Modernism and Modernist Literature
The Modernist period, coinciding with philosophical revolutions in politics, psychology, and science, was characterised by artistic experimentation, reflecting the increasingly fragmented and detached nature of modern life. The visual arts embraced abstractions, and a plethora of aesthetic manifestos encouraged practitioners to rewrite the rules of artistic creation. Poetry, fiction, and all literature, was never the same again.
Our authors cover a huge range of topics relating to the first half of the twentieth century including fashion, lesbian literature, radio culture, communist modernist writing, and asbestos viewed as a modernist substance. Alongside a range of lesser-known writers, some authors studied include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vernon Lee, and D. H. Lawrence.
Works on Modernist literature by our departmental staff
Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers
An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference.
For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity.
Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde
Critics have traditionally maintained that capitalism's resurgence after the Second World War precipitated the transition from modernism to postmodernism. This revisionist account shows that modernism does not simply decline. By foregrounding phenomenological conceptions of bodily experience, Jason M. Baskin reveals modernism's ongoing vitality. Key postwar writers, critics and philosophers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Ralph Ellison and Raymond Williams, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Theodor Adorno, developed an aesthetics of embodiment that adapted modernism to a new postwar landscape.
Working across differences of race, gender, national and intellectual tradition, genre and form, Baskin contends that these authors used ordinary bodily experiences, such as perception, memory and laughter, to imagine modes of common being and purpose that were otherwise unavailable in a postwar society dominated by liberal capitalism.
Granular Modernism
Granular Modernism understands the way that some Modernist texts put themselves together as a way of pulling themselves apart. In this volume, Beci Carver offers a new way of reading Modernist novels and poems , by drawing attention to the anomalies that make them difficult to summarise or simplify.
Carver proposes that rather than trying to find the shapes of narrative or argument in their writing, the 'Granular Modernists' - namely, Joseph Conrad, William Gerhardie, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett - experiment in certain of their works in finding the shapelessness of a moment in history that increasingly confidently called itself 'modern', which was to call itself shapeless.
Interrogating Lesbian Modernism
Makiko Minow coined the phrase ‘lesbian modernism’ in 1989. Since then, scholars of lesbian modernism have produced crucial work to critique and expand the modernist canon. At the same time, there has been ongoing critical debate about what constitutes a lesbian modernist text, who counts as a lesbian modernist author, and how lesbian modernism relates to queer and trans modernism.
This edited volume presents twelve newly commissioned chapters that reassess and interrogate the meanings, uses and limitations of lesbian modernism by exploring a broad range of authors, genres and histories. Individual chapters investigate what work the concept of ‘lesbian modernism’ has done in the past, how its boundaries have been defined and contested, and what voices have been included and excluded. As a whole, the book demonstrates how the concept of lesbian modernism can be mobilised in new and meaningful ways to continue to inform and enrich modernist studies.
Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy
How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others' autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily and troubling?
Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word 'empathy'), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response. Attending closely to literary depictions of gesture, movement and rhythm; and to literary explorations of the bodily and of transcendence; this book argues that central to modernism was an ideal of sympathy that was morally complex, but that was driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel.
The BBC German Service during the Second World War
This book, part media history and part group biography, tells the story of the BBC’s attempts to reach out to listeners in Nazi Germany at a time when Anglo-German relations were particularly strained. Who were the individuals behind the microphone, whose names could only be mentioned in whispered conversations on the continent? Who wrote the satirical sketches that offered comic relief to housewives struggling to obtain enough food to feed their families?
And who made decisions about programme delivery and staffing? Drawing extensively on previously unexamined archival material, The BBC German Service during the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy sheds light on the complex, often difficult working arrangements at the wartime BBC where people from different nationalities and socio-political backgrounds collaborated and argued about the delivery of an effective propaganda programme that would assist the Allies in defeating the Nazis.
Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object
Few modern materials have been as central to histories of environmental toxicity, medical ignorance, and legal liability as asbestos. A naturally occurring mineral fibre once hailed for its ability to guard against fire, asbestos is now best known for the horrific illnesses it causes.
This book offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showing how literature and film during and after modernism responded first to the material’s proliferation through the built environment, and then to its catastrophic effects on human health.
Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object offers readers a compelling new method for using cultural objects when thinking about how to live with the legacies of toxic materials.
The book was awarded a significant literary prize, having received the European Society for the Study of English Book Prize, in its Cultural and Area Studies in English category for 2024.
Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing
Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together?
Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama, and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose, and the late plays, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.
Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism
In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned—and aesthetically responsive—to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into Stalinism, opening up a hitherto underexplored domain in the political history of avant-garde literature.
In doing so, Steven amplifies the resonance among the universal idea of communism, the revolutionary socialist state, and the American modernist poem
