dramatically shattered old patterns of form and style, proposed a new paradigm for poetry and poetic thought, demanded recognition from all literary quarters, and changed the ways in which it was possible to approach, read, or write poetry. The Waste Land helped to define the literary and artistic period known as modernism. This Companion is the first to be dedicated to the work as a whole, offering fifteen new essays by international scholars and covering an extensive range of topics. Written in a style that is at once sophisticated and accessible, these fresh critical perspectives will serve as an invaluable guide for scholars, students, and general readers alike.




A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature


Book Description

This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.




Queer Atlantic


Book Description

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. Refusing to take white masculinity for granted, Daniel Hannah considers how the canonical novels of modernist fiction explore the ways that privilege is propped up and driven by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality. Queer Atlantic examines the work of established writers – Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford – to reveal that anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential helped broaden the novel's formal possibilities. Demonstrating how masculine mobility, and often specifically transatlantic mobility, both enacts and queerly disorients male privilege, Hannah places these writers in the context of debates about naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the "new imperialism." In the process he raises important questions about the current field of queer ethics, highlighting the strange companionship of queer openness to otherness and imperialist thought in modernist writing. Arguing for the surprising resilience of such fictional structures, Queer Atlantic provides a new understanding of modernism's emergence from a troubling of masculine privilege, mobility, and desire.




Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism


Book Description

Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes's textual corpus. The five chapters of this book reconsider modernist intertextuality, affect, and subjectivity to produce a series of lively and compelling readings of the major




Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 8


Book Description

Eliot is called upon to become the completely public man. He gives talks, lectures, readings and broadcasts, and even school prize-day addresses. As editor and publisher, his work is unrelenting, commissioning works ranging from Michael Roberts's The Modern Mind to Elizabeth Bowen's anthology The Faber Book of Modern Stories. Other letters reveal Eliot's delight in close friends such as John Hayward, Virginia Woolf and Polly Tandy, and his colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley, as well as his growing troupe of godchildren - to whom he despatches many of the verses that will ultimately be gathered up in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). The volume covers his separation from first wife Vivien, and tells the full story of the decision taken by her brother, following the best available medical advice, to commit her to an asylum - after she had been found wandering in the streets of London. All the while these numerous strands of correspondence are being played out, Eliot struggles to find the time to compose his second play, The Family Reunion (1939), which is finally completed in 1938.




The New Modernist Novel


Book Description

Considers relationships between modernist literature and literary criticism and argues that new modernist fiction can bring with it new modes of reading Considers how close reading may change as the study of modernism changes to include recently recovered fiction Asks what reading meant for selected critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960 Offers readings of three new modernist novels: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loy’s Insel Considers key cultural moments of the novels' composition and reception Extends the questions about reading raised by these novels to Samuel Beckett’s Comment c’est / How It Is and Jean Rhys’s short stories Since the late twentieth century, new understandings of modernism have come with new attention to a range of writers. Yet if the academic study of modernism took shape around an older, narrower selection of writers and works, how can its modes of reading be relevant to newly recovered modernist writing? This book considers how close reading may change as the subjects of literary study change. Elizabeth Pender asks what reading meant for critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loy’s Insel tend to resist some of the strategies of reading that helped construct a narrowed modernist canon at mid-century, such as the pursuit of coherence. These novels offer new thinking about the temporality of reading, style, and the ethics of narration. Reading these novels now suggests that other new modernist fiction, too, may require revisions to vocabularies with which modernist literature has sometimes been read.




Djuna Barnes's Nightwood


Book Description

Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood. In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.