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Modern Literature
This chapter has seven sections 1. General; 2. Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945 Fiction; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. British Poetry 1900–1930. 7. Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Aaron Jaffe; section 2(a) is by Andrew Radford; section 2(b) is by Sam Slote; section 2(c) is by Eric Sandberg; section 3 is by Nick Bentley; section 4 is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6 is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Maria Johnston.
1. General Modernism, now or never might be a fitting motto for this section of YWES, covering books published during 2009 and 2010. Or else: Modernism, now and forever. This contribution is framed by a double pack of efforts to disclose modernism’s idiosyncratic legacies across the impossibly long century spanning two potholed fins de sie`cle. ‘The two ends of the twentieth century hail each other like long lost twins’, as Tim Gunning writes (quoted in Murphet, Modernism, Now and Then, p. 12). Modernism, I’d like to introduce you to . . . modernism, mon semblable, mon fre`re. The point, which Julian Murphet makes particularly well, is not merely to concoct a historical analogy between modernisms now and then. Rather, following Tom McCarthy’s lead in C, it tries to find century-long coherences concerning a future-overburdened past, echoes of internet already programmed on the radio, as it were: ‘The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush’ (p. 63). Once again, we’re being fitfully launched backwards into a bigger, wider, more direct modernity with uneven, unsettled, and unsettling consequences. The desperate gambler, feeling something auspicious in the last few hands, can’t leave the table without making one last bet. Doubling down on modernism, then, means The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 91 (2012) ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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AARON JAFFE, ANDREW RADFORD, SAM SLOTE, ERIC SANDBERG, NICK BENTLEY, REBECCA D’MONTE, GRAHAM SAUNDERS, MATTHEW CREASY AND MARIA JOHNSTON
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channelling big M and little m modernism, as Catherine Driscoll usefully puts it: that is, big M, the auto-institutionalizing brand, the autotelic mainstay of proper names, anthologies, galleries, and museums, and little m, the expanded, generic contraption that takes on modernity in all its critical, interdisciplinary, transnational complexities, one zone of a Venn diagram (Militant Modernism, p. 13). The latest modernist resurgence is less a matter of conservative retrenchment away from postmodernism than it is evidence of continued mutations of cultural value occurring in modernity, and the unremitting need for continuously returning to the unfinished business of literary history and literary modernity. Theoretical and institutional underpinnings want rethinking side by side, along the lines delimited in Stephen Ross’s Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate for example. Instead of ‘simply’ using theorists instrumentally, mining them for new interpretations of modernist lit., Ross’s collection usefully conceptualizes a co-articulated modernist project, underscoring both literature’s speculative and conceptual powers and theory’s avant-garde and literary ambitions. This orientation also partly animates the emergence of new institutions such as the Modernist Studies Association, Post45, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS), and the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM). Indeed, Murphet’s outstanding lecture Modernism, Now and Then, inaugurating the new Centre for Modernism Studies at the University of New South Wales, begins with the question that has been hovering around these congeries: What comes after postmodernism (http://www.youtube .com/watch?v¼T2IxDpQ3vuE)? How did that massively influential hypothesis, elaborated in the early 1990s, become operationally exhausted? Of course, no gesture is more obligatory (in a modernist sense) than this form of regulative petitio principia. Seeking to cut the Gordian knot, Murphet explains why modernism is ‘back on the agenda’ and why postmodernism was always in the cards. The strong form of postmodernism was all too aesthetically reductive, drinking too deeply from the well of then fashionable end-of-history thesis statements. Its potted versions, which became a PR machine for fashioning lists of aesthetic alternatives to Modernism, did not age well. After all the modernism/postmodernism double entry bookkeeping ‘the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic’ that, Jameson argues, were finally evacuated by the postmodern return more acutely than ever. A retro-revenant continues to stalk the present. Modernism names, in effect, a struggle with an incomplete future-past, and postmodernism, by extension, designates a ceasefire which claimed there was no future left to experience. If postmodernism is a kind of blinking cursor of the eternal present, what Vile´m Flusser calls the non-thing, a form of pluralist nihilism, the modernist revenant is a void in all this interminable plenitude. ‘Alle Apparate auschalten’, to crib Friedrich Kittler’s last words. Not only is the idea of modernity’s completion premature (because who knows?)—its expressive cultural immanence never quite made sense. Modernism, as the putative cultural logic of modernity, looks nothing like positivist boosterism about either global markets or the metanarratives some described it as. Rather, it resembles an apparatus for creative destruction, reinventing and reinvesting
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archaic survivals, resetting the clocks, reversing the eddies of now and then, inverting centres and edges, repurposing what’s cheap and diminishing what’s dear, ‘mutual and reciprocal determination between new and old’ to the end of the Earth’ (p. 14). For Murphet, modernism names an ‘aesthetic expression of the uneven development between manual and mechanical media’. The avant-garde, he writes, is ‘the most perspicacious scribe’ of relations between media. Again, one thinks of McCarthy’s ecstatic static, or, Michel Serres’s idea of the chattering parasite. Film celluloid, vinyl, radio transmission stand for a techno-medial revenant, retro-burdening the conceptual drive towards futurity. In Murphet’s account, postmodernism designates a situation in which markets (‘the infinitely larger and unrepresentable horizon of the mode of production itself’) become aesthetically expressible as pure form, a techno-determinant qua absolute. Stein theorizes ‘what a commodity might feel like if you ask it, stranded somewhere between exchange and use’, whereas Duchamp posits no daylight between the commodity and the artwork. In short, little m modernism, in this release, ingests postmodernism without digesting it, yielding an aesthetic-affective interface with modernity (‘critical, conformist, undecidably both’) that takes on the contradictions and makes the ambivalences matter. Two very different works of conceptual synthesis in the reviewed period help clarify why it remains important to stick with modernism: Murphet’s own Multimedia Modernism and Driscoll’s Modernist Cultural Studies. Murphet’s approach draws on the heady mix also informing his lecture, speculative materialists like Kittler, Alain Badiou, and Nikolas Luhmann. His book reformulates the structural unevenness of modernity in terms of uneven media interpenetration, thus proposing a complex context for rereading for avant-garde literature. This is not another survey of modernism’s relations to new technologies so much as a formidably argued and meticulously researched exploration of the ways that modernist aesthetics can be understood as ‘a structural adjustment’ to a complexified array of emergent communication technologies in the early twentieth century, ‘telegraphy, photography, typewriting, machine-set printing, photomechanical printing, the cheap rotary press, telephony, recorded sound on wax cylinder and phonograph’ (p. 10). The book demonstrates the wisdom of constructing a more thoroughgoing account of this system as a ‘mediatory code for the decryption of modernist texts’. To this end, it pursues ‘a sedimented trace-history’ of media institutions competing for actuality, elaborated chiefly around Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis Zukofsky, complemented by Pablo Picasso, D.W. Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Alfred Stieglitz (p. 3). These cultural workers operate beyond the author function as ‘strategists of the modern’: ‘media professionals, propagandists of the word-as-deed, whose acute sensitivity to what advertising, photography, halftone print technology and early cinema could do allowed them to effect transpositions between those newer media and their elected older one’ (p. 38). The case studies largely come from the North American fraction of modernism (pp. 21, 59) and give pride of place to modernist mediation of mediation in non-narrative literary forms. Modernist antipathy to narrative
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and narrativity—its long-held investments in why it might not be a good thing to be deeply narrative, as Galen Strawson puts it—follows an interest in an inhuman critical environment (‘[a]n acephalous infinity of sub-systems results from this relentless fissiparity; the name of that infinity is, of course, ‘‘modernity’’ ’, p. 13). One of the best chapters examines the ways in which these operations take place in the technical ‘vortex of aesthetic possibility’ supplied by Stieglitz’s groundbreaking quarterly Camera Work. The chapter is a tour de force, tracking the fate of modernist pictorialism, portraiture, and celebrity, along with Gertrude Stein’s relation to the journal, the dissemination of Cubism and ‘its instrumental effects on her writing’ through a certain grammatical automatization. The provocative point is that the modernist grid discovers the aesthetic (not vice versa) through/as variable-sized ink dots. Utilizing new halftone printing, Camera Work ‘reintegrates’ photography and modern painting ‘as two symbiotic halves of a torn whole’, resulting in a transportable ‘universal currency of being in the world’ (p. 58). This is not the familiar account of celebrity as mass-mediated personality but rather entails a new affective formation of becoming medium—or, with an eye on Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay, becoming at once flattened and flattered in a grid-like interface: the roll-out of ‘a meta-medium in which words and photographic images both became ‘‘photographic’’ and ‘‘printed’’ at the same time’, shifting the relation between here and now and then and there into a conceptual register of medial transience (p. 63). Borrowing from Mladen Dolar, Murphet advocates a version of modernism ‘constructively reformulated as the insistent whispering of a certain Socratic voice which, whenever it speakers . . . turns me away from something I’m about to do, but never encourages me to do anything’. Along these lines, his book fingers an important shift away from the cliche´d big M modernism of discovery to modernism as a shock-addled search for substitutes in the aftermath of relentless obsolescence (p. 202). The payoff here is, in Murphet’s words, ‘rethinking literary practice as media practice, to professionalize, to scourge, to flatten, to taboo, to extirpate and eliminate as much as possible that was superannuated from within what currently stood for the ‘‘literary’’ at the very moment that literature was exposed to the shock of the new media’ (p. 38). Literature’s monopoly on storage and dissemination may, in the deep pile-up of dead media, still hold for a long time. Like his theoretical teachers, Murphet is a quirky materialist, the kind attuned to matter becoming concept and correctly viewing this as a distinctly modernist technical problem. If modernism expresses ‘[l]iterature’s desire to be a thing . . . to refashion itself as a ‘‘media system’’ proper’, his project is a ‘‘theoretical wager on the direction of contemporary thought—as a motivated exploration of the past in order to expose the lines of force still structuring the present. It is, then, in the consolidated context of the epochal event of the computer that the assumption of a mediatory code of media systems to interrogate the conditions of possibility of modernist formal innovation attains to full dialectical intelligibility’’ (p. 11). When Murphet writes that ‘the medium really is the master in modern culture’ (p. 2), he points to a constitutive transposition in literary modernity about control between concept and matter. Instead of the familiar bind of hard determinism, foundering on the theoretical jags of base and superstructure, this cybernetic materialism
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cultural studies deploys . . . classic Modernist traits of self-reflexivity and perspectivism combined with the classic modernist tools that put these into action: ideology, dialectics, phenomenology, pragmatism, ethnography, semiotics, and dialogical analysis. It also employs those modernist tools that enable a critical position by the conscious disavowal of their own position (a consciousness that speaks to it), such as ‘impersonality’ and ‘formalism’. This is not an exhaustive list but it demonstrates the crucial modernist conjunction of an ‘expert’ position and a ‘culture’ that invites analysis or requires defamiliarization. (p. 205) The new modernist studies can also be understood as part of this same elaborate disposition for administering everyday modernity and administering modernity every day. Driscoll usefully defines modernism as modernity channelled as an ongoing, critical happening and contemporary critical procedure ‘to periodize, to discriminate, and to assemble’, a signal selected
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refuses to adduce material causes from aesthetic effects. The medium commands the material conditions and inhuman medial self-consciousness goes viral, blasted, broadcasted, amplified and extended in every direction. Driscoll, in Modernist Cultural Studies, goes further than anyone else around in historicizing the emergence and directions of new modernist studies. On the one hand, new modernist studies is a delayed reception of cultural studies. On the other—less obviously—modernism is a key ingredient in the very formation of cultural studies. Cultural studies shifted the objects of modernist study into the project of thinking about modernity’s miscellaneous cultural epiphenomena and vernacular contexts—film-going, adolescence, sex education, shopping, fashion, time, to cite Driscoll’s examples. Goodbye aesthetic praise term or periodizing catch-all; Driscoll’s modernism conveys instead a critical discourse about the cultural administration of modernity. Above all, her version indexes an educational disposition: modernist cultural formations entail both a tacit theoretical attitude and an exemplary practice, and cultural studies, she writes, ‘has learned . . . from Modernist responses to the problem of the everyday as an experience particular to modernism and a concept integral to modernism’ (p. 122). This educational turn—and its ongoing critical legacy—depended on discovery of the everyday as an aesthetic situation mobilized for critical response and feedback. Fittingly, the response emerges across multiple discursive frontiers: ‘Modernism is the context in which subjects come to have ‘‘styles’’ of ‘‘life’’ that are always defined in relation to both public and popular culture’ (p. 67). Early going, Driscoll sketches a narrative history of the peril facing the modernist scholar in a cultural studies environment that ‘deems everything equally worthy of analysis’, but not before she proposes a version of modernism as an ‘asset’ to add to the portfolio of cultural studies administrator (pp. 2, xi). Modernism works as an asset precisely because cultural studies depends on its procedures: ‘modernism is defined by the way it understands and articulates both ‘‘culture’’ and the subjects that perceive and manifest culture’ (p. 3). She demonstrates how cultural studies conforms to a critical legacy of modernist thinking. Whether or not it knows it,
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from the noisy situation (p. 227). Seen in this light, modernism as an exemplary practice or recombinant project of the everyday with its own theoretical assemblages, the new charge of the new modernist studies must be to think through our own practices in the genealogies of modernism proper. While it’s tempting to see technology and transnationalism as the two pillars supporting recent critical work, scale and direction provide more compelling problem-oriented keywords. Speed is a scalar not a vector—it conveys magnitude not direction—and the very directionlessness of it all (following Murphet’s lead) is what makes speed such a suggestive way of framing the feelings that technology and politics are all spinning us out of control in a kind of monumental pile-up. In The Speed Handbook, a study of the literary implications of the modern speed cult, Enda Duffy approvingly cites Aldous Huxley’s assertion that speed is modernity’s only new pleasure. G.K. Chesterton said something similar about vulgarity: ‘Vulgarity is one of the great new modern inventions; like the telephone or the wireless set.’ Speed and vulgarity are merged in Marinetti’s wrecked car, for instance. A terrible beauty is born, and, a hundred years on, we are still making a hullo-bullo, as the Vorticists put it, about the destructive beauties of future-oriented machinery. Books like Duffy’s, Georgine Clarson’s Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, and Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life all hit this note. Duffy describes his project as ‘a history of the epistemology of speed in the specific historical period between the beginning of the end of imperialism and the beginning of the era when speed seemed superseded by computer instantaneousness’ (p. 42). In other words, Duffy’s speed era is synonymous with modernism itself. His book shuttles engagingly between discussions of speeding phenomenologies such as being on roller coasters and adrenaline and modernist writing by Edith Wharton, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Usefully, Duffy begins by connecting his discussion to a critique of distance as ‘the imperative of sound critical judgment’ (p. 51). Delving into a forgotten reservoir of novels, manuals, and the motoring press, Georgine Clarsen’s Eat My Dust provides a historically grounded account of the origins of automobilism. Like Duffy’s book, it is also essentially a booster’s guide to techno-modernity: fast cars converting ordinary subjects into ‘beneficiaries of technological modernity’, the joyride as universal solvent of spatial, social, and political limits (p. 12). Usefully, this gives her account an explicit political dimension, by taking measure of the invention of the woman driver. She begins with the story of Bertha Benz, the first person to take a car ‘social journey’, she claims, by liberating the machine from her sleeping husband’s workshop for a jaunt through the Black Forest to her mother’s house. ‘Bertha’s actions’, which became a public relations sensation, ‘signaled the transformation of what had been an item of industrial production, the internal combustion engine, into a safe and manageable object of domestic consumption’ (p. 1). Clarsen emphasizes not only the role of gender in the speed fix but also the political benefits of modern feelings for what’s under the hood. The gear-head, as a mechanics aficionado, finds a heroic aesthetic of modern embodiment, as she is ‘operating a lathe, using a wrench, driving a car, traveling far from home, changing a tire, having an accident, or burning rubber for fun’ (p. 10). Against repressive tendencies framing women as inept
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drivers, incompetent mechanists, or disoriented travellers, the automobile releases ‘women’s aspirations for major social change—for independence, mobility, meaningful work, and pleasurable lives’ and a vehicular location for ‘sites of struggle over claims to authority and entitlement in the field of a technology’ (pp. 4, 5). Modernity means accidents—not least between concepts and things. As Ross Hamilton observes, ‘the sense in which accident makes people modern . . . lies in its capacity to make this process of perception by registering a conceptual position within an existing system of thought’ (Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History, p. 301). Be it vulgar, excruciating, shocking, or thrilling, modernity accelerates affective currents, the study of which informs approaches as diverse as Clarsen’s and Duffy’s as well as several other laudable works in recent years such as Hamilton’s Accident, Justus Nieland’s Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. This critical turn, as Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg observe in their Affect Theory Reader, itself proceeds as ‘a matter of affectual composition . . . in a couple sense of the word ‘‘composition’’—as an ontology always coming to formation but also, more prosaically, as a creative/writer task’ (p. 11). Indeed, as Murphet notes, it is significant that this aesthetic development comes as literary studies dials down extreme forms of the postmodernism hypothesis, from which it often followed that feelings were too ‘inauthentic or too traumatic to map’. It’s probably not what Seigworth and Gregg have in mind with their ‘inventory of shimmers’, but the shimmers and shivers analysed in Judith Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions, Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Sean Latham’s The Art of Scandal, Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman a` Clef, and Faye Hammill’s Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History all make hay as reception histories of affective phenomena. Hammill’s ambitious Sophistication, for instance, has impressive breadth— spanning the eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries and covering a remarkable number of the essential primary texts on the topic, from Richard Sheridan and Jane Austen to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sophia Coppola. She does a convincing job of showing how ‘sophistication’ is a crucial structure of feeling (to use Raymond Williams’s term) of modern literature, the development of which bridges more narrowly conceived epochs (i.e. Restoration, Romantic, Victorian) and the affective modes associated with them, especially sentimentalism. Mark Goble’s archivally rich Beautiful Circuits should also be mentioned here. It proceeds from a premise similar to Murphet’s Multimedia Modernism—tracing ‘how [US] modernism itself desired communication . . . as a way of insisting that [mass communicative] power was already modernism’s own’—although more modestly both in its thinking about modernism and its engagement with new media theory (p. 3). Unlike Murphet, Goble is engaged above all in the affective implications of the mass mediation of identity. Very early on he usefully reminds us that there is a buried history of media theory with the generation of thinkers who were in effect the first responders to modernism (Richards, Wiener, McLuhan, Burke, Kenner). In something of a prehistory of the internet, he tours through scenes in late Henry James (including a superb interpretation of The Ambassadors), late Gertrude Stein,
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James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where new forms of communication implicate literary subjectivity, ‘where intimacy appears indistinguishable from the exchange of information, where simple conversation seems to require a daunting degree of technical proficiency, and where a network of transmitted feelings provides a model for almost any category of social definition or any representation of sexuality, class or race’ (p. 12). Despite protestations to the contrary, the book serves as a rebuke to a Greenbergian account of modernist aesthetics in which modernism is defined by purity qua medium. Goble’s modernism is medium-curious about the ‘expanded field of sensory effects’ entailed by a technologically mediated life (p. 9). Stein opens herself to celebrity background noise (or what Steven Connor has called ‘extimacy’); attitudes about race in works by Johnson and Fitzgerald manifest the effects of the apparatus of recorded music; Agee and Evans register the documentary impulses of modernism’s photography fetishism. Goble’s title comes from one of James’s lines in The American: ‘the things that reach us only through the beautiful circuits and subterfuge of our thought and our desire’. The components are duly, if somewhat too softly, analogical here; some aspects of information theory are served up—storage and noise—insofar as they bear on identity formation, but actual circuits are too quickly consigned to dusty boxes in closets. Modern affect flows through technologically mediated loops of ‘ubiquitous communication’, an inexorable, scalar process in which anything and everything becomes (latent, potential) information, and the reader is left wondering about directions and channels and the nature of the impediments and resistances observed, achieved, or engineered (p. 13). Moving from electrical engineering to civil engineering takes us to Michael Rubenstein’s Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial. Rubenstein proceeds from an expressive homology between the production of two modern epics, Ulysses and public infrastructure in postcolonial Ireland—‘one a milestone of literary modernism and the other a milestone of technological modernization’. Ulysses is his paradigmatic case, but his book also engages variations of its thesis in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Denis Johnston’s play The Moon in the Yellow River, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Martinican novel Texaco. Rubenstein’s fictional examples serve as occasions to speculate about the advent of engineered infrastructure in Ireland, and Joyce in particular mirrors a fable about ‘the development of public utilities as the development of a common good’ (p. 9). In this regard, his ‘Benjaminian, redemptionist, weak-messianic’ account of Irish modernism/ modernization resonates with Hatherley’s point about other modernist ruins serving as ‘a potential index of ideas, successful or failed, tried, untried or broken on the wheel of the market or the state. Even in their ruinous condition, they can still offer a sense of possibility which decades of being told that ‘‘There is No Alternative’’ has almost beaten out of us’ (p. 13). The public infrastructure of modernization—water, gas, electric service, transit—appears only belatedly in Ireland. In light of the catastrophes of colonial domination, it provides a potent mixture of aesthetic and utilitarian means that is uneven on arrival, as it were. In a way, it was a mixture ready made to ‘commune with the
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material culture of the state, encountering its power and, when things are in working order, its benevolent provision’ (pp. 9–10). Rubenstein reads Joyce’s works—indeed, the entire arc of the Joycean career—as an epitome of a modernist development project within uneven conditions: in effect, Ulysses gives the logic of alternative modernities epic form (NB: Rubenstein sees this as a postcolonial comedy). Irish modernism is, he writes, ‘an ambivalent and protracted struggle to forge an Irish modernity in defiance’ of a false bifurcation of aesthetics and use in the construction of water closets that models other postcolonial situations. And the changing of horses from Ireland to the Caribbean in the last chapter is an effort to extrapolate ‘that Irish modernism ought to be studied in the context of comparative postcolonial literary studies, and . . . that the argument . . . is a portable heuristic that yields new insights into a multiplicity of postcolonial literatures’ (p. 2). Eric Hayot’s Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain is another monograph in the transnational-vectors camp. It sets out to explore a meme, which Hayot argues has become a literary and philosophical commonplace over the last few centuries: How easy is it to inflict harm on a distant stranger? What’s the connection between moral hazard and the physical distance of the other? This thought experiment cuts to the heart of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, for example: ‘A couple of fellows meet accidentally . . . no connections between them at all. Each fellow murders a total stranger.’ Acting on the premise is presented as a classic minimal difference between a sociopath and a sympathetic human. Bruno will, Guy won’t. According to Hayot, it’s a mode of thought paradigmatically elaborated around examples of Chinese cruelty: ‘what is the relative worth to you of harm done to a Chinese stranger?’ (p. 4). Indeed, he claims that the discourse of modern sympathy in Europe—examples include writings by Adam Smith, Bertrand Russell, and Georges Bataille as well as various missionary materials—depends on an imaginary transversal of geographical distance with the Chinese example serving as ‘the first contemporaneous civilizational other’ (p. 9). The contours of a kind of argument about decentring are familiar from postcolonial theory, but Hayot is after more than decentring. He proposes the term ‘ecliptic’ to describe his approach—‘the path of the sun seen from the surface of the Earth’—which conveys ‘a particular perspective . . . whose locality is named and defined by the universal it declares’—but the geometric figure with the two foci, the ellipse, might be more apt (p. 11). He is interested, he says, in ‘tracing the history of [the] relation, recognizing the ways in which a Western perspective oriented around China helps establish the centrality of the West to the history it writes, even as it writes . . . a more local history of the geopolitical limited landmass it calls ‘‘China’ ’’ (p. 12). Hayot is right that postcolonial theory, when it emerged, had remarkable little to say about China, a place which doesn’t fit the postcolonial framework. He writes: ‘no history of modernity will be complete if it cannot account for this habit of reference, for the sustained and persistent appearance of the Chinese under the sign of sympathy, and of sympathy under the sign of Chinese’ (p. 8). What’s most compelling about this book to this reviewer is its case that the examples used in the literary, cultural, and
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philosophical discourses of modernism and modernity matter. Examples are not incidental or arbitrary but precisely the point. Matthew Hart’s brilliant Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism and Synthetic Vernacular Writing also pursues a transnational vector and seeks ‘to contribute to a modernist literary history that is flexible at the vertical (social) and horizontal (geographical) levels’ (p. 5). It theorizes what Hart calls ‘synthetic vernacular’, a critical neologism for tracking a fraction of poets deeply invested in sites of local language yet simultaneously committed to avant-garde elsewheres. Focusing on Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, E.K. Brathwaite, and Melvin B. Tolson, the book also engages significantly with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, as well as contemporary poets such as Harryette Mullen. As in the best of the revisionist strain of new modernist studies, Hart’s book elegantly reframes much that has been long known about big M modernism using a lot of little m judo. Synthetic vernacular is a deft way to conceptualize the ways in which (some) modern poetry mediates between a host of antipodes—above all, locally affiliated sociolect drawn to indigenism and avant-garde idiolect chasing cosmopolitanism. The modernist experimental verse Hart is after is not ‘toxic to ethnicity or nationality [but] the gateway to a negative dialectical politics of autonomy and interrelatedness that was alone adequate to the unevenly transnational character of the modern world’ (p. 5). Again, modernity’s unevenness is on the table, understood here as a resource for pressuring conceptual false oppositions in the name of profounder hybridities. Think Robert Scholes’s paradoxy of modernism gone wild, conditions in which synthetic vernacular poems, Hart writes, quoting Williams Carlos Williams, ‘go crazy . . . in many different directions at once’ (p. 7). Such multivalence is conceptually productive, a resource of possibilities for vernacular intellectuals (nodding to Grant Farred’s work), pressuring left m with right m, high with low, local with cosmopolitan, inauthentic with expressive, difference with universality—and vice versa. One takeaway is the attention given to the ways in which poetic thingness doesn’t recede into the communication grid. Another related one is this point of emphasis: ‘ ‘‘Late’’ or ‘‘second wave’’ modernism is no simple holdover, as if the modern Prometheus of the avant-garde merely shuffled, its joints showing and its trousers rolled, into the nuclear age’ (pp. 15–16). Hart’s synthetic vernacular provides a robust reformulation of the long modernist now of complex continuities and dissolutions and in a transnational age, in which the idea of purified national literatures comes to seem not only ‘antimodernist but [also] anterior to modernism’ (p. 17). Periodization continues to be a fiddly problem. Kristin Bluemel’s edited collection Intermodernism is another effort to propose ‘a new term, a new critical category’, in this case against transnationalist currents, ‘for twentiethcentury British culture’ (p. 1). ‘Intermodernism’ evokes a temporal version of the Interzone—anomalous extraterritorial space, Tangier, say, between 1912 and 1956, which Burroughs adopted as his idiosyncratic homeland. Depending on whom you ask, Interzone is either governed by international law or no known sovereign law at all. Part of Bluemel’s argument here is that numerous (mostly) British writers of the 1930s and 1940s (Storm Jameson, T.H. White,
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Harold Heslop, Stella Gibbons. J.B. Priestley, William Empson, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Lowry, and so on—the book includes an appendix of about a hundred ‘intermodernists’), are neither modernists nor postmodernists, nor postcolonialists, but remain institutionally unaffiliated to any known jurisdiction of English studies:
The introduction is organized around a polemic shot across the bows of new modernist studies and its supposed institutional hegemonies. Yet, as Alex Pestell points out in his review of Intermodernism (TPr 24:v[2010] 936–9), new modernist work emerges precisely to give critical voice to many of these same thematic concerns. Nor can it be charged with the putative institutional neglect of intermodernism’s version of fantasy football. Indeed, despite Bluemel’s suggestion that ‘scholars of intermodernism are the ‘‘real’’ intermodernists’, many of the contributors to the volume are bona fide new modernist scholars (p. 6). Modernism has become more than a container for writers. In effect, the prefix reflex endlessly chases its own tail: the hunt for modernism without Modernism accelerates and miniaturizes the entire critical lifespan of the postmodernism hypothesis. The minimal differences of multiple modernisms evaporate into that most conventional of all critical-aesthetic imperatives: periodize! The mechanisms of literary reputation are complicated—not least when one considers the reception history of multiple literary generations. Whether the ‘intermodernists’, born in and around 1900, were mostly more responsible, politically engaged, and/or culturally elitist than ‘outer modernists’, born in and around 1885, makes more sense as historical conundrum than foundational premise. In Writing the Victorians: The Early Twentieth-Century Chronicle, Rudolph Glitz takes on just this sort of needed reception history of period concepts. Judiciously argued and impressively constructed, the monograph examines the ways in which early twentieth-century family chronicle sagas by John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf retroactively mobilize generational time and the Victorian era. The study raises some provocative problems about belatedness, but the bulk of it (which among other virtues raises many rich and strange points for Woolf studies) is devoted
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Intermodernism explored the manifestations and implications of such intermodern responsibility, focusing on three defining features: cultural features (intermodernists typically represent working-class and working middle-class cultures); political features (intermodernists are often politically radical, ‘radically eccentric’); and literary features (intermodernists are committed to non-canonical, even ‘middlebrow’ or ‘mass’ genres). Researching, defining and theorizing intermodernism, the contributors to this volume do not believe that academic publishers’ backlists and university courses on the thirties and the forties, modernism and post-modernism or postcolonialism, can do justice to the web of sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious associations between writers, institutions and cultural forms of the middle years of the twentieth century. (pp. 1–2)
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2. Pre-1945 Fiction (a) General The year 2010 was remarkable for the sheer quality and range of books devoted to the empirical and philosophical basis of aesthetic modernism. Brooker et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, at over 1,100 pages, was a major publishing ‘event’, demonstrating detailed alertness to British fiction of the interwar era and its geo-cultural resonances. The Handbook contains lively interdisciplinary approaches to key authors such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and E.M. Forster. This reviewer was cheered to note that contributors blend close engagement with the literary text, its form and rhetorical tactics, with patient contextualization that prioritizes once unfairly overlooked women writers, such as Mary Butts, Vernon Lee, Jean Rhys, and Dorothy Richardson. The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms is clear and commanding in its resolve to show these women writers as both avid participants in and shapers of a movement governed by acts of self-exile, audacious border-crossing, and literary pilgrimage. The most searching chapters confront issues of central importance to theorists whose work gauges points of overlap between literary, cultural, gender, and area studies. This is especially useful for experimental authors such as Olive Moore. Her fiction develops dissident new idioms of self-description and broaches questions about how the e´migre´ responds to, as well as debating and interacting with, the mystical geographies of modernism. Related questions about the cultural appropriation and politics of nature, place, and space are elaborated in Feigel and Harris, eds., Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, and Schaff, ed., Exiles, E´migre´s and Intermediaries. Burns and Charnley eds., Crossing Frontiers: Cultural Exchange and Conflict, does sterling work to uncover the modes we employ to express, contest, and chronicle the energies which circulate and flow through ‘in-between’ territories. The year marked an excellent period for scholarship devoted to Wyndham Lewis’s often fiery contributions to the production and circulation of seditious new art forms. The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms supplies richly textured material on Lewis’s satirical salvoes, as well as his position as both epitome
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to analysing the transit of these chronotropic relics across the family saga sub-genre: furnishings, mothers, the decrepit paterfamilias, and rebel children. ‘The idea of the ‘‘Victorian’ ’’, Glitz writes, ‘did not arise from the controlled activity of academic research, from the discursive practice supposedly committed to methodical self-awareness and the pursuit of truth’ (p. 15). That Victorianism is a retroactively imagined construct—a modernist one at that, though Glitz isn’t overly impressed by this point—doesn’t take away its real entailments as a material relic that generates cultural mnemonics, to borrow one of Glitz’s words. Modernism itself, returning to Murphet, can be constructively understood in similar terms, the retro-revenant, ‘the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic’, still stalking our critical futurity.
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and truculent critic of the contradictory potencies moulding early twentieth-century literary culture. Walsh, ed., London, Modernism, and 1914, boasts a politically nuanced and theoretically astute essay by David A. Wragg on ‘Conflict ‘‘Resolution’’: Wyndham Lewis’s Blasts at War’ (pp. 101–21). Wragg calibrates Lewis’s impassioned responses to the First World War across the two Blast publications of June 1914 and July 1915; these texts can be ‘legitimately regarded as both prediction and reaction to the outbreak of hostilities’ (p. 101). Wragg also effectively conveys the ideological outcomes of rapid industrialization and the sense of a world mediated by elaborate technologies of death. Lewis’s polemical utterances betray, Wragg concludes, mingled exhilaration and unease about narratives of material progress. The diversity of Lewis’s cultural and political concerns, especially his commitment to reprogramming staid rubrics of selfhood, is reflected in Jeffrey Meyers, ‘ ‘‘Monstre Gai’’ in Wyndham Lewis and Saul Bellow’ (NConL 40:iii[2010] 6–8), David Fairley’s Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, and Michael North’s Machine-Age Comedy. Catherine Lanone’s historically grounded essay ‘Negotiating Colonial Contradiction: E.M. Forster’s and V.S. Naipaul’s Negative Landscapes’ (in Guibert, ed., Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries, pp. 229–41) brings together two major writers in order to conduct a careful and close comparative reading that raises questions about protagonists and topographies literally and metaphorically on the edge. Lanone focuses well on A Passage to India and what Christopher Butler calls in Modernism Forster’s probing ‘awareness of the relationships between realism, symbolism, and religious myth’ (p. 43). It is a keynote of Forster scholarship in 2010 that it throws into sharper relief a writer eager to rethink familiar schemata of identity, including the sovereign self, the bourgeois family, and the bitterly contested matter of the nation. Lanone and Butler variously parse issues of fragmentation, both formal and personal. Lanone is alert to Forster’s habit of negotiating political conundrums through intricately wrought aesthetic strategies which laud an undogmatic openness to a range of affective engagements. The issue of whether fragmentation is an inevitable reaction to the unifying tendencies of imperialism in A Passage to India or whether it is a by-product of colonial endeavours to divide and rule remains vexed at the close of Forster’s most celebrated novel. But Forster’s gnomic conclusion adumbrates, according to Lanone, the paradox that unity may be a ‘precondition’ for the positive dimensions of ‘fragmentation’ to be actuated (pp. 238–41). Nicole DuPlessis’s ‘Transcendence, Transformation, and the Cultural Economy of Literacy in E.M. Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus and Other Kingdom’ (LIT 21:ii[2010] 81–100) and Ralph Pordzik’s ‘Closet Fantasies and the Future of Desire in E.M. Forster’s ‘‘The Machine Stops’’ ’ (ELT 53:i[2010] 54–74) canvass misinterpreted facets of Forster’s overlooked writings. Pordzik construes Forster’s short narrative ‘The Machine Stops’ [1909] as a ‘closet fantasy’, a text allegorically dramatizing the problem of engaging a literary coming-out while at the same time denying the presence or feasibility of such an act of public identification (p. 55). Forster’s relations to the sanctioned modes of silence and implicitness have the potential for being ‘peculiarly
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revealing’ about ‘speech acts in modernist writing’. Pordzik posits that his fictional works all seem to play with their ‘readers’ ignorance’, circling as they do around one or a whole series of ‘unspoken or unspeakable desires and secrets’. Forster’s ‘queer’ procedures of ‘concealment and disclosure’ shape symbolism, characters, plot, and reader relations in his texts and frequently show how a disavowed (homosexual) secret may ‘structure or direct’ the narrative situation (pp. 55–64). Michelle Fillion’s Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster argues that Forster’s ‘musical biography’ affirms his ‘credentials as a writer with music’ (p. 23) whose art is informed by complex attitudes towards various composers, performances, and competing musical theories. Fillion assesses his critical writings, short stories, and novels, including A Room with a View, which alludes to Beethoven, Wagner, and Schumann, and Howards End, which explicitly alerts readers to how musical forms, tropes, and ideas are seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric. Fillion’s carefully researched volume also includes, for the first time in print, Forster’s notes [1939–40] on Beethoven’s piano sonatas. While pundits have scrutinized the vivid role Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony plays in Howards End, Fillion also canvasses the significance of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, which also appears on the programme of the Queen’s Hall Concert attended by the Schlegels and Leonard Bast (pp. 79–92). Equally instructive is her analysis of the use Forster makes of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Where Angels Fear To Tread (pp. 24–38), Wagnerian leitmotifs in The Longest Journey (pp. 39–55) and the varied repertoire of Lucy Honeychurch (like Forster himself, a gifted amateur pianist) in A Room with a View. The book ends with a brief consideration of ‘the spectacular auditory world’ (p. 141) of A Passage to India. Fillion’s illuminating book can be assessed alongside Deborah McLeod’s ‘Disturbing the Silence: Sound Imagery in Conrad’s The Secret Agent’ (JML 33:i[2009] 117–31) and Angela Frattarola’s ‘Developing an Ear for the Modernist Novel: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce’ (JML 33:i[2009] 132–53), both of which pose questions about the obsessive attention to sound and auditory experience in experimental modernist novels. Wendy Moffat’s new biography of Forster A Great Unrecorded History benefits from diligent scrutiny of previously unpublished memoirs and letters (though Philip Garder’s extensively annotated edition of these papers is scheduled for publication by Chatto & Pickering in February 2011). Intended to commemorate the 130th anniversary of the novelist’s birth, this energetically written account, as Peter Porter has recently observed, ‘supplements’ rather than ‘supplants’ P.N. Furbank’s authorized biography and steers clear of some of the ‘educated guesswork’ that marred Nicola Beaumann’s chronicle of Forster’s private life. Moffat begins her biography by exploiting the dramatic resonances of that moment when the Maurice manuscript arrived at Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home five months after Forster’s death. As Richard E. Zeikowitz’s edition of Letters Between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature [2008] reveals, Isherwood had long known of the book and of Forster’s unwillingness to publish it. Moffat, who refers throughout to Forster as ‘Morgan’ the way his friends did, casts new light on a man whose journals reveal acute resentment at having to veil such a
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vital facet of himself but who deemed Maurice to be unpublishable until after his death. Moffat’s succinct treatment of Forster’s rhetorical preoccupation with subterfuge, pose, theatricality, and ironic constructions of authenticity is extended by Jeffrey M. Heath’s invaluable edition of The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster [2008]. Valeria Tinkler-Villani’s essay ‘Thoughts towards the Nature of Creativity in Literary and Cultural Communities’ (in Corporaal and Leeuwen eds., The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790–1910) explores how Virginia Woolf, Forster, and other members of the Bloomsbury group participated, via myriad publishing initiatives, in the ‘practical problems’ of ‘civilizing’ (p. 173). This essay is assured in detailing the nature and extent of Forster’s involvement with the Hogarth Press, which published his compilation of ‘Miss Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India’ in 1924. Barker and Gill, eds., Literature as History is a commemorative essay collection that celebrates Peter Widdowson’s ‘interdisciplinary strategies for expanding the literary canon’ (p. 106) and his important contributions to Forster studies, focusing on issues of class, ideology, and gender relations. Philippa Moylan’s ‘The Nervous Economies of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Chronicles’ (ELT 54:i[2010] 56–78) postulates that at the core of Galsworthy’s three-volume family saga [1906–33] is a deep-seated misgiving about the vigour not only of the patrician English clan but indeed of the body politic (p. 56). Moylan proposes that in ‘a manner’ that ‘befits the family saga genre’ the Forsyte chronicles delineate a rancorous conflict between the tribe as imperial fortress with dynastic ambitions and its steady erosion by aberrant internal proclivities (pp. 57–9). Moylan is assured in setting forth the tensions between sabre-rattling rhetoric and the nervous antipathies which beset the landed estate in decline. An uncanny version of the august country seat—the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’—looms large in Sarah Wasson’s Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. Wasson affords a pellucid account of how Elizabeth Bowen’s Blitz-era ‘home front’ narratives revisit and exploit the complex tropes of ‘haunting’ which infuse her autobiographical and fictional discourses of the 1920s (pp. 119–21). Wasson contends that Bowen is a stylist of provocative eccentricity whose aesthetic sensitivity to ‘subjective fracture’ and ‘narrative disjunction’ (p. 157) constitutes a searing ‘counter-story’ to the glib national mythology of British ‘survival’ and stoical self-possession (p. 157). Hepburn, ed., Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen brings together in one volume many previously unknown or neglected radio broadcasts, interviews and public lectures that Bowen delivered from the 1940s to the 1960s. Though Hepburn explains that public appearances at university campuses in the US and the UK were often highly fraught occasions for Bowen, who grappled with a pronounced stammer, she crafted a multilayered persona as a cultural pundit with keen insight into the politics of reading and the buried mechanisms of consumer society. Hepburn’s edition includes a percipient introduction which sets out his editorial principles and selection of material. This reviewer was heartened to find included in this handy volume Hepburn’s elegant English translation of Bowen’s important essay in French: ‘Panorama of the Novel’ (pp. 135–44).
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Bowen specialists who trace the evolution of distinctive adolescent agencies and visions of maturity in her 1920s narratives should consult Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson’s Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence. This wide-ranging thematic analysis posits that the Victorians refined a concept of adolescence that endured into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of youth as a time of emotional upheaval. In the enormously popular ‘juvenile’ literature of the period, especially adventure and school stories, adolescence is registered as a life stage conceived of as transitional and precariously poised between growth and relapse. Ferrall and Jackson also ponder the residue of romantic yearning in the questing adolescent self—an idealism that is vitiated by bourgeois matrimony, and the concomitant responsibilities of household management. The book’s postulate that adolescence is as crucial as the Romantic cult of childhood which preceded it sheds light on ‘middlebrow’ authors including Rosamond Lehmann, Patrick Hamilton, E.H. Young, and Walter Greenwood. The sixth chapter of Max Saunders’s Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature looks closely at literary impressionism, a peculiarly problematic term that Richard Bretell rightly argues is ‘the best-known and, paradoxically, least understood movement in the history of art’. Saunders canvasses the significance of impressionism in Joseph Conrad’s and Ford Madox Ford’s retrospective life-writings (pp. 260–88). The core strength of this chapter—and there are several, including the limpid clarity of the exposition and its assiduous tracing of links between the synthetic category ‘autobiografiction’ and aesthetic modernism— is that its probing of Ford’s ‘autobiographical practice’ (p. 287) manages to raise if not resolve weightier questions about the role of language in shaping and showing the past. Saunders’s subtly compelling thesis that ‘life-writing is fundamentally intertextual’ (pp. 5–6) is suggestive, as is his discussion of how the memoir genre throws into sharper relief many modernists’ obsessive interest in mapping fluctuations of felt sensation by keeping diaries. Overall, this is a hugely impressive enterprise, in which Saunders wears his formidable erudition and theoretical expertise gracefully and wittily. At over 560 pages, however, there is a risk that newcomers will only appraise Saunders’s tome— so judicious in research, organization, and the layered maturity of its argument—in modest segments. Saunders’s essay ‘Ford Madox Ford and Nomadic Modernism’ (in Cianci et al., eds., Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism, pp. 77–100) canvasses Ford’s Great Trade Route, a text which eludes precise generic classification yet attempts to link Ford’s peripatetic existence with ‘a history of civilization as produced by travel and migration’ as well as political upheavals of interwar Europe. Saunders affords a percipient account of how Great Trade Route seeks to put the threat of another global conflict into ‘a larger cultural and economic story’ (p. 79). Caroline Patey’s essay on ‘Channelling Words’ in the same volume (pp. 211–24) assesses Ford’s fictional gift for ‘importing and domesticating unabashedly French’ literary modes ‘into English’ (p. 217).
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Mark Douglas Larabee’s ‘Modernism and the Country House in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier’ (ELT 53:i[2010] 75–94) argues that, while The Good Soldier has garnered ‘the lion’s share of critical interest’ among academic commentators devoted to Ford’s varied corpus, the country house milieu of the text has yet to secure the close and discerning attention it deserves (pp. 75–6). It is certainly true that the key surveys of the country house in British literature—Richard Gill’s Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination [1972] and Malcolm Kelsall’s The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature [1993]—only give cursory attention to Ford’s novel. Larabee corrects this oversight by offering a persuasive summary of how the movements of the central protagonists are inflected by codes of conduct synonymous with ‘the psychological, cultural, and economic imperatives of estate life’ (p. 76). Though Ford Madox Ford does not feature in Sarah Crangle’s Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation, his insistent fictional focus on evanescent diurnal anxiety and unfulfilled yearning is illuminated by Crangle’s conceptually rigorous enterprise, which demonstrates how low-key everyday impressions enliven the modernist imaginary. Like Ian Ker’s The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 [2003], Adam Schwartz’s The Third Spring [2005], and Richard Griffiths’s The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 [2010], Timothy J. Sutton’s Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists gauges the complex Catholic influence on imaginative writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Sutton supplies an incisive chapter on Ford Madox Ford, his conversion to Catholicism, and how this fraught process altered his stance towards ‘the aesthetic and political strains of literary modernism’ (p. 14). The seventeen essays brought together in Harding, ed., Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing reveal a wide range of exegetical and theoretical methodologies by which to calibrate ‘the management, cultural politics’ and editorial perspective of Ford’s magazines (pp. 14–15). Jason Harding’s elegantly phrased introduction not only explores Ford’s ‘unusually exacting editorial standards’ but also rightly stresses the importance of Ford’s intense and often fractious ‘personal relations with his contributors’ (p. 14). This reviewer was particularly struck by Nick Hubble’s closely argued essay (pp. 67–79), which ponders why H.G. Wells, one of the key contributors to the English Review, tends to get labelled nowadays as ‘one of modernism’s duller acts’ (p. 15). Elizabeth O’Connor’s chapter (pp. 129–41) effectually cuts through the tangle of ‘agenda-driven biographical’ gossip (p. 16) which often passes for sedulous investigation into Ford’s editorial promotion of Jean Rhys’s work through the pages of his transatlantic review. O’Connor’s fine essay demonstrates that Rhys’s novel Quartet not only writes back at Ford’s little editorial empire but also bitterly debunks the encrypted, adulterous complexities at the heart of The Good Soldier. Alison Butler’s Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic offers valuable insight into Aleister Crowley’s career as an occultist celebrity and sometime author of uncanny tales, many of which have been gathered together in a new edition of The Drug and Other Stories. Butler’s writing is especially well structured as she moves between literary texts and journalistic sources,
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alighting on many different issues along the way. She offers a confident survey of Crowley’s arcane interests and captures the other ceremonials and personalities associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, such as Maud Gonne, W.B. Yeats, and Arthur Machen. James Smith Allen’s essay on honour, gender, and the occult (in Forth and Accampo, eds., Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Sie`cle France, pp. 112–29) also throws into sharper relief the cross-Channel negotiations and collaborations of various occultist impresarios such as Crowley. Aleister Crowley’s fictional obsession with the revenant can be construed through the theoretical lens provided by the final chapter of Christine Berthin’s Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. Berthin comprehends the Gothic not only as a subversive force that disrupts the rules of representation or as the transmission of unspoken secrets, but more intriguingly in terms of clinical melancholy, whose fantasies of resurrection postpone or smother intimations of mortality. Poston, ed., The Making of a Mystic: New and Selected Letters of Evelyn Underhill will prove useful to literary historians of modernist fiction and the occult. Underhill achieved international recognition with the publication of her pioneering book Mysticism in 1911. This edition of her letters offers historical context for those working on Arthur Machen, Charles Williams, Crowley, and Mary Butts. It was a good year for Katherine Mansfield studies. Jenny McDonnell’s Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public pays sedulous attention to Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a highly competitive literary milieu, during the years that witnessed the emergence of little magazines in Britain. McDonnell is shrewd in documenting Mansfield’s involvement with and contributions to periodicals such as the New Age, Rhythm, and the Athenaeum. Sydney Janet Kaplan’s Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence reconsiders the place of John Middleton Murry in the development of literary modernism in Britain. Drawing on Murry’s journals and under-appreciated novels, Kaplan’s book assesses his importance as a ‘circulator’ of ideas, reputations, and critical perspectives in his roles of editor, translator, and literary critic, and complicates the arguments of earlier biographers and critics about his personal and professional relationship with Katherine Mansfield. Kaplan’s approach to these creative relationships builds on the signal strength of her fine 1991 monograph Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. One of the key difficulties that intrepid biographers of Mansfield must confront and process is the dizzying array of accounts of this great writer that already exist in plays, novels, and often highly spiced, semi-fictionalized memoirs. Kathleen Jones’s Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller is the first ‘orthodox’ biography of this intensely private and peripatetic figure for over two decades. As Hermione Lee has noted, separating Mansfield’s actual lived experiences from the myth of a martyred ‘Saint Katherine’—a lucrative version partly fostered and marketed by Middleton Murry—is as tricky a task as decoding Mansfield’s calligraphy. Indeed, this reviewer found Jones’s habit of separating the narrative into a present-tense chronicle of Mansfield’s life
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and past-tense summaries of the ghostly ‘afterlife’ to which Murry contributed created a distracting rhythm of reading. The signal strength of this book is its rendering of Mansfield’s intense feelings for the distinctive terrain, cultures, and communities of New Zealand. It is less sure-footed on the stories themselves, especially Mansfield’s experiments with voice, tone, and timbre. Le-Guilcher and Lassner, eds., Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller supplies fascinating material on 1920s British literary culture, especially the preoccupation with enforced as well as elected exile. The essays evince clear-sighted awareness of the shifting political and cultural borders of postcolonial nations and the displacements brought about by international strife. Of particular note is Mary Grover’s essay on Rumer Godden’s status as a so-called middlebrow novelist (pp. 23–38). Grover’s cannily angled account should be construed alongside Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, which contains a detailed account of the interwar obsession with ‘significant soil’ (p. 10), space, and place manifested through the writings of so-called ‘Neo-Romantic authors’ such as the Powys brothers. Harris’s project reminds us that these writers’ environmental concerns have their origin as much in the debates around public health as they do in those about husbandry, garden cities, and preservation in the interwar years. Harris is probing on E.M. Forster’s Howards End and its delineation of ‘the rootlessness of the middle classes’ (p. 54). Alexandra Harris also contributed an essay on ‘Seaside Ceremonies: Coastal Rites in Twentieth-Century Art’ to Feidel and Harris, eds., Modernism on Sea (pp. 227–43). The seventeen contributors to this volume of essays reflect upon and redefine the role of myriad British coastal resorts as creative hubs between 1900 and 1945. Deborah Parsons’ essay ‘The Sitwells on the Sands’ (pp. 70–83) appraises the importance of Scarborough’s social terrain in the Sitwell brothers’ autobiographies, for both ‘their self-narrated myths’ of aesthetic provenance and ‘the location of those myths within a seemingly halcyon lost world’ (p. 71). Parson is discerning on the verbal texture of Osbert Sitwell’s satirical novella Before the Bombardment [1926], in which the seaside resort operates as a ‘metaphor for the destruction of the Victorian age’ and the ‘political complacency that led up to it’ (p. 74). This essay collection is an engaging companion piece to Cianci et al., eds. Transits, and gestures towards the magisterial potency of the sea and seafaring in Conrad’s fictional and autobiographical writings. However, some contributors are less clear as to whether aesthetic modernism’s obsession with the seaside—such as Virginia Woolf’s evocation of the austere Cornish coastline—was aggressively forward-looking or marked by waves and currents of elegiac nostalgia. Postcolonial theorists mindful of J.B. Priestley’s 1925 tribute to a Conrad who ‘knew the tropics better than he knew any other locality’, in particular ‘the Indian Ocean and Java’, should consult Aparna Vaidik’s Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History. This chronicle of the Andamans’ colonization—and their early twentieth-century rehabilitation as a nationalist enclave—presents the Indian Ocean as a space of decree and deviancy in richly allusive literary as well as legal narratives. Vaidik’s punctilious ‘unravelling’ of a history of ‘colonial spatio-geographical
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imaginings’ (p. 4), as well as the complex cultural forces engendered by exiles, political prisoners, and diasporic communities, is a timely intervention given that Wasifiri is planning a special edition dedicated to ‘Indian Oceans’ in June 2011, while Columbia University Press is set to publish An Indian Ocean Literary Anthology in 2012. Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea examines a poetics of maritime fiction that illumines not only Conrad’s deep knowledge of sea literature but also his arraignment of the ‘contradictions’ underpinning ‘late capitalist modernity’ (p. 234). Cohen’s perspicacious book should be scrutinized alongside Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea [2002] and Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture [2002]. Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance argues for the complexity of Conrad’s abiding engagement with the often belittled romance genre. Conrad is presented in this persuasive book as an author who is radically ambivalent about popular modes such as the adventure story. In spite, or perhaps because, of this ambivalence, Conrad infuses romance conventions with a philosophical gravitas and a persistent concern with the malign operations of imperialist ideology. Baxter’s detailed alertness to nuance and semantic ambiguity comes through particularly strongly in chapters on Conrad’s unjustly neglected narratives, especially The Rover [1923]. Korte et al., eds., Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture contains a thoroughly absorbing essay on Conrad’s Under Western Eyes by Christiane Bimberg (pp. 49–65). Sharply focused in its analysis, the essay weighs intercultural East–West encounters and the often ambiguous ideological positions posed by this text. Bimberg underscores the difficulty of ‘translating’ Russian ‘problems and peculiarities’ for a Western readership (p. 62). Richard Niland’s Conrad and History parses the subject of the nation in Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. Niland presents Conrad as a writer whose belief in an inherited Polish national identity was complicated by an increasingly sceptical and sardonic attitude towards modern nationalism in European and Latin American contexts. Niland’s most perceptive arguments relate to Conrad’s frequently misconstrued late novels, especially Suspense [1925] and its evocation of French military and cultural history. Like Niland, Peters, ed., A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad, also prioritizes Conrad’s keen fascination with competing concepts of nationalism, the status of the foreign outsider, and the cultural connotations of a return to the native. Andrea White’s carefully poised contribution on ‘Conrad and Modernism’ (pp. 163–96) does a fine job of arguing how Conrad’s works both infuse and benefit from the emergence of Anglo-American literary modernism. Cambridge University Press published Joseph Conrad’s Last Essays in 2010. Bringing together work composed from 1890 to 1924, the nineteen pieces collected in the posthumously published Last Essays [1926] function as a ‘primer’ to Conrad’s eclectic interests and to the varieties of his prose style. This edition, supported by an extensive textual apparatus, includes reminiscences, reviews, and essays on the sea and politics, as well as several miscellaneous items, including Conrad’s ‘Congo Diary’ and the other
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notebook he kept in Africa in 1890. This reviewer was pleased to note that early drafts of several essays are published here for the first time, making this authoritative critical edition a major contribution to Conrad studies. John Attridge’s ‘ ‘‘The Yellow-Dog Thing’’: Joseph Conrad, Verisimilitude, and Professionalism’ (ELH 77:ii[2010] 267–96) argues that Conrad’s practice of verisimilitude is geared towards ‘securing the reader’s trust’ (p. 267). Figured in this manner, verisimilitude emerges, according to Attridge’s probing analysis, as a crucial ‘term’ in the ‘equation’ linking Conrad’s literary tactics to aesthetic modernism, on the one hand, and to ‘the mass market’ on the other (pp. 267–8). Attridge skilfully reads Georg Simmel, H.G. Wells, and other contemporary sources to underscore the centrality of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ to the profession of authorship at ‘the dawn of mass society’ (p. 267). Ryan Bishop and John Phillips’s Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception contains a searching and subtle appraisal of Conrad’s The End of the Tether. They contend that Conrad’s novella looks to the ‘end(s) of colonialism and the stark conditions’ of a coming postcolonial South-East Asia, already dominated by the circulations of ‘global capital’ (p. 119–22). Bishop and Phillips demonstrate that Conrad’s tale offers a highly ambiguous account not only of the changing ‘role of the navy’ as steam makes ships more strategically efficacious, but also the ‘inextricable economic dimensions of military logistics in both colonial and postcolonial contexts’ (p. 120). Saverio Tomaiuolo’s In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres invites us to ponder textual connections between M.E. Braddon’s debut novel The Trail of the Serpent [1861] and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (pp. 106–7). This is a timely intervention given the recent surge of critical interest in Conrad’s reimagining of sensational tropes even as he impeaches the social, political, and ethical relevance of this genre. Conrad’s supposed distaste for the melodramatic and sensational facets of ‘bestsellerdom’ also features in Anna Vaninskaya’s William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914, whose opening gambit canvasses the emergence of what the protagonist of W.H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age [1922] calls the ‘fantastic romance’ genre between 1880 and the outbreak of the Great War. Vaninskaya also supplies lively readings of H.G. Wells’s 1909 succe`s de scandale, Ann Veronica, and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists [1914], showing each as a peculiarly problematic example of ‘ideological heterogeneity’ (p. 148). This nimbly crafted research prompts us to think about the challenges of labelling, and how sensational, fantastic, and other ‘popular’ modes become a phantom presence in novels by more established modernist writers. Urmila Seshagiri’s interdisciplinary study Race and the Modernist Imagination contains strong chapters on Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, and Rebecca West. Seshagiri postulates that the key concept of ‘race’ supplied these writers with a cluster of figurations, settings, and plot trajectories that enriched a culture of artistic, social, and sexual experimentation. While there are intelligent discussions of familiar texts such
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as Heart of Darkness, Seshagiri also addresses Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu tales and Vita Sackville-West’s travelogues. Michael Mayer’s ‘When Trees Become Kings: Nature as a Decolonizing Force in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (in Volkmann et al, eds., Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, pp. 179–88) seeks to challenge ‘the long-established understanding’ of Conrad’s text as a depiction of redoubtable, questing Europeans and demoralized indigenous tribes (p. 180). Mayer concludes through a close examination of the ‘imagery of landscape’ that Conrad undercuts the ‘imperial power-relations’ between the colonized and the colonizer (pp. 180–1). Finn Fordham’s ‘I do, I undo, I redo’: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves positions Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a ‘complex narrative process’ in which the ‘self is hazily located within a vision of radical disorientation of a kind emblematic of modernism’ (p. 142). This conception of a fictional self is thrown into relief by the ‘wide range of Conrad’s experience of writing processes’ (pp. 142–3), from the ‘mists’ of writer’s block at one end of the spectrum to an energized immersion in which the self and the crippling difficulties of composition are temporarily set aside. While Fordham presents a Conrad who could write speedily ‘in instalments’, reacting to editorial deadlines supplied by Blackwell’s Magazine, Forster’s A Passage to India’s composition ‘spans the period’ of the Great War, which is frequently construed as the ‘prime cause or the symptom’ of a social ‘breakdown’ which in turn mirrors the ‘fragmentary artistic practices’ synonymous with the modern movement (p. 179). Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy’s ‘ ‘‘A Choice of Nightmares’’: The Ecology of Heart of Darkness’ (MFS 55:iii[2009] 620–48) positions Nature at ‘the heart’ of Heart of Darkness (p. 620). McCarthy shows that Conrad’s 1899 text confronts and processes ‘modernity’s destructive alienation’ from a verdant milieu against the ‘backdrop’ of the Congo’s ecological disintegration (p. 622). McCarthy is persuasive in showing how Heart of Darkness supplies a scalding perception of landscape that subverts the ‘colonizing subject’s confident assertions of power’, and ‘simultaneously, forecasts the brewing storm of ecological catastrophe’ (p. 620). David Punter’s Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy offers a strikingly impressive account of the ‘sacrificed boy-hero’ in Conrad’s The Secret Agent and how the ‘attainment’ of heightened perception can only be posited on a ‘thwarting, or at least a stepping aside from, the processes of maturation’ (p. 220). Punter’s enterprise is adroit and supple in its thinking and expression. He works his way through a complex set of relations and standpoints; he maintains an assured grip on both luminous textual detail and broader patterns of the core thesis. Adam Barrows’s ‘ ‘‘The Shortcomings of Timetables’’: Greenwich, Modernism, and the Limits of Modernity’ (MFS 56:ii[2010] 262–89) explores Conrad’s The Secret Agent in terms of ‘a seamless space-time map’ and the Greenwich Royal Observatory as an ‘international symbol of British imperial power’ (p. 262). Revealing the ‘linkage’ of Greenwich Mean Time to regimes of power, knowledge, and commerce, Conrad endeavoured to dislocate narrative temporality from its enlistment in the imperial project of world
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standard time. The thesis is elaborated with diligent attention to semantic ambiguities, as well as alertness to the ways in which time-obsessed fictions can calibrate and test the very limits of selfhood. The telling detail in Barrows’s reading of Conrad’s text is matched by a confident and committed approach to a diverse range of secondary scholarship. Peter Lancelot Mallios’s Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity supplies a richly textured ‘literary and cultural history’ of the modern American fashioning of Conrad as a ‘master literary figure between 1914 and 1939’ (p. ix). Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, Mallios argues that his fiction functions as a complex lens through which to ponder anxious debates about North American mores and the global marketplace; contested chronicles of the nation; formations of the democratic self; notions of civic responsibility in times of war and peace. Mallios is especially convincing in charting the historical and political issues that made Conrad’s oeuvre resonant to a diverse array of prominent American authors, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright. Horlacher et al., eds., Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present offers a series of conceptually well-wrought chapters that underline the obsession with ‘barbarity’, insular atavisms, and violations of ethical norms in Conrad’s major fiction. Russell West-Pavlov’s Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary Deixis contains a theoretically probing analysis of Conrad’s poetics of place in which the ‘self-propelling but empty’ human subject is crucial (pp. 58–100). Pavlov-West pays especial attention to Marlow’s ‘nightmarish odyssey’ in Heart of Darkness, canvassing the ‘dialogue with place’ initiated by the noisy steamer’s navigation of the river’s treacherous ‘snags and shoals’ (p. 35). Todd Kuchta’s Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present expands ‘the parameters’ of suburban narrative by canvassing fictional and journalistic accounts of metropolitan hinterlands that ‘congeal with the slum’ (p. 12). In a percipient chapter on ‘Outposts of Progress: Conrad’s Suburban Speculation’ (pp. 84–114), Kuchta explores how ‘imperial expansion’ generated a ‘counter-current of reverse colonization’, one that brought anxieties of racial dissolution ‘home to Britain’ (p. 86). In The Mirror of the Sea [1906] and The Secret Agent [1907], Conrad evokes London as ‘infiltrated from beyond or regressing’ into a primordial wilderness (p. 86). Kuchta is also shrewd on the ‘ideological and stylistic affinities’ between the Edwardian Liberals C.F.G. Masterman and E.M. Forster (p. 125). Masterman’s trenchant contributions to the Independent Review energized Forster’s fictional forays into the suburban ‘abyss’ as a state of ‘social non-existence’, a geographical backwater and cultural cul-de-sac (pp. 125–37). Gudrun Kauhl’s ‘Certain Problems on Reading Chance’ (Conradian 35:ii[2010] 30–45) weighs Conrad’s experimental narrative techniques, while William Freedman, ‘Conrad and the Anxiety of Knowledge’ (Conradian 35:ii[2010] 1–12) ponders the treatment of knowledge and truth in selected fictions, especially their complex relationship with images of sickness and terror. Other Conrad-related essays of especial note in 2010 include: Paul Byrne Johnson, ‘Heart of Darkness: The Dream-Sensation and Literary Impressionism Revisited’ (Conradian 35:ii[2010] 13–29); Andrew Francis,
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‘ ‘‘You always leave us for your own ends’’: Marriage and Concubinage in Conrad’s Asian Fiction’ (Conradian 35:ii[2010] 46–62); Allen MacDuffie’s ‘Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy’ (ELH 76:i[2009] 75–98); Laurence Davies’s ‘ ‘‘Don’t you think I am a lost soul?’’: Conrad’s Early Stories and the Magazines’ (Conradiana 41:i[2009] 7–28); Scott A. Cohen’s ‘Imperialism Tempered by Expediency: Conrad and The Outlook’ (Conradiana 41:i[2009] 48–66); and Robert Hampson’s ‘Conrad and the Illustrated London News’ (Conradiana 41:i[2009] 67–87). Rau, ed., Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War includes Christine Berberich’s incisive essay, ‘ ‘‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’: The First World War and the (Ab)uses of the Pastoral Tradition’ (pp. 26–45). Berberich looks at the dynamics of propaganda as well as contested ideologies of Englishness using Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man. Sassoon’s text deconstructs the ‘myth of the prelapsarian rural idyll of the English countryside once and for all’ (p. 27). Patricia Pulham’s contribution on ‘Violence and the Pacifist Body in Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations’ (pp. 46–63) offers a resonant view of Lee’s little-read allegorical work of 1915, and the revised version contained in her ‘most comprehensive intellectual response’ to the First World War (p. 46) in Satan the Waster [1920]. Regenia Gagnier’s Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859–1920 contains a trenchant chapter on New Women and crusading female aesthetes of the early twentieth century. Gagnier considers the socialist individualist Edith Lees (1861–1916), whose novel Attainment [1909] permits us to view women as both ‘active shapers of individualist ideology and the object of theories of instinct’ (p. 62). Faith Binckes’s elegantly structured new book Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading ‘Rhythm’ 1910–14 calibrates the years of early modernism immediately preceding the Great War. Binckes gauges how experimental literary subcultures evolved by focusing on two little magazines excluded from orthodox histories of this period of seismic social and political unrest: Rhythm and the Blue Review. Binckes’s historically informed arguments offer lively insight into how Katherine Mansfield discovered and refined a narrative voice with which to capture the riddling ambiguities of the colonial condition (pp. 97–127). Marius Turda’s Modernism and Eugenics not only supplies a cogent summary of the technologies through which the human body was redefined eugenically by an array of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940, but also affords valuable contextual data for scholars fascinated by interwar women writers such as Mary Butts, whose fiction is centrally concerned with issues of racial hygiene and social cleansing. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation 1919–1939 delineates the crisis of post-war masculinity by canvassing an interwar period whose intellectual climate of stored-up disaster, its rhetoric and posture of threat, were shaped by public intellectuals and novelists located between Hampstead and Bloomsbury. Overy is shrewd in his analysis of the philosophy of the contraception activist Marie Stopes, whose writings are reflected in many interwar British novels. Stopes was also a eugenicist, and her theories
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harmonize with a literary era obsessed, according to Overy, with degenerationist discourses. Ina Haberman’s Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, Du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness effectively contends that current debates about globalization and the challenges of multiculturalism were powerfully shaped in the interwar period, with its myriad literary negotiations of regional as well as national belonging. Haberman posits that Englishness as a mode of ‘collective and cultural identity’ can be gauged as a ‘symbolic form’ (pp. 3–8). This claim is borne out by Haberman’s scrupulous attentiveness to stylistic and narrative tactics in J.B. Priestley’s 1929 novel The Good Companions, a text which won him international acclaim (p. 47) and whose imaginative excavation of native soil betrays a principled ambivalence about Englishness, melding heady commitment and cagey retreat. Haberman attends well to this misconstrued text, permitting it to disclose its enigmatic ambivalences as he adroitly unpicks them. Ashton and Kean, eds., People and their Pasts: Public History Today and McCalman and Pickering eds., Historical Re-enactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn both provide conceptually ambitious material for scholars of interwar literary culture, especially those alert to Sarah Henstra’s arguments regarding The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction. Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns also canvasses this period and its competing understandings of regional lore with intellectual verve. Harris’s punctiliously researched, accessible, and often droll account enables us to view E.M. Forster’s fictional obsession with the animistic and esoteric undercurrents of native soil from a fresh perspective. The illuminating opening gambit of Arias and Pulham, eds., Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past also raises important questions about the literary representation of spatial experience, specifically an English cultural geography of atavistic, totemic, and occult formations. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde posits an innovative way of construing the trajectory of modernist art and literature by correcting many existing surveys which describe the early phases of the movement as a principally European cultural phenomenon. There is much to say about the contexts and discipline of art appreciation in this epoch, and Arrowsmith provides an eloquent account of how Asian, African, and Pacific curios powerfully and overtly influenced seminal writers via exhibitions and museums both public and private, especially in London. Modernism and the Museum supplies a crisp and convincing account of Ford Madox Ford and Richard Aldington (pp. 128–63), whose novelistic techniques reflected a keen responsiveness to the rarefied holdings in the British Museum. This cultural institution emerges from Arrowsmith’s thesis as the West’s most vital ‘hub’ of transcultural aesthetic interaction and negotiation during the early twentieth century. Cathrine O. Frank’s Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925 contains a refreshingly sensitive chapter on ‘the burden of inheritance’ in Edwardian fiction (pp. 135–62). Frank addresses how Arnold Bennett’s and John Galsworthy’s writings dissect and to some extent exorcise
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the oppressive residues of ‘Victorian clutter’ (p. 147). Frank meditates compellingly on the impulses and outcomes of the ‘bequest’ in Edwardian literature, especially the circulation of ‘material property’ (p. 147) which invites close comparison with the sustained treatment of inheritance in Hepburn, ed., Troubled Legacies [2007] The year 2010 saw the welcome publication in paperback of Kathy Phillips’s Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature, which contains an incisive chapter on the ‘dread’ of the ‘effeminate’ male soldier in British Great War fiction (pp. 41–84). Phillips is savvy in focusing on literary texts which merit more punctilious attention by cultural historians, such as Wyndham Lewis’s ‘The French Poodle’ [1916], Richard Aldington’s ‘The Case of Lieutenant Hall’ [1930], and Mary Butts’s ‘Speed the Plough’ [1923]. The shell-shocked veteran in Butts’s cryptic story seems to cherish a ‘modernist ideal of beautiful patterning’ yet this attention to ‘sleek surfaces’ is an increasingly desperate attempt to mask the ‘torn flesh of bodies at war’ (p. 29). Phillips’s early chapters bring together vivid context with strikingly good and detailed attention to these texts. She challenges the critical field, utilizes memorable phrasing, and deploys myriad observations that signal an informed perception of publishing contexts, while maintaining a keen ear to the fictions’ aesthetic and ideological dynamics. Phillips’s thesis should be scrutinized alongside Gabriel Koureas’s Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 [2008] and Jessica Meyers’s Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain [2009]. David Trotter’s The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film appraises ‘British First World War Combat Fiction’ (pp. 97–113). In this chapter Trotter situates phobia not as a pathological state but as a complex historical entity that offers itself as a dynamic aesthetic and political resource. Although Trotter is a pungent and persuasive guide through the textual intricacies of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End [1924–8], he is at least as acute when gauging unjustly neglected Great War texts such as A.P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle [1919], A.D. Gristwood’s The Somme [1927], Liam O’Flaherty’s Return of the Brute [1929], and James Hanley’s The German Prisoner [1930]. Jaffe and Goldman, eds., Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity Modernity Culture sets forth with intellectual verve how celebrity culture and modernism are ‘mutually determining phenomena’ (p. 3). This lively essay collection demonstrates that an abiding fascination with celebrity has radically altered ‘older cultural formations’ and phenomena such as the mass market, the patrician elite, and ‘hero worship’, as well as their representation in fiction from this period. The concerns of this volume intersect with and amplify the findings of Sean Latham in ‘Am I A Snob?’: Modernism and the Novel [2003], which interrogates the intricate ‘commercial mechanisms’ that upheld ‘highbrow modernism as a repository of intellectual sophistication’ (p. 3). Alexander C.T. Geppert’s Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-deSie`cle Europe thoroughly charts the interstitial zones of modernity and especially Ford Madox Ford’s delineation of The Soul of London [1905] as ‘a permanent world’s fair’ (p. 238). Geppert explicates the goals and ambitions,
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developing techniques and execution, of imperial expositions held in fin-de-sie`cle London, Paris, and Berlin. This study, with its adroit melding of careful close reading and broad spatial analysis, should be read alongside David Pinder’s Visions of the City [2005] and Nicholas Freeman’s Conceiving the City [2007]. Sondeep Kandola’s Vernon Lee is an introductory critical study to a writer whose cosmopolitan panache both foreshadowed and contributed to the aesthetic experimentation synonymous with literary modernism. Kandola’s crisp account conveys a vivid sense of Lee’s ‘dislocated’ or ‘interstitial’ national identity (p. 3) and how a perception of biting estrangement informs her reaction to the cultures she sought so sedulously to document in both her fictional and journalistic writings. This emphasis links Lee to the neglected works of Alice Meynell, Anna Wickham, and Charlotte Mew, whose story ‘A White Night’ [1903] is, according the Elaine Showalter, a ‘feminist counterpart’ to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As Joseph Bristow argues in ‘Charlotte Mew’s Aftereffects’ (Mo/Mo 16:ii[2009] 255–80), the work of these women writers ‘confound[s] the critical frameworks’ that link their work either to the most prominent publications of the ‘fin-de-sie`cle decadence, on the one hand, and emergent literary modernism, on the other hand’ (p. 257). Indeed they draw ‘direct attention’ to the ‘disorderly modernity’ that both infuses their art and estranges their troubled speakers, calling into question ‘critical and cultural imperatives that try to fix anyone or anything in time’ (p. 258). Lori M. Campbell’s Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy provides a careful contextual reading of William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel The House on the Borderland. Campbell shows how the portal functions as a symbolic device in this text to divulge the ‘effects of increasing female pressure’ on a beleaguered ‘male status quo’ (p. 17). Bray and Sturch, eds., Charles Williams and his Contemporaries, examines Williams’s ‘supernatural thrillers’ of the interwar period, especially War in Heaven [1930] and The Place of the Lion [1931]. This international symposium also raises broader questions about what Lee Oser calls the ‘clash between a dogmatically relativist type’ of aesthetic modernism and the proponents of a Christian humanism such as G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien. Its contents reflect not only the extraordinarily wide range of Williams’s writing, but also the many contacts he made both personally and through his work at Oxford University Press. Barbara Newman’s ‘Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence’, (Spiritus 9:i[2010] 1–26) also gauges the legacy of Williams, paying especial attention to his role as an ‘esoteric Christian teacher’ and ‘a practicing Rosicrucian’ (pp. 1–2). Newman concentrates on his key doctrine of ‘co-inherence’ and ‘corresponding prayer technique’ known as ‘substituted love’ (pp. 3–4). Newman’s essay also traces Williams’s familiarity with ritual magic and how this knowledge inflects the verbal texture of War in Heaven. Julia Stapleton’s superb critical edition of G.K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913 attests to Chesterton’s signal importance in the Edwardian literary milieu. This multi-volume enterprise contains approximately 750 items, including brief articles, literary reviews, and correspondence, that have previously only been available in
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archival, microfilm form. Chesterton’s book reviews supply acerbic assessments of new biographies and memoirs, as well as reveal an increasingly truculent investment in democratic and Christian issues. Chesterton and his correspondents were engaged in most of the key debates of the time, such as education, eugenics, imperialism, temperance reform, women’s suffrage, and foreign alliances. Julia Stapleton’s highly perceptive chapter on Chesterton as one of the foremost ‘radical right intellectuals’ of the interwar period (in Copsey and Olechnowicz eds., Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period, pp. 224–44) positions The Napoleon of Notting Hill as a text committed to a ‘high and heroic ideal of democracy’ (p. 228). Stapleton also illustrates Chesterton’s rendering of the Jewish entrepreneur as an ‘unpatriotic conspirator’ whose machinations expose the fragility of a liberal, secular democracy when faced by a ruthless ‘new aristocracy of wealth’ (pp. 228–9). This fine chapter should be scrutinized alongside Jonathan Freedman’s The Temple of Culture [2002] and Maren Tova Linett’s Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness [2007], which show how the concept of the Jew functioned as a notable means of authorial self-fashioning at a time of acute social ferment. Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channelling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 examines Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys [1903] in terms of the occult and ‘automatic female behaviour’ (p. 143). Extending Pamela Thurschwell’s sterling research on secretarial agency in early twentieth-century literature, Galvan positions the heroine as a figure whose secretarial naivety acts as a ‘deliberate pretence’ and as ‘a way not just of denying knowledge but at the same time of proactively gaining it— in other words, of becoming a detective’ (p. 143). Galvan concludes persuasively that the ‘mediating woman’ in this novel evinces a ‘complicated knowledge position’ to veil her objectives of ‘abetting others’ quests’. Indeed, the ‘cliche´ around women’s typing’ exposes ‘a space for a productive duplicity that silently queries the cliche´ itself’ (pp. 145–6). Barnett and Trowbridge, eds., Acts of Memory: The Victorian and Beyond, and John Morton’s Tennyson among the Modernists variously engage with questions of literary influence and the degree to which aesthetic modernism failed to exorcise completely the unquiet spectres of Victorian literary culture, especially Tennyson. Malgorzata Milczarek’s ‘Landscape of Life: Past and Present in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent’ (in Barnett and Trowbridge, eds., pp. 97–108) contends that recollection of the ‘Victorian era’ assumes the ‘form of Lady Slane’s memory of her life, which elicits the contrast between her dream of becoming an innovative artist and the less glamorous actuality of domestic and maternal duties (p. 107). Morton’s book pays close attention to the impact of Tennyson’s poetry on Conrad’s writing, especially Heart of Darkness, ‘The Return’ [1898] and ‘Youth’ [1902]. Morton also gauges Forster’s ironic questioning of ‘Tennyson’s output’ (p. 42). Finally, Rae Beth Gordon, in Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France, explores the signal impact of music-hall and other vernacular modernisms on twentieth-century avant-garde projects such as surrealism and Dada.
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(b) James Joyce Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s long-mooted edition of Finnegans Wake was published in March 2010, twenty-one months in advance of the expiration of copyright on Joyce’s works within the European Union. The fact that its publication proceeded without approval from the notoriously litigious Joyce Estate and yet preceded the expiration of copyright explains some of its immediate peculiarities. The edition, published by the Houyhnhnm Press (an imprint of Lilliput Press), appears in two deluxe limitations, the more affordable of which costs £250 (a leather-bound edition sells for £750). It was printed at the Stamperia Valdonga in Verona and its presentation is indeed lovely and even merits the exorbitant price. The strategy for producing a deluxe and expensive edition as a means of testing a potentially litigious publishing climate recalls Joyce’s own plan with the first edition of Ulysses (which was also reprised by Rhein-Verlag with the Goyert translation of Ulysses in 1929). A more affordable version of Rose and O’Hanlon’s edition, published by Penguin, is promised for early 2012, when the copyright dispensation will be unambiguously amenable. Rose and O’Hanlon’s edition is not actually the first edited version of Finnegans Wake. For their Dutch translation (Athenaeum [2002]), Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes were permitted to emend the translated text in accordance with their own editorial investigation of transmissional departures in the manuscript dossier. While they did not alter the original text presented en face, they were permitted to include an appendix that listed all their emendations along with corresponding references to the manuscript reproductions in the James Joyce Archive. Rose and O’Hanlon’s edition includes a slim second volume with essays by Seamus Deane, Hans Walter Gabler, and David Greetham, and an afterword by the editors. Unfortunately, none of this additional material actually provides much in the way of specific information about Rose and O’Hanlon’s editorial rationale and methodology. Indeed, the Houyhnhnm website (www.houyhnhnmpress.com) provides more and better information to explain the novelty of this edition, although it still falls short of an explicit definition of the editorial rationale. By contrast, Rose’s controversial 1997 ‘Reader’s Edition’ of Ulysses (with a second edition in 2004 published by Houyhnhnm, revised to accord with the judgment issued in the 2001 court case initiated by the Joyce Estate against that edition) was much more expansive in terms of delineating and explicating its editorial rationale. The most controversial aspect of Rose’s Ulysses edition (Macmillan [1997]) was his decision to emend what he called ‘textual faults’ in addition to errors that were perpetrated in the transmission of the text from one draft to the next. According to Rose, ‘A textual fault . . . can be suspected when one realizes that there is ‘‘something wrong’’ with a particular sentence in the isotext, not simply where a word is misspelled but more subtly where the sentence is saying something that it should not, where the logic of the narrative is inexplicably broken’ (p. xvii). This obviously grants the editor tremendous licence to meddle with a text, and Rose’s Ulysses contained many dramatic emendations that lacked any documentary support, such as his reworking of
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Bloom’s budget in ‘Ithaca’. The question, then, is if his Wake is radically emended in a similar fashion. Since Rose does not provide a synoptic version of his emendations (as Gabler has comprehensively done with his edition of Ulysses) and since there is no substantive account of his editorial rationale—omissions that can be attributed to the copyright climate—any detailed review of his edition has to begin with a full collation of his edition against the first edition and the full manuscript archive in order to avoid being merely impressionistic. In effect, one would have to reverse-engineer Rose and O’Hanlon’s editorial work in order to judge it, and such work is beyond the scope of the present review. In terms of a bullet-point appraisal, unlike Rose’s Ulysses, Rose and O’Hanlon’s Wake does not venture much into the realm of correcting textual faults, even though the temptation to do so is presumably much greater with the Wake. This is, however, not to say that there are no such emendations. But, in general, Rose and O’Hanlon are much more conservative here and, for the most part, limit themselves to emendations that can be documented in the Wake’s commodious and complex manuscript dossier (which includes for them its notebooks as well as drafts). As with Gabler’s Ulysses, there is a debatable preference for earlier readings. Many of Rose and O’Hanlon’s emendations follow from Bindervoet and Henke’s work; however, each edition contains emendations not present in the other (at a panel on Rose and O’Hanlon’s edition at the 2010 Joyce Symposium in Prague, Henke was quite laudatory about Rose and O’Hanlon’s work and admitted that he and his colleague had simply missed many of the emendations Rose and O’Hanlon had made). Certainly, this edition is not perfect and definitive (no edition of any text, especially not the Wake, could ever presume to be). Rose and O’Hanlon’s edition is thus the first salvo in what will be a proliferation of new editions in the years following the expiration of copyright. As with any new edition, some changes are incontrovertibly sound and others are contestable to varying degrees. It does Rose and O’Hanlon no disservice to say that many of their emendations are debatable, but the debates are and will be enlightening. Their Wake is a significant contribution, one which will definitely supplement the original Faber edition, certainly as an adjunct and perhaps even, eventually, as a (but not the) replacement. When Rose and O’Hanlon are eventually able to present their full hypertext edition, which served as the basis for their editorial work, their contribution will be even more resounding. The importance of manuscript work and genetic criticism also informs Michael Groden’s book ‘Ulysses’ in Focus (the title echoes that of his earlier work, ‘Ulysses’ in Progress). Following in the style of Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, Groden presents an intellectual autobiography that recounts his personal engagement with Joyce over the years, telling the story of how he became a Joycean and, specifically, a Joycean genetic critic. The mixture of the personal with the intellectual is certainly an apposite approach for a writer like Joyce. Groden also includes two chapters on the textual genesis of the ‘Cyclops’ episode that draw on the new manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002, thereby updating his discussion from his earlier book. In this, his book offers a conjoined telling of the genesis of Ulysses along with the genesis of a Joycean.
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Karen Lawrence’s Who’s Afraid of James Joyce? revisits her earlier and seminal book The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ by reprinting verbatim four chapters along with nine new essays. The first suite of new material is in a section entitled ‘Joyce, Women and Feminism’. One of these essays covers the emergence of feminist thought within Joyce studies and is necessarily autobiographical, as Lawrence was the first female president of the International James Joyce Foundation. The volume Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined, edited by Tim Conley, is also a revisionary effort, in this case a re-examination of Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Conley’s volume gathers together fourteen essays on each of the essays in the 1929 Exagmination in order to reappraise their significance and perhaps continued relevance in Joyce studies. Beckett’s essay on Work in Progress has long eclipsed all the others in the Exagmination and so it is refreshing to see each of the essays taken seriously on its own merits (and flaws). As with almost any edited volume, not all the essays are of the same high standard and, indeed, the same very much applies to the Exagmination. However, Conley’s volume, both collectively and in terms of its individual contributions, is much more critically focused than its predecessor. Highlights include Dirk Van Hulle on Frank Budgen’s essay and Vicki Mahaffey on Robert Sage’s (both of which being previously neglected contributions to the Exagmination). On graduating from college Joyce (briefly) considered a career in medicine. In Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, Vike Martina Plock cogently argues how this belated career was never completely abandoned and that ‘Joyce’s aesthetics developed alongside his synchronized interest in medicine’ (p. 3). Through thematically organized chapters, she presents a compelling new perspective on Joyce’s works (although Finnegans Wake is largely neglected). Plock argues that Joyce was not just a literary modernist but also a medical modernist, in that his works engage with and reconfigure a range of contemporary medical discourses. While Joyce’s engagement with medical discourses has, with only a few exceptions, been a largely neglected topic within Joyce criticism, his engagement with popular culture has been well mined and explored. R. Brandon Kershner’s new book, The Culture of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, explores the resonances of various manifestations of popular culture (novels, magazines, advertisements, fashion, and photography) within Ulysses and how these affected the emergence of modernism both in general and in the specific context of the colonial backwater of early twentieth-century Ireland. Kershner’s meticulous research has uncovered much that is new, and his discussion of Eugen Sandow and advertisement and self-promotion is especially interesting. In his provocative new book, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion, Geert Lernout excavates a previously neglected discursive skein in Joyce’s texts, freethinking. Lernout traces the evolution of Joyce’s anti-clericalism against a background of various liberal and secular movements within late nineteenth-century thought by locating patterns of specific reference throughout his works as well as through educing broader conceptual affinities. Lernout mounts a strong case for Joyce’s persistent atheism, and although the
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argument is unconvincing in places, overall his book offers a persuasive revision of Joyce’s religious revisionism. Seemingly no year can pass without yet another addition to the canon of scholarly companions to Joyce, and 2010 was no exception, with Sean Latham’s volume James Joyce, published for the Irish Writers in Their Times series of the Irish Academic Press. The volume is divided into the typical range of essays, with offerings on Joyce’s biography, his literary context, individual essays on all the major works, and a single essay on the minor works, as well as theoretical and thematic overviews. There is little in the way of groundbreaking work here, but all the essays are, at a minimum, stolid and all the essays on the major works should be helpful to student readers. In particular Michael Groden’s essay on Ulysses and Tim Conley’s essay on Finnegans Wake are accessible introductions to the complexities of Joyce’s later works. The eleventh volume of Joyce Studies in Italy, James Joyce Metamorphosis and Re-writing, edited by Franca Ruggieri, consists of papers from the James Joyce Italian Foundation’s 2009 Graduate Student Conference in Rome supplemented by various new contributions. While there is little thematic consistency throughout the volume, the range of essays, especially those from graduate students and young scholars, is impressive. In particular, Federico Sabatini’s essay on Joyce’s use of Bruno’s theory of temporality in the Wake and Paul Fagan’s essay on amnesia in the Wake are significant contributions to Wake scholarship. The volume is rounded off with solid contributions from more senior Joyceans, such as Richard Brown and Jacques Aubert. The final essay, by Enrico Terrinoni, on the humour of Ulysses, is a well-considered essay written with an appropriately light touch. Janine Utell’s book James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire offers a reading of love and marriage throughout Joyce’s works that does not succumb to the cliche´s of the marriage plot. Instead, she follows from the ethics of Emmanuel Le´vinas (and from Marian Eide’s Le´vinas-informed reading of Joyce in Ethical Joyce) and construes love as a recognition and maintaining of both individuals’ alterity. Utell begins with an analysis of Joyce and Nora’s correspondence and then moves to a reading of Katherine Parnell’s memoir of her relationship with Parnell, a relationship which she posits not unconvincingly as a role model for Joyce’s ideas of love and marriage. Utell’s analysis of Ulysses is, in particular, convincingly argued and neatly develops a reading of the Blooms’ marriage, however flawed, as one in which each partner’s identity and desires are acknowledged. David Vichnar’s book Joyce Against Theory is a comprehensive and useful survey even if its title promises something more provocative. It has been a commonplace within Joyce studies, as within literary studies in general, that the age of high theory has passed. This has led to any number of anxieties, such as wondering what would be the next ‘big thing’. Of course, rather than have any one theory be hegemonic—if only for a delimited period—the current situation is one of multiple coexisting perspectives. In this Vichnar’s book offers comprehensive genealogies of the development of various theoretical paradigms and their applications to Joyce. His overall orientation of taking a historicist approach to his analysis of Joycean theorizations is somewhat unexamined, but this weakness is more than compensated by his thoroughness
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(c) Virginia Woolf Molly Hite published two articles on Woolf in 2010. The first, ‘The Public Woman and the Modernist Turn: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Elizabeth Robins’s My Little Sister’ (Mo/Mo 17:iii[2010] 523–48), compares Woolf’s first novel and a 1913 ‘scandal novel’ by her ‘most evident [female] Edwardian antecedent’ (p. 524). While the comparison itself is based largely on grounds of thematic similarity, the structure of the essay allows Hite to make a number of valuable observations regarding The Voyage Out and its relationship to its Edwardian predecessors. Woolf’s novel, Hite argues, depends on an absence of ‘tonal cues’ which would assist readers in their assessment of ‘key phrases and passages, scenes and characters’ (p. 525). This absence complicates the process by which Rachel is both ‘translated . . . into the idiom of social relations’ and aborts this transformation through illness—‘the redemptive mode in which Rachel’s inviolability and integrity are preserved’ (pp. 536, 541). Thus the novel produces resolutely un-Edwardian ‘effects of political and ethical questioning, qualification, revision, indecision and indeterminacy’ (p. 543). In ‘Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway’ (Narrative 18:iii[2010] 249–75) Hite deploys this concept of tonal cues to a reading of Mrs Dalloway, exploring the ways in which their absence affects the novel’s ethical impact (p. 249). Hite’s most valuable observation is that ‘different selections from the tonal cues strewn through the text lead to incompatible readings’: the fact that critical opinion of characters in the novel
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and his adroit close readings. Of course, one problem with such a book is that it runs the risk of being out of date very soon and, indeed, there is nothing here on emerging theoretical tendencies in Joyce studies, such as possible worlds theory, ecocriticism, and the ethical turn evinced in some recent works (such as Utell’s). Finn Fordham’s book ‘I do I undo I redo’ is an example of comparative genetic studies. Fordham analyses the manuscripts and writing practices of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, E.M. Forster, Joyce, and Woolf as diverse manifestations of a model of a continual self-revising self-fashioning that is endemic to literary modernism. The brief chapter on Joyce focuses on ‘Circe’ and describes how its fragmented perspectives derive from a complex sequence of composition. This chapter, and indeed the book as a whole, are an essential addition to the corpus of Joycean genetic criticism. The Dublin James Joyce Journal continues to publish articles of note. Highlights of the third issue include an article by Frank Callanan that expertly traces out Joyce’s political development through his reading of the United Irishman. Joyce’s political position in terms of Irish nationalism is one of nuance, as Callanan ably demonstrates. Also of note is Vincent Deane’s article on the Prankquean in Finnegans Wake. In terms of other articles, Amanda Sigler’s ‘Joyce’s Ellmann’ (JoyceSA [2010] 3–70) offers a meticulous account of the construction of Ellmann’s still influential biography that indicates its biases and blind spots. In this, Sigler’s article is an advance on previous work by both Joseph Brooker (Joyce’s Critics) and Joseph Kelly (Our Joyce).
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varies so widely is attributable to Woolf’s systematic removal of textual aids to interpretation (p. 253). Rather than providing answers, Woolf’s novel enacts ‘the complexity along with the urgency of ethical and political questions’ (p. 254). The reader’s inability to reach authorized ethical judgements, Hite argues, leads to a ‘far-reaching positive ethical value’ (p. 266). A number of articles published in 2010 address the political implications of Woolf’s work. ‘Indifference, Identification, and Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light and Triumph of the Will, and Leontine Sagan’s Maedchen in Uniform’ (WomGY 26[2010] 73–96) by Jennifer Barker uses both biographical and critical interpretations of Reifenstahl to illustrate how the ‘women’s indifference’ proposed by Woolf in Three Guineas is a ‘problematic strategy of resistance’ (p. 75). Sagan’s Maedchen in Uniform, on the other hand, demonstrates how ‘Woolf’s theories on identification and desire as tactics for the disruption of fascist strategies of control’ are potentially more effective in the struggle against fascist ideology (p. 75). In ‘The Comedy of Nature: Darwinian Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’ (Mo/Mo 17:iii[2010] 639–67) Sam See explores the ways in which Woolf’s last novel ‘concentrates’ aesthetically, ethically, and politically ‘by shutting out . . . the self’s socially-constructed identity’ (p. 640). Through parodic discourse and what See describes as ‘concentrated camp’, Woolf challenges the sexist logic of ‘pseudo-Darwinian rhetoric’ and Nazi policies of eugenics with a ‘strange concatenation of humor and horror’ (pp. 645, 646, 642). The essay’s most interesting and controversial claim, however, is that the closing passages of the novel are ‘actually written by a queer character in the novel named Miss La Trobe’ and thus disrupt ‘the heteronormative telos of Isa and Giles’ sexual behavior’ (p. 649). While See admits that ‘the fact that La Trobe writes the play at [the] novel’s end is curiously overlooked in Woolf scholarship’, he unfortunately does little to justify what is by his own account a minority reading (p. 664). In ‘The Estrangement of Community in Between the Acts: A Play Embedded in a Novel’ (IJH 7:xi[2010] 1–10), another article focusing on Woolf’s last novel, Nicole Tabor carefully engages with both text and recent criticism to explore the ways in which Woolf’s novel challenges both the ‘phallocentric hegemony’ of generic classification and ‘a patriarchal generic law of drama’ through Miss La Trobe’s pageant (p. 2). Ultimately, Tabor suggests that La Trobe as an outsider ‘holds the shaman-like possibility for healing the fractured community during a time of violence and transition’ (p. 3). However, Tabor reminds us that the novel as a whole does not validate the triumph of La Trobe’s pageant: the ‘remains of the novelistic plot still register an urgent sense of alienation, or dis-harmony’ (p. 8). Other articles address issues of temporality in Woolf’s work. ‘Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours’ (Narrative 18:ii[2010] 137–62) by Kate Haffey uses Michael Cunningham’s interpretation of the kiss between Clarissa and Sally Seton to explore the ‘strange and unpredictable forms of temporality’ it creates within the narrative (p. 138). Haffey argues that the kiss reveals a combination of lyric and narrative temporalities at work within the text, and identifies this with Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the ‘queer moment’ which is able to ‘transcend the
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divide’ between ‘adolescent and adult selves’ (pp. 143, 144). This essay offers a number of particularly interesting and valuable close readings of passages from Mrs Dalloway, as it develops the idea that the kiss is ultimately a celebration of ‘the moment as a moment’ (p. 159). ‘ ‘‘The Shortcomings of Timetables’’: Greenwich, Modernism, and the Limits of Modernity’ (MFS 56:ii[2010] 262–89) also addresses time in Mrs Dalloway, although here in the context of a discussion ranging from Conrad to Joyce. Adam Barrows argues that Woolf, like other modernists, challenges the linkage between ‘temporal synchronization’ and ‘imperialism’ (p. 277). In place of the ‘coordinated clocks’ of Greenwich Mean Time, Woolf associates ‘people and events according to contextually determined social factors’ (p. 278). Evelyn T. Chan’s ‘Professions, Freedom and Form: Reassessing Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas’ (RES 61[2010] 591–613) argues that Woolf’s interest in ‘the professional system’ both ‘informed . . . her political views in Three Guineas, and her aesthetic decisions throughout the extensive rewriting process of The Years’ (p. 592). Chan usefully situates Woolf’s ‘conflicting feelings’ towards professionalism, her eagerness to see women gain full and free access to the professions, and her fear that this very access would erode women’s difference, within both a broader cultural debate over professionalization and the development of Woolf’s own perspectives on these issues (p. 593). In the most interesting portions of her essay Chan uses the holograph draft of The Years to explore the ways in which a ‘sweeping vision for a society without specialization underlies the published novel’ (p. 613). This vision, she argues, is in fact more radical than the ‘partial compromise’ of imbuing the professions with feminine values offered in Three Guineas, and is critical to the use of omission, ellipsis, and indeterminacy in The Years (p. 608). ‘Passionate Debates on ‘‘Odious Subjects’’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity’ (TCL 56:ii[2010] 131–67) by Brenda S. Helt situates Woolf’s work within a context of interwar attitudes towards hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality. In A Room of One’s Own, Helt argues, love between women is presented as a normal and ‘highly desirable and empowering emotive force’ rather than as an indicator of an unusual sexual type (p. 142). This is part of Woolf’s resistance to any theoretical simplification of or limitation to ‘gender, desire, and sexuality’ (p. 143). In her reading of Orlando, Helt points out that Orlando’s desires are ‘free-flowing’, unlinked to any particular alignment of sex or gender, another example of the way Woolf attempts to dissociate desire from constructed gender roles (p. 146). Helt’s point here is that for Woolf this was a completely normal state of being: ‘If everyone is androgynous, then androgyny is nobody’s distinguishing characteristic, nobody’s rare trait’ (p. 149). Perhaps the most valuable conclusion Helt reaches, however, is that Woolf is ‘far more interested in desire than . . . in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity’ (p. 156). In ‘Private Worlds, Public Minds: Woolf, Russell and Photographic Vision’ (JML 33:iii[2010] 112–30) Timothy Mackin situates Woolf’s work in relation to traditional questions of epistemology. For Mackin, Woolf is neither ‘anti-philosophical’, as Michael Lackey has argued, nor participating, as Anne Banfield believes, in a project akin to Bertrand Russell’s search for an objective epistemology (p. 113). Mackin’s argument is thoroughly situated in a
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critical context. Traditional views of Woolf describe her as either a subjective or an objective writer, but Mackin argues that Woolf’s primary aim is to reconcile the two extremes: the objective world is ‘both part of and apart from ourselves’ (p. 115). The best way of understanding Woolf’s engagement with the question of subject and object is through her meditations on the medium of photography and cinema, which allow her to ‘find a relation to the world that does not involve the imposition of consciousness’ through feeling and emotion, ‘a way of losing the ‘‘I’’ without losing the self’ (p. 123). In his essay ‘Virginia Woolf—‘‘Death Is the Enemy’’ ’ (HudR 63:iii[2010] 429–44), Victor Brombert examines the images of ‘ferocity and gore’ that underlie the ‘the delicate texture and lyrical strains of Virginia Woolf’s poetic prose’ (p. 429). While the adjectives ‘delicate’ and ‘lyrical’ are perhaps no longer widely accepted as the most appropriate descriptors of Woolf’s prose, Brombert’s central observation is sound, and carefully supported by reference to a wide range of Woolf’s work. The key essay in volume 16 of the Woolf Studies Annual is ‘ ‘‘Tilting at Universities’’: Woolf at King’s College London’ (WstA 16[2010] 1–44) by Anna Snaith and Christine Kenyon Jones, which fills a small but significant lacuna in Woolf’s biography. Snaith and Jones argue that newly studied archival material ‘substantially alters the narrative of Woolf’s early formal education as intermittent, brief, or even non-existent’ (p. 3). In fact, Virginia Stephen was registered at King’s College Ladies’ Department from 1897 to 1901, where she studied a number of different subjects (p. 6). Snaith and Jones trace the course of Woolf’s formal education in detail, and look at the potential impact of her educational experience on works such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, but ultimately find it ‘curious’ that Woolf did not draw ‘more directly’ on her experience at King’s College, preferring perhaps ‘to think of herself as an autodictat’ (p. 40). Another interesting essay in the collection is ‘Odds, Ends, and Others: Objects and Narration of Woolf’s Servant Characters’ (WstA 16[2010] 111–31) by Monica J. Miller, which looks at the ‘ephemerality and formlessness of the servant characters’ in Woolf’s novels (p. 111). Miller argues that Woolf developed an alternative approach to the representation of character concerned with surfaces and objects, ‘seeking a method of characterization better suited to representing the other’s interiority’ (p. 113). For Miller, however, this attempt ultimately ‘fails to fully reconcile her political and narrative concerns’ (p. 113). Some of the more provocative connections made in this year’s work on Woolf have occurred in shorter articles. In ‘Buddhism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’ (N&Q 57[2010] 233–6), for instance, Robert E. Kohn argues that the Cockney pronunciation of ‘home’ without an audible ‘h’ signifies ‘the most famous of all Buddhist mantras, OM’ and that Woolf’s novel ‘draws heavily’ on Eliot’s The Waste Land (pp. 234, 235). In ‘Erotic Daydreams in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ (Expl 68:iii[2010] 185–8), Kohn writes that ‘though born female, Orlando posed as a male’ in order to ensure her accession to the family property (p. 186). Unfortunately, neither of these interesting if disputable claims is supported in great detail. Arthur F. Bethea, in his ‘Septimus Smith, the War-Shattered Christ Substitute in Mrs. Dalloway’ (Expl 68:iiii[2010] 249–52), describes Septimus Smith as an abortive Christ-figure
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whose death on the area railing’s spikes ‘analogize[s] the nails in Jesus’s hands on the cross’ (p. 250). The first issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany published in 2010 dealt with intellectual property and copyright (VWM 76[2010]) and the second with Woolf and nature, building on the theme of the 2010 Woolf conference at Georgetown College in Kentucky (VWM 77[2010]). Woolf appeared in a number of valuable book chapters in 2010. Several of these focus on particular questions of genre. Anna Jackson’s Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writer’s Diaries, 1915–1962 offers two chapters on Woolf as a diarist in a study of the diary’s formal qualities and their impact on the literary effects produced in diaries by particular writers (p. 5). Jackson first compares Leonard Woolf’s 1953 edition of A Writer’s Diary with the full-text edition of Anne Olivier Bell published between 1977 and 1984, arguing that his editorial decisions to ‘extract passages’ concerning writing from passages concerning ‘worries about . . . clothes and gossip about friends’ makes for a successful book, but not for a successful diary or record of ‘writing as a part of life’ (pp. 89, 92). A later chapter examines Woolf’s use of the dash both for temporal control—the speeding up and slowing down of prose—and as a ‘democratic punctuation mark’ offering formal equality between sequential items (p. 118). Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward place Woolf in an unusually broad and comparative context in their New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, tracing the development of the genre from what they argue are its roots in Masonic tradition and literature. Interestingly in terms of Woolf studies, Summerfield and Downward refuse to accept a feminist stance which would ‘privilege gender as the sole lens through which to read novels which concern development’, instead seeking to reintegrate the novel of female development into the broader generic category (p. 5). Their reading of To the Lighthouse focuses on the ways in which the text allows a space for ‘increased potentialities for selfhood of both genders’ to emerge (p. 167). Other chapters address issues of modern technology and its impact on modernist literature. Lara Feigel’s Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930–1945: Reading Between the Frames offers an insightful chapter on Woolf’s engagement with photography and cinema, arguing, through readings of Three Guineas, The Years, and Between the Acts, that her ‘vision of cinema’s potential’ allowed her to ‘incorporate politics and history in her fiction’ (p. 157). Feigel is particularly effective in outlining the techniques Woolf used in these works: satirical or contrastive montage and a visualization or spatialization of the passage of time. Also of value is the broader context within which Feigel sets Woolf’s employment of cinematic tropes. David Welsh’s Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf is misnamed in a revealing way: while the book deals with literary representations of the Tube as recent as Seamus Heaney’s 2006 poem ‘District and Circle’, Woolf is granted headline status in this comprehensive and interesting thematic study. Welsh ably charts Woolf’s lifelong ‘fascination with the Tube’ (p. 172). His key observation is that Woolf uses the underground as ‘the machine in an abstract form’, as a metaphor for a ‘descent into the self’, and as a formal device allowing her to ‘decompose character’ in her fiction (pp. 172, 180).
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Deborah Cohler’s discussion of Orlando in her Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain situates it alongside Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an exemplar of the ‘necessary connections of sexual identities to nationalism’ (p. 153). Orlando, Cohler argues, successfully represents a ‘female same-sex desire within Britain that can remain intact’ in ways that neither Mackenzie’s nor Hall’s novels were able to (p. 184). Cohler’s discussion of the positive reception of Woolf’s novel, in spite of its transgressive nature, is extremely interesting. Andrew Robinson’s Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs places Woolf in the unusual if welcome company of scientists and artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Albert Einstein. He offers a brief but competent biography, with particular focus on the elements in Woolf’s life that contributed to the writing of Mrs Dalloway, and more generally examines potential factors contributing to creative achievement. Perhaps the briefest and most amusing contribution to the year’s work in Woolf studies, however, is Mark Crick’s Woolfian recipe for Clafoutis Grandme`re a` la Virginia Woolf in the Oxford Book of Parodies, a spot-on pastiche of To the Lighthouse. The year produced at least four new and notable monographs on Woolf. Lorraine Sim’s Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience offers an in-depth examination of ‘ordinary experience’ in Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction. Sim argues that the ordinary, the trivial, and the everyday were vital concepts for Woolf, points of access to the representation of modern life, and, indeed, the very location of the extraordinary. Sim begins by looking at ‘ordinary’ objects and colours in Woolf’s early short stories which, subject to ‘epistemological perspectivism’, become anything but ordinary (p. 57). Sim’s definition of ordinary experience is explicitly capacious, including both pain and illness, which are an ‘epistemologically valuable part of ordinary life’ for Woolf, and twentieth-century technology such as the motor car, which ‘altered people’s . . . conceptions of space and time’ (pp. 106, 135). Ultimately, Sim proposes that Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ are also an ‘integral aspect of ordinary life’, part of a ‘philosophy of pattern’ which is both aesthetic and ethical (pp. 137, 163). Throughout, Sim carefully grounds her analysis in both historico-philosophical and contemporary critical contexts. Overall, this is an extremely effective study, risking critique only on the grounds of breadth; if all of this is ordinary, what, one might ask, is not? It is perhaps doubtful that Woolf’s short stories are, as Heather Levy writes in her The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction, ‘critically neglected’ in anything other than a comparative sense implying that Woolf’s novels are critically over-exploited (p. 1). This study distinguishes itself from previous studies such as Nina Skrbic’s 2004 Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction and Christine Reynier’s 2009 Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story by examining in detail Woolf’s portrayal of working-class women and lesbian desire. Levy’s approach is chronological, moving from the pre-1917 fiction and its staging of ‘lesbian desire . . . through innovative spatial images’, to the stories of 1917–21 in which ‘lesbian subscripts are very difficult to unearth’ (pp. 21, 77). Woolf’s 1922–6 short
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fiction features, according to Levy, ‘conspicuously open examples of Lesbian passion, which are not universally governed by delineations of class’ (p. 127). Levy’s close readings seem at times, however, less sensitive to the texts than to her developing argument: in ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ is the narrator really describing Clarissa ‘ruthlessly’ by saying that she is ‘acquainted’ rather than ‘intimate’ with ‘discipline and suffering’ (p. 137)? Might Woolf’s choice of language not be an allusion to Isaiah 53: 3, and the man of sorrows acquainted with grief? Ultimately, Levy’s interpretative lens seems limiting: while there may be ‘little space left over for the articulation of lesbian desire’ in Woolf’s later short stories, surely there are other elements at play here that are worthy of consideration (p. 149). In Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin Angeliki Spiropoulou argues that Woolf’s vision of modernity is articulated through her engagement with historiography; this relationship is established by using Walter Benjamin’s theories of modernity and history as an interpretative context. Spiropoulou insists that this is not a comparative study, but a ‘drawing of parallels’ (p. 3). Both Woolf and Benjamin, for instance, reacted against traditional historicism with its insistence on ‘narrative reconstruction of the factual past’, offering instead a history open to ‘the intervention of imaginative, fictional reconstructions’ in Woolf’s case and one ‘determined by the expectations of the present’ in Benjamin’s (pp. 39, 47, 55). Spiropoulou goes on to delineate these constellations through readings of Jacob’s Room, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Years, and Between the Acts, a list of novels that makes Woolf’s interest in historiography clear. Once engaged with Woolf’s texts, Spiropoulou’s interest clearly lies with Woolf and her engagement with the writing of history rather than with Benjamin or the parallels between the two writers: in her discussion of Jacob’s Room, for instance, Benjamin plays little role beyond occasional excursions of the ‘is also highlighted by’ form (p. 65). This in no way lessens the strength and insight of Spiropoulou’s readings, but it does perhaps raise questions about the utility of the theoretical framework she has brought to her project beyond a general sense of similarity. Judith Allen’s Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language is unusual in its integration of Woolf’s writings with the exigencies of contemporary politics: for all the emphasis in Woolf studies on the political nature of both her fiction and non-fiction, explicit connections between Woolf’s work and the realities of the twenty-first century are seldom made. How unexpected to find in a scholarly work on Woolf discussions of Abu Ghraib, Twitter, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Allen also looks backwards, taking Woolf’s lifelong engagement with the essays of Michel de Montaigne as a cue for an examination of the ‘relevance’ of her ‘writing to our increasingly complex problems regarding the reception of language’ (p. 9). Both Montaigne and Woolf, Allen writes, develop a form of ‘essayistic theorising’ which allows them to avoid the certainty of a ‘unitary voice’ (pp. 22, 28). Instead, the essay is a form of ‘dialogic thinking’ closely related to Bakhtinian theories of the negotiability of meaning (p. 19). Allen then moves on to offer detailed close readings of A Room of One’s Own focusing on its rhetoric, narrative, and diction as they relate to ‘the politics of her writing, the politics of her language’
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(p. 80). Throughout, Allen is at pains to link Woolf’s writing practice with the needs of a threatened twenty-first-century democracy for critique of and resistance to political and linguistic hegemony. Another notable publication in Woolf studies in 2010 is the reissue of Makiko Minow-Pinkney’s Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels, a landmark study first published in 1987 which remains essential reading for any serious student of Woolf. This year also saw the publication of a number of edited collections of papers on Woolf. Woolf and the City: Selected Papers of the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish, contains many essays of interest but also notable omissions: while the keynote address by Tamar Katz, ‘Pausing, Waiting, Repeating: Urban Temporality in Mrs. Dalloway and The Years’, is present, the other plenary papers are available only in abstract form. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Anna Snaith’s ‘The Years, Street Music, and Acoustic Space’. However, the volume does offer a broad snapshot of the diversity and fecundity of research on Woolf. The essays collected in Helen Southworth’s Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism make an important contribution to the study of ‘early twentieth-century cultural production’, and are notable for the light they shed on the depth and breadth of the Hogarth Press’s publishing history (p. 2). There are several admirable essays in the collection, including Mark Hussey’s re-examination of the Woolfs’ publication of the much-maligned poetry of Joan Adeney Easdale in relation to their fraught relationship with John Lehmann and the boys’ club atmosphere of the 1930s poetry scene, and Anna Snaith’s study of the press’s list of anti-colonial publications, but the real virtue of this collection is the uniformly high quality of its component parts. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, edited by Jean Dubino, addresses similar aspects of ‘commodity culture’, although from a slightly less focused vantage point (p. 1). While essays such as Vara Neverow’s study of editorial self-censorship in Jacob’s Room and Beth Rigel Daugherty’s study of Woolf’s early literary reviewing make genuine incremental contributions to our understanding of aspects of Woolf’s writing practice, they do not resonate in the same way that the essays in Southworth’s collection do. This becomes even more apparent when topics as disparate as Woolf’s articulation of a ‘positive nihilism’, Emily Bronte¨’s status as ‘a prophet and martyr of women’s literature’, and ‘the evolution of Woolf paperback covers over the last sixty or so years’ are grouped under the same capacious rubric (pp. 85. 118, 238). Of course this sort of collection is not unusual; it is simply the remarkable cohesion of Southworth’s collection that draws attention to the relative amorphousness of Dubino’s. Maggie Humm’s The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts achieves cohesiveness through expansiveness. Taking Woolf’s engagement with the arts in the broadest sense as their theme, the twenty-five essays in this collection comprehensively explore this important aspect of Woolf’s career. Contributors explore Woolf’s relation to an enormous range of artistic areas, from aesthetics to painting, from domestic arts such as fashion and gardening
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3. Post-1945 Fiction There were a number of monographs and edited collections in 2010, as well as books aimed at the student market that balance an introductory approach with new research. Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards’s A.S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling offers a critical introduction to the work of this central figure in contemporary British fiction and is part of Manchester University Press’s Contemporary British Novelists series. The book covers Byatt’s fictional output from her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun [1964], to her latest, The Children’s Book [2009], and also refers to Byatt’s works of literary criticism and her public engagement with literary and cultural issues. Following Byatt’s own preference for criticism that is not author-centred, Alfer and Edwards focus on the texts themselves, and produce engaged readings of individual novels against a series of important themes that recur in her fiction. The short introduction offers an overview of Byatt’s corpus and some of the critical responses to her work. This is followed by a chapter that discusses her first two novels and attempts to identify themes and approaches to narrative in these earlier novels that are picked up in the later fiction. The chapter makes a convincing case against the
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to publishing and book design, from film and photography to music and dance. A reader’s selection in a collection such as this will no doubt be guided by their personal interests and preferences: some will no doubt find an essay which begins with the assertion that Woolf ‘was not a garden-maker’ off-putting, but Nuala Hancock’s ‘Virginia Woolf and Gardens’ will be of interest to those exploring the signifying role of horticulture in Woolf’s writing (p. 245). Brenda R. Silver’s ‘Virginia Woolf Icon’ reverses the normal subject– object relationship of this collection, examining not Woolf’s relationship to a particular from of art, but art’s relationship to Woolf. This essay will be of interest to those who have not read Silver’s 1999 book-length study of Woolf’s iconicity, or to those interested in a more up-to-date discussion referencing Michelle Obama. Similarly, Jane Goldman’s ‘Virginia Woolf and Modernist Aesthetics’ will perhaps be most useful to those interested in Goldman’s riposte to Stephen Ellis’s critique of her work in his 2007 Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. It is this broad yet focused expansiveness combined with a highly detailed particularity that makes this collection so interesting. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari’s two-volume Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury is divided into two broad fields. Volume 1 examines aesthetics, while volume 2 deals with politics; both arise out of the Fourteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. The short essays in the first volume offer a stimulating variety of readings: for example, of A Room of One’s Own in the context of popular university fictions, of Jacob’s Room in the context of the contemporary study of nature, and of Woolf’s photographic practices in the context of Freudianism. The second volume also deals with a disparate range of topics: Woolf’s variety of written responses to war, the signification of dogs in her writing, and several essays on the Hogarth Press. Taken together the collection offers a panorama of Woolf criticism.
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tendency to read The Shadow of the Sun as an autobiographical text, despite its employment of a central figure (Anna) that might be compared to Byatt, arguing that ‘there is a more serious, and more seriously aesthetic dimension to Byatt’s probing beyond the confines of limited knowledge than Anna’s rather simple coming-of-age story suggests’ (p. 14). It goes on to show that the sophistication of narrative control Byatt achieves in this novel is predicated on a ‘hierarchy of vision’ presented with respect to individual characters that complicates the way in which the novel deals with issues of aesthetic representation and forms an engagement with the ideas of realism and romanticism in fiction (p. 18). Chapter 3 concentrates on the first two in Byatt’s quartet of novels centred around the Potter family: The Virgin in the Garden [1978] and Still Life [1985]. It opens with a discussion of the way in which Byatt’s work interrogates the opposition between realism and experimentalism and shows how this was an important part of the literary-critical landscape in the period that covers the earlier stages of Byatt’s novelistic career. Alfer and Edwards argue that the first two novels in the quartet ‘show how realism, far from being epistemologically naı¨ ve, can indeed be a profoundly self-conscious mode of storytelling’ (p. 52). This position is convincingly arrived at through identifying the way in which the thoughts and actions of several of the characters in the two novels (Alexander Wedderburn and Stephanie and Frederica Potter in particular) are affected by literary references and historical contexts. This produces a complex situation in which the reality of the actions and feelings of characters can be based on fictional and imagined influences. Chapter 4 looks at the way this approach is developed in the next two novels in the quartet, in which there are more overt experiments with narrative structure and perspective. This increased level of experimentation reveals ‘Byatt’s engagement with contemporary notions of breakdown and fragmentation of language in Babel Tower and her fictional ponderings of the narratives of science in A Whistling Woman’ (p. 6). The next chapter focuses on Byatt’s best-known novel, Possession: A Romance [1990], and the case is made that despite the work’s status as an exemplary instance of postmodern narrative playfulness (and, in Linda Hutcheon’s phrase, ‘historiographic metafiction’), much of the novel’s success lies in the use of ‘old-fashioned pleasures of character development and plot’ (p. 94). In a thoughtful analysis, Alfer and Edwards show that Possession is an ‘active re-in(ter)ventions of the novel of ideas at the end of the twentieth century’ (p. 95). Chapter 6 offers thoughtful readings and comparisons of Angels and Insects [1992], The Biographer’s Tale [2000], and The Children’s Book. The final chapter details the way in which Byatt has been involved in critical debates about the novel, aesthetic practice, and cultural issues more generally. This chapter successfully places the earlier analysis of the debates raised in her fiction in a wider cultural context. Overall, the book is an important contribution to the growing body of critical work on this central figure in contemporary British fiction. Philip Tew’s Zadie Smith is another book in Palgrave’s excellent series, New British Fiction, which is aimed at both literary scholars and students. As with all the books in the series it is organized into three parts, the first of which offers a timeline that combines important historical and cultural events with
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relevant biographical details and publishing history pertaining to Smith; an introductory chapter that contextualizes her fiction; and a brief reading of her biography. The second part offers critical analyses of Smith’s major works: White Teeth [2000], The Autograph Man [2002], and On Beauty [2005]. Tew adopts an approach drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on social identity, agency, and influence in detailed readings of Smith’s fiction. In particular, he identifies a number of themes that appear across the novels, including ‘the extremities of belief; the demands of the systems of faith . . . the vicissitudes of friendship and affection; the disruptive nature of seduction, passion and sexual love; the comic possibilities of everyday realism; the simultaneously banal and heroic qualities of such quotidian human routines; and the often unexpected contradictions of an age exploring both diversity and a liberal version of multiculturalism’ (p. 15). This perceptive identification of Smith’s themes is examined in insightful and erudite readings of the three novels. In White Teeth, Tew examines the novel’s focus on comedy and location, its broad historical scope, and its exploration of the various cultural forces impacting on the lives of the main characters, some of which he sees as purposely archetypical. As Tew argues, ‘The comedy and poignant accuracy of social observation is often explicitly dependent upon their possibilities as archetypes’ (p. 55). A shorter reading of The Autograph Man focuses on the structure of the novel and its engagement with Jewish culture, and addresses some of the criticisms the novel received in comparison with White Teeth. Tew sees On Beauty as a sophisticated engagement with contemporary Anglo-American art and life and focuses on the literary intertexts it employs, most notably E.M. Forster’s Howards End. In a thoughtful analysis Tew convinces us that ‘Smith’s technique of overlaying and multiplying view-points, often refracted by others, is highly effective, adding depth to her perspectives’ (p. 102). The final part of the book includes an engaged survey of some of the interviews Smith has given; the critical reception of her fiction; and an analysis of her short stories. Overall, Tew has produced a book that offers a critical introduction aimed at the student market alongside fresh readings and critical research that will be a useful source for scholars working on Smith. Joseph Brooker’s Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed is part of Edinburgh University Press’s series Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature, and offers a critical overview of the main literary trends and practitioners of the period. It covers fiction, poetry, and drama and is organized in thematic chapters that range from issues of the engagement with cultural politics in literature to identifying aspects of literary form. In an informative introduction Brooker discusses the politics of the period, and in particular the move from the consensus politics of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s. This provides an interesting account of some of the paradoxes raised by Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values in the family alongside the late capitalist centralization of the market and the rejection of what were perceived as left-leaning concerns with society. Brooker also identifies cultural shifts during the period, which saw a rise in minority arts alongside a desire for cost-effectiveness in cultural production driven by market forces. The first of five main chapters discusses the range of writers practising during the period, identifying the continuation of established figures
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such as Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, and Kingsley Amis, set against the emergence of new voices such as Martin Amis, Craig Raine, and Caryl Churchill. In this chapter there is an interesting comparison between Martin Amis’s Money [1984] and Churchill’s Serious Money [1987], which together highlight financial and economic issues as one of the decade’s central preoccupations. Chapter 2, ‘Disaffections’, takes its name from James Kelman’s novel A Disaffection [1989] and offers a survey of the important working-class, dissident, and regional writing of the period. There is discussion here of Alan Bleasdale’s seminal TV drama series Boys from the Blackstuff [1982]; Pat Barker’s Liza’s England [1986]; Tony Harrison’s poem about the 1984 miner’s strike and disaffected youth in Leeds, ‘V’ [1985]; as well as a focus on a number of Scottish writers emerging during this period, including Liz Lochhead, Iain Banks, Tom Leonard, Janice Galloway, and James Kelman. The next chapter looks at the importance of the literary mode of postmodernism to the decade. The first part of this chapter offers an examination of some of the theoretical positions underpinning postmodernism, looking at ideas by Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard and Brian McHale in particular. The chapter then goes on to discuss some of the central postmodernist writers and works of the period, including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children [1981]; Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus [1984]; Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit [1985]; Graham Swift’s Waterland [1983]; and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in 4 Books [1981]. There is also an overview of postmodern poetry of the period, culminating in a detailed discussion of some of the work of Iain Sinclair and Paul Muldoon. Chapter 4 looks at the central importance for 1980s literature of contexts around national identities and ethnicity. After a discussion of Tom Nairn’s important work in this field, The Break-Up of Britain [1977], the chapter goes on to discuss Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain [1980]; Brian Friel’s Translations [1980]; Margaret Drabble’s trilogy of novels that begins with The Radiant Way [1987–91]; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day [1989]; the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs [1986]; and V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival [1987]. The last main chapter focuses on the importance of feminism, gender, and sexuality in 1980s literature, looking closely at Churchill’s Top Girls [1982]; Sarah Daniels’s The Devil’s Gateway [1983]; Sue Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations [1982]; Fay Weldon’s The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil [1983]; Zoe¨ Fairbairns’s Benefits [1979]; and Alan Hollingsworth’s The Swimming Pool Library [1988]. Overall, Brooker offers an engaged and critical analysis of some of the central literary works and preoccupations of the decade, and convinces that the ‘1980s have been a pivotal centre of attention’ for critics and writers in first decade of the twenty-first century, and that the literature from that period has had a great influence in the decades that followed (p. 218). Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives is edited by David Herman and comes out of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies that was devoted to Spark. The book contains ten essays from established and upcoming critics in the field, divided into three sections: ‘Spark as Scottish Writer and World Author’, ‘Situating Spark in Postwar Culture’, and ‘Reading Spark’. As Herman suggests in the introduction, the main aim of the book is to ‘take stock of Spark’s enduring legacy’ in chapters that ‘explore, from multiple
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perspectives, the situation of Spark’s work within the landscape of postwar writing’ (p. 1). Herman goes on to provide a context for the range of approaches adopted by the contributors, and her connection to literary movements such as the French nouveau roman. He also focuses on some of Spark’s non-fictional writing in which she indicates aspects of her aesthetic practice and outlook, especially in his account of Spark’s 1971 ‘The Desegregation of Art’. In this essay she emphasizes the constructedness of her fiction as a way of providing a critical engagement with social relationships, but also the importance of ridicule as, in Herman’s words, ‘an active targeting of social practices and institutions that sanction any form of violence’ (p. 5). This is a perceptive reading of Spark’s technique and sets up the volume well. There are two chapters in the first part of the book: Gerald Carruthers discusses a range of Spark’s work with respect to Scottish identity and traces intertextual references to Scottish writers such as James Hogg in her early fiction, while Lisa Harrington does some good research on Spark’s relationship with the New Yorker and makes a convincing case that this helped to establish her as an international literary figure. The next section consists of four chapters that contextualize Spark’s work with respect to important aspects of post-Second World War literature and culture. Patricia Spark offers an engaged examination of Spark’s ontological investigation of the metaphysical conditions of late modernity. Waugh details the dangers of critical approaches that foreground an identity politics, arguing for a reinvigoration of older approaches to Spark that focused on her engagement with spiritual contexts, but emphasizing that much of Spark’s work was concerned with interrogating the secularizing processes embedded in the project of modernity. Waugh persuasively argues that Spark’s faith ‘gave her an alternative perspective on the relations between reason and feeling, body and mind, that are at the heart of Western dualisms and the histories of Western secularization’ (p. 65). Marina MacKay focuses on the trope of treason as a way of thinking about Spark’s employment of characters with double identities, and, more broadly, on her interest in metafictional devices. She compares Spark with Rebecca West in this context, a connection that is new to Spark criticism. Bran Nicol produces a fascinating essay on the way in which Spark’s narrators, and consequently the figure of the author, are deflated to the point where intended authors in selected texts can be identified as petty criminals, or stalkers, rather than overarching figures in control of the ethical perspectives of the fiction. He pursues this argument in detailed readings of The Comforters [1957], The Driver’s Seat [1970], and Loitering with Intent [1981]. Like MacKay, Hope Howell Hodgkins compares Spark with another contemporary female writer from the 1950s, Barbara Pym, looking at the way both novelists build representation of style and fashion into the thematic and formal interests of their texts, especially through the figure of the spinster. If the chapters in the second part of the book can be seen to approach Spark’s fiction from a particular social, cultural, or historical contest, the four chapters in the last section of the book, ‘Reading Spark’, provide close readings of one or two specific novels. John Galvin identifies the way in which apocalypse is perceived as a metaphor for a transforming force in The Mandelbaum Gate, and identifies this novel a ‘gateway’ for Spark into different
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forms of writing in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Jonathan Kemp offers a critically engaged reading of The Driver’s Seat that incorporates queer theory, French feminism, and a Deleuzian focus on the schizophrenic, that together signal the fracturing of identity in the novel. In ‘ ‘‘Look for one thing and you find another’’: The Voice and Deduction in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori’, Allan Pero discusses Spark’s 1958 novel from a Lacanian perspective and produces a thoughtful way of thinking about the use of voice in the novel. In the last chapter, Lewis MacLeod examines the themes of surveillance, omniscience, and narrative power in two of Spark’s novels: The Abbess of Crewe [1974], and Loitering with Intent. Taken together, this volume of collected essays engages thoughtfully with Spark’s corpus as well as the extant criticism on her work, offering fresh perspectives and new critical insights. There have been three additions this year to Edinburgh’s Companions to Scottish Literature series that cover our period. The first of these is The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh, edited by Berthold Schoene. In an informative introduction Schoene contextualizes Welsh with respect to the Scottish literary scene in the 1990s, identifying him as part of a group of writers who were attempting to break with traditional constructions of Scottishness. Trainspotting [1993] is thus seen as a key moment, not only in Welsh’s career but in contemporary Scottish literature more broadly. This sets the tenor for the rest of the essays collected in the volume. Alice Ferrebe develops Schone’s point by looking at Welsh’s perception of himself as a radical writer, allied with the likes of Alexander Trocchi from a previous generation of Scottish writers. Matt McGuire offers a critical survey of Welsh’s fiction, and engages in particular with his representation of working-class culture. David Borthwick concentrates on Welsh’s shorter fiction, while Duncan Petrie looks at Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Trainspotting. Carole Jones looks at questions of gender in Welsh’s fiction, identifying in particular the use of the carnivalesque in this context. As well as the introduction, Schoene contributes a chapter on the place of drugs and subcultures in Welsh’s fiction, which explores the novelist’s construction of subcultural identities and their relationship with mainstream or ‘parent’ culture. Drawing on relevant aspects of subcultural theory by critics such as Ken Gelder, Schoene produces a detailed reading from a perspective that is proving to be an exciting critical trend in the analysis of contemporary British fiction generally. Adrienne Scullion offers insight into Welsh’s engagement with the theatre, a connection that has often been overlooked in Welsh criticism. Gavin Miller examines the importance of gender politics in analysing Welsh’s texts; and Peter Clanfield and Christian Lloyd offer a geographically informed reading of Welsh’s representation of Edinburgh. The last chapter in the book is Katherine Ashley’s discussion of translated versions of Welsh’s work, and the inherent problems caused by the attempt to capture Welsh’s use of Scottish vernacular in other languages. Taken together, the combination of critical approaches, informed by theoretical perspectives and detailed readings of the primary texts, make this an essential source for students and researchers working on Welsh. The second book in this Edinburgh series is on James Kelman, and is edited by Scott Hames. The book consists of an introduction by the editor followed
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by eleven chapters on a variety of perspectives on the writer’s work, divided into two parts: ‘Literary Forms’ and ‘Critical Contexts’. In a short introduction Hames interrogates the description of Kelman as a Scottish writer, highlighting the inherent problems in such a designation. Following this, the first part includes a mixture of chronological and generic approaches to Kelman’s output. Paul Shanks discusses Kelman’s early fiction, and especially the short stories in which he began to render the Glaswegian vernacular, while Peter Boxall focuses on the later novels, focusing specifically on their engagement with political issues. Mary McGlynn concentrates on Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late [1994] with respect to the questions it raises about literary value, an aspect of the work that was especially revealed in the attention it received after winning the Booker Prize. Some of this attention tended to focus on the (over)use of expletives in the novel. McGlynn argues convincingly, however, that the way in which Kelman pays attention to linguistic structures places him closer to the ‘serious’ literary preoccupations of modernist writing than to attempts to engage with forms of popular expression in a realist context, as many of his previous critics and reviewers had assumed. As she writes: ‘Kelman’s pyrotechnic profanity challenges marginalization of certain words and displays an art form that has been regularly and strategically devalued’ (p. 26). In the remaining three chapters in this section, Adrian Hunter looks at Kelman’s short stories; Mia Carter discusses his critical and polemical writing; and David Arthur looks at the less well known dramatic output. In ‘Critical Contexts’, Craig Cairns offers a close reading of what he identifies as the ‘Glasgow sentence’ in Kelman’s fiction, using a critical approach informed by the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. The next two chapters also focus on Kelman’s experiments with linguistic form and structure. Hames discusses Kelman’s ‘art-speech’ and shows how his representation of the vernacular was always ‘literary before it was phonetic’ (p. 89). Michael Gardiner looks at Kelman’s fiction in the context of world English, while Carole Jones explores Kelman’s representation of, and engagement with, discourses of masculinity. The final chapter is Laurence Nicoll’s discussion of the influence of existentialism on Kelman’s fiction, comparing A Chancer [1985] to Albert Camus’s The Outsider. James Kelman is now an established figure on the Scottish and, as these essays show, international literary scene, and this volume contributes significantly to the body of criticism his work continues to attract. The third in the Edinburgh series on Scottish literature is a second book this year on Muriel Spark, indicating the importance of this writer in the current desire for reassessments of her work following her death in 2006. This volume is edited by Michael Gardiner and Willy Maley and has ten chapters. In the introduction, Gardiner and Maley argue that Spark is arguably ‘the most important Scottish writer since Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson’, citing her work in a variety of forms, her literary experimentation, and her international status as evidence for this claim (p. 1). In the first of the main chapters, David Goldie explores the difficulties of Spark’s fiction and non-fiction writing with respect to rendering biographical narratives. As Goldie suggests, for Spark, ‘the problems of truly knowing others disinterestedly, and being able to render such knowledge satisfactorily in language,
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seem insurmountable’ (p. 7). He goes on to read this difficulty with respect to characters in some of Spark’s fiction and some of her biographical studies, such as an essay she produced on Emily Bronte¨. In the following chapter Vassiliki Kolocotroni concentrates on the ‘poetic perception’ she identifies in Spark’s fiction, focusing on a number of her novels, but especially on the character Joanna Childe in The Girls of Slender Means [1963]. Gardiner contributes a chapter examining the way in which Spark’s characters are often involved in a negotiation with ‘the structures of nation, state and empire’ (p. 27). This approach is pursued with perceptive readings of The Comforters [1957], Robinson [1958], and The Ballad of Peckham Rye [1960]. Marilyn Reizbaum focuses on Spark’s ‘eccentric narrative style’ in a number of works, identifying her stylistic strangeness in terms of voice, place, and form. Adam Piette’s chapter, ‘Muriel Spark and the Politics of the Contemporary’, argues that Spark’s interest in individual ‘tyrant-liars’ reveals broader political concerns. As he argues: ‘For Spark, every institution, every department, every family harbours a tyrant-liar; someone who spreads vicious rumours and who is able to do so because of the longevity of other people’s tolerance’ (p. 52). This perceptive reading is pursued with reference to three novels: The Mandelbaum Gate [1965], The Girls of Slender Means, and The Hothouse by the East River [1973]. Matthew Wickman offers a formal analysis of Spark’s fiction and her relationship with the aesthetic practices associated with modernism and postmodernism, arguing that ‘there is something evocatively Sparkian about the plight of a displaced, anxious, delusional and perhaps non-existent postmodernism’ (p. 64). Gerald Carruthers reassesses the traditional ways of thinking about Spark as a Catholic novelist, and the more recent trend to play down that aspect of her work. He frames this debate with a pertinent question: ‘is Spark’s confessed spirituality now to be disregarded by critics as either irrelevant in her work or, at best seen as a quaint delusion . . . ?’ (p. 75). Carruthers shows that there is still an important frame of reference to be gained from looking at the spiritual, and specifically Catholic, aspects of Spark’s fiction. This is followed by Paddy Lyons’s discussion of Spark’s break with Romanticism, identified primarily in the deployment of narrative voices that use mixed methods of narration, destabilizing the idea of identity as singular and unified. He looks particularly at The Comforters in this context. Randall Stevenson examines the historical contexts informing Spark’s writing in the post-war period. He begins by identifying the comparisons between Spark’s concerns with existential and theological questions and the use of metafictional devices in the early fiction, and goes on to discuss her interrogation of fascism in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1961]. Both of these approaches are read as responses to broader concerns during the period, in particular cultural and political ideas circulating just after the Second World War. The final chapter is Drew Milne’s exploration of the distinctive Sparkian use of wit and humour. In particular, he produces an interesting argument that her satire negotiates a politically engaged (and potentially socialist) critique of capitalist society with a more conservative satirical tradition associated with Evelyn Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Nancy Mitford. He goes on to read the importance of crime in her fiction as a way of framing her engagement with social critique.
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As with all of the books in this series, the essays collected here offer fresh and insightful analysis of Spark’s writing from a number of perspectives. Matthew Beedham’s The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism is another book in Palgrave’s excellent Readers’ Guides series which aims to offer a critical analysis of the main critical and review responses to the work of writers. Beedham provides a detailed and accessible introduction to the extant criticism on Ishiguro, and covers the span of Ishiguro’s literary career with eight chapters that look at critical responses to his six novels, from A Pale View of Hills [1982] to Never Let Me Go [2005]. In a short introduction Beedham identifies the initial response to Ishiguro by reviewers who were keen to focus on his Japanese identity despite him having grown up in Britain from the age of 5. The first main chapter on A Pale View of Hills focuses on a range of aspects in the early criticism, including filmic influences on this novel, especially the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Beedham also details the way in which critics have tended to focus on the historical and social contexts of the novel, and the development of the idea of ‘reticence’ in Ishiguro’s narrative style. Chapter 2 focuses on the criticism of An Artist of the Floating World [1987], which has tended to concentrate on interpretations of its narrator, the artist Masuji Ono. The Remains of the Day is Ishiguro’s most famous work, and as such has received more critical analysis than any other of his books. Beedham gives over three chapters to this novel, which look in turn at its reception and narration; historical and postcolonial readings; and interdisciplinary approaches. This last chapter is particular interesting as it details the way in which the novel has provided studies on the way in which memory operates, the ethical context of the novel’s use of nostalgia, and the ethics of serving, as discussed in a study of the novel by the lawyer Rob Atkinson. Chapters 6 and 7 cover The Unconsoled [1995] and When We Were Orphans [2000] respectively, and the last main chapter looks at the superb and unsettling Never Let Me Go [2005]. This last chapter looks at criticism of the novel that has focused on its engagement with ethical debates around cloning in a sci-fi scenario, which is an unusual departure from the conventions of this form in its presentation of the mundane and quotidian. This heightens, as Beedham notes in his discussion of Bruce Robbins’s reading of the novel, the ‘conflict of the individual and the collective’ (p. 144). The conclusion identifies gaps in the criticism to date and suggests possible directions for future work on Ishiguro. It might have been useful to include some discussion of Ishiguro’s 2009 work Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, but given that this is a book of linked short stories which has not received much serious literary criticism to date, the omission is understandable. The value of the book (and this is where this Palgrave series is most successful generally) lies in Beedham’s knowledgeable and discerning selection of the issues and ideas that the Ishiguro criticism has produced, making it an essential read for any student of his fiction. In fact, Kazuo Ishiguro has received much critical attention in the last few years; his importance in the literary criticism of contemporary fiction is added to by Wai-chew Sim’s Kazuo Ishiguro. This book is aimed primarily at the undergraduate student market as part of a Routledge series of study guides on literature, but it also includes new and insightful analysis alongside a critical
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introduction to his work. After a short introduction, the book is divided into four sections: Ishiguro’s life and contexts; his major works; a survey of some of the criticism of his work; and a short chronology (which might have been better placed at the front of the book). The first section identifies nineteenth-century British, rather than Japanese, fiction as the main influence on Ishiguro, going against the initial critical reaction to his work. As with Beedham, Sim also identifies the importance of Japanese film as an influence, especially in the early works. The main section of the book is given over to introductions to and critical analysis of Ishiguro’s six published novels to date, from A Pale View of Hills to Never Let Me Go. A summary of the plot and main characters is provided for each novel, as well as an engagement with some of the main themes and the aesthetic distinctiveness of each. For example, Sim shows how reading The Remains of the Day with respect to Ishiguro’s earlier fiction serves to universalize the themes of the later novel, extending it beyond the historical contexts of 1930s Britain, and he discusses Ishiguro’s references to Dickens’s Great Expectations and his experiment with the conventions of detective fiction in When We Were Orphans. The next section of the book offers a very useful summary of the critical response to each of the novels, divided into the main areas in which his work has been discussed, as well as a the criticism of the Merchant–Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day. Overall, Sim provides a well-written and comprehensive introduction to one of the most important writers on the contemporary British scene at the moment. An invaluable resource for students of literature of the period has been published this year by Continuum. The Post-War British Literature Handbook is edited by Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison and provides a range of approaches and information related to the study of literature from 1945 to the present. After a useful introduction and timeline by the editors, the book is divided into four parts that cover ‘Contexts’, ‘Case Studies’, ‘Critical Approaches’, and ‘Mapping the Field’. In the first of these, Patricia Waugh discusses the historical contexts of post-war British literature, while Cockin and Morrison look at the literary and cultural contexts. This is followed by two case studies in ‘reading literary texts’ and ‘reading critical and theoretical texts’ by Michael Greaney. The ‘Critical Approaches’ section has a number of contributors, and focuses on key critics, concepts, topics, and critical responses and approaches of the period. The final section sees Susan Watkins discussing issues of gender and sexuality; Ruvani Ranasinha on ‘Changes in the Canon: After Windrush’; and Sean Matthews bringing the survey up to date by examining the current critical landscape. The book also includes a useful annotated bibliography. Alongside the book-length studies of post-1945 fiction there have been a number of journal articles of note. Richard Robinson’s ‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’ (MFS 56:iii[2010] 473–95) identifies the way in which McEwan’s novel engages with a variety of intertextual references from the mid-twentieth century, including Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly. Robinson argues that the novel’s ‘conversation with modernism’ is thus framed with Bryony Tallis’s coming to terms with the ‘moral responsibility of telling stories’ (p. 473). Magdalena Maczynnska explores the representation of
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the city and urban landscapes in a number of contemporary writers in ‘This Monstrous City: Urban Visionary in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Mie´ville and Maggie Gee’ (ConL 51:i[2010] 58–86). In ‘Historical Fiction and the Revaluing of Historical Continuity in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’ (ConL 51:ii[2010] 371–97), Mandy Koolen discusses current issues in queer theory with respect to historical contexts and the present. She examines Waters’s novel in this context, arguing that ‘Tipping the Velvet, which is set in Victorian England, shows that queer historical fiction may not only aid theoretical revaluings of studies of historical continuities but also destabilize the idea that studies of differences and similarities across time must exist in tension and opposition to each other’ (p. 371). Greg Forter also considers the relationship between history and fiction with respect to Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger [1992] in ‘Barry Unsworth and the Arts of Power: Historical Memory, Utopian Fictions’ (ConL 51:iv[2010] 777–809). In ‘Elizabeth Bowen and the New Cosmopolitanism’ (TCL 56:iii[2010] 318–40), Nels C. Pearson explores Bowen’s quirky treatment of time and space with respect to ideas of cosmopolitanism. As he argues, ‘Bowen’s refusal to propose subjective time and abstract space as the opposites of and successors to a prior modality defined by historical and geographic orientation or rootedness— encourages us to consider Bowen’s work in a new theoretical context: the shifting discourse of cosmopolitanism in critical approaches to global democracy’ (p. 319). It is also worth noting that a second edition of D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke’s important 1998 analysis of the fiction of Salman Rushdie has been published this year. The 2010 edition adds chapters on The Ground Beneath Her Feet [1999], Fury [2001], Shalimar the Clown [2005], and The Enchantress of Florence [2008]. The chapter on The Ground Beneath Her Feet concentrates on Rushdie’s engagement with issues of globalization in its three main geographical locations—Bombay (Mumbai), London, and New York—and how these locations are set against an aesthetic triangulation of, in Rushdie’s words, ‘music, love and death’ (p. 147). Goonetilleke also shows how the novel is a departure for Rushdie from his previous work in its engagement with popular culture, and in particular its exploration of rock and pop music as part of the cultural glue of globalization. This is set against the typical Rushdie style of varied and many literary and cultural allusions, most notably the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Goonetilleke regards the novel as important, but lacking the ‘tautness and intensity’ of his previous work (p. 147). There are short chapters on Fury, concentrating on Rushdie’s engagement in a comparison between European and American culture in that novel, and on Shalimar the Clown, which could certainly have warranted greater attention. This is also true of the short chapter on The Enchantress of Florence. The book as a whole updates Goonetilleke’s analysis of Rushdie, but the real value of the analysis still lies with his thoughtful and influential readings of the novels up to The Moor’s Last Sigh [1995]. The following books were published in 2010 but will be reviewed in next year’s list: Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch and Morality (Palgrave), and Monica Germana`, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (EdinUP).
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4. Pre-1950 Drama
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This year has seen a crop of books on Irish drama, especially to do with W.B. Yeats and the Abbey Theatre. Material on other dramatists has, as usual, been thin on the ground, although there has been a welcome investigation of Christopher Fry and British verse drama, as well as suffrage drama, and classical drama on the Edwardian stage. A book on the Free German League in wartime London also provides an insight into the cultural life in the metropolis at this time. Lauren Arrington’s provocative book, W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State, revises the view that there had been no censorship of the theatre in Ireland, arguing that this was in fact imposed more by the directors of the Abbey Theatre than by the Irish government. Yeats himself was involved in this, regardless of his oft-repeated views on artistic freedom, as shown by Arrington’s meticulous research into the Abbey’s financial documents, minutes, and correspondence. Taking this as the central thread, a new history of the Abbey is presented, showing its roots in the Irish nationalist movement of the 1890s, through the various compromises taken by those in charge. The picture drawn here is of Yeats as a media-savvy and manipulative figurehead who went to extraordinary lengths to protect his theatre. Gerardine Meaney’s thoughtful Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation covers a much wider area than Arrington’s work. However, it takes up some of the same issues of Irish nationalism, and relates this to the founders of the Abbey Theatre: Yeats, Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory. Gaol Gate [1906], one of Gregory’s short plays, is described as linking folklore, Christianity, and Irish nationalism in a way that ‘might have seemed closer to the new nation of strong farmers, publicans and petit bourgeois poised on the verge of self-invention in 1906 than to an unchanging, peasant essence of Irishness’ (pp. 49–50). This view that Irish female dramatists of this time do ‘not simply embody the nation, but articulate, activate and are agents of it’ (p. 52) is taken up with Maud Gonne’s Dawn, a rewriting of the Mayo famine of 1898. Meaney also looks at the stage representation of the Cuchulainn legend by Yeats, Gregory, and Synge. The story concerns a battle between father and son, which has come to stand for ‘a recurrent paradigm of the impossibility of a national, civil society, that is, one that can bequeath posterity to a new generation’ (p. 155). Yeats returned to this legend for over twenty-five years, in plays such as On Baile’s Strand [1904]. Meaney’s genderized comparison of this with Gregory’s Cuchulainn of Muirthemne is incisive. Whereas Yeats idealizes the warrior queen Aoife, Gregory describes the hostility of the father and son towards her. Gregory takes on the voice of the strong male, but, as Meaney warns, ‘To assume Cuchulainn is a figure of liberation and release is to fall into Gregory’s cleverly fashioned trap, which proposes heroic intensity and peasant authenticity as the essence of a lost (about-to-be-recovered) Irish national spirit’ (p. 158). Meaney also gives a variety of interpretations of Synge’s own spin on the Oedipal myth, The Playboy of the Western World [1907]. Interestingly, she turns to Teresa Deevy’s parody, The King of Spain’s Daughter [1935]; by removing the mythic Oedipal
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framework present in the works of Yeats and Synge, Deevy emphasizes the brutality of familial violence. Volume 2 of Julia M. Wright’s edited A Companion to Irish Literature has useful sections on George Bernard Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and Sean O’Casey. The former dramatist is discussed in Christopher Innes’s ‘Defining Irishness: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Connection on the English Stage’. Here he describes how Shaw was the last major Irish playwright to write the majority of his work for English audiences. However, he remained a champion of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the only one of his full-length plays written wholly about Ireland, John Bull’s Other Island [1904], directly influenced the finalization of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 after Lloyd George and Winston Churchill saw a revival of it. In ‘W.B. Yeats and the Dialectics of Misrecognition’, Gregory Castle describes Yeats as mobilizing ‘a quintessentially Revivalist attitude towards time and temporality in order to structure his own attitude towards the past’ (p. 66). The plays of his early period—On Baile’s Strand, The Green Helmet, The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Death of Cuchulain—shows his commitment to cultural nationalism. At the Hawk’s Well [1917] marks a turning point, where he starts to integrate stylized aspects of Japanese Noh drama, introduced to him by Ezra Pound. Ann Saddlemeyer’s ‘John Millington Synge—Playwright and Poet’, emphasizes the brevity of the dramatist’s stage career: his first works were written in 1902 and his sixth and last appeared posthumously in 1910. All of his work— poetry, plays, and essays—was influenced by French symbolism, especially Mallarme´ and Verlaine’s belief in the colour and sound of words. This was infused with an awareness of Ireland’s physical and cultural geography, most notably in Riders to the Sea [1902], which also reflects his early musical training. Saddlemeyer contextualizes the infamous Playboy riots, noting how Synge wanted to fuse the romantic tone of the play with more Rabelaisian qualities. This essay does much to present Synge as a theatrical innovator, who looked forward as well as back in his work. Another useful piece is by Sandra Wynands, ‘The Word of Politics/Politics of the Word: Immanence and Transdescendence in Sean O’Casey and Samuel Beckett’. Here Wynands suggests a fundamental theatrical difference between the two playwrights. O’Casey ‘uses drama to communicate the ills of social circumstances and to mobilize his audience to change them’, while Beckett ‘induces experiences that does not so much move audiences towards one another as make them turn inward’ (p. 115). Michael McAteer’s Yeats and European Drama outlines the different stages of writer’s theatrical career: the early plays, such as The Land of Heart’s Desire and The King’s Threshold, the middle period, dominated by the Cuchulain cycle, and later works such as The Dreaming of the Bones and Purgatory. Reminding us that Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 as much for his theatre work as for his poetry, McAteer describes the influence of such dramatists as Maeterlinck, Strindberg, and Pirandello, and of German expressionism. Given Yeats’s aforementioned links with Japanese Noh theatre, the title of this book is perhaps a slight misnomer (although the point is made that this is Noh theatre as filtered through a European sensibility), but the volume remains a useful addition to Yeats studies. As with
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Saddlemeyer’s piece on Synge, here another Irish playwright is shown as attentive to new theatrical forms. McAteer convinces in his argument that Yeats’s plays can specifically be seen to draw on all of the major trends in early twentieth-century European drama. For example, strong connections are made between Calvary and The Words upon the Window-pane and, respectively, Pirandello’s Lazarus and Six Characters in Search of an Author. The Death of Cuchulain is described in terms of its anti-theatricality, showing how ‘human experience was becoming automatised in a machine age’ (p. 128), a key theme of modernism. Moving to Scotland, Ian Brown’s edited From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth uses Scotland’s national fabric as a way of thematically linking a variety of cultural forms. Paul Maloney takes a look at music hall in ‘ ‘‘Wha’s Like Us?’’: Ethnic Representation in Music Hall and Popular Theatre and the Remaking of Urban Scottish Society’. Maloney sees how the rebranding of music hall as variety in the 1890s led to a need to find artists who could break through regional barriers to find national fame. Harry Lauder was one such figure who anglicized his vocabulary while using other Scottish elements (tartan, comic repertoire) to become acceptable to a wider audience. This larger-than-life Scottish persona proved popular throughout the world, and was successfully replicated by a number of other performers. The use of the kilt and other tartan trappings allowed them to ‘negotiate images of Scottish identity that connected the present with the historic past through celebration of a shared culture’ (p. 149). Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove’s Politics By Other Means: The Free German League of Culture in London, 1939–1946 gives a fascinating insight into the cross-cultural fertilization taking place in wartime London. Launched in 1938/9 and continuing until beyond the end of the Second World War, the FGLC brought together refugees—‘enemy aliens’—fleeing from Nazi Germany. Various venues, including one in Belsize Park (the ‘Little Theatre’), were used for meetings, concerts, and theatre performances. These latter events included satirical revues and plays, introducing many British people to European theatrical fare long before the arrival of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in 1956. Benefits were also held by the League’s supporters, including Sybil Thorndike, Beatrix Lehmann, and Roger Livesey. Always under the careful watch of the British government, many members of the FGLC were interned, leaving it at times bereft of performers and audience. However, it worked hard to promote European culture while also drawing on more home-grown talent: revues like Mr Gulliver Goes to School [1942] followed the style of Herbert Farjeon’s topical skits, and productions of plays by J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde were given a foreign twist. The FGLC also adapted pieces seen at other London venues, as with Calling Erna Kra¨mer [1941], taken from a one-act play at the left-wing Unity Theatre. Frances Jessup’s Christopher Fry: A Dramatic Reassessment of the Fry/Eliot Era of British Verse Drama has an alternately plodding and lyrical style: ‘He was born at 65 Sussex Place, Bristol, in 1907, weighing seven and a half pounds, after forty-eight hours of labour’ (p. 5); ‘Fry and Marlowe take us to the open sea, where the waves are high and the risks are great’ (p. 37). While it is hard at times to see this as a contemporary piece of work, it is nevertheless
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advantageous to have a book on this under-represented theatrical genre. After a decidedly unacademic biographical chapter, Jessup shows how Fry’s early work was written for religious festivals, with its ritualistic directness emulating Greek and medieval drama. A distinction is made early on between a verse play and poetic drama, even if this is not entirely clarified (the former is ‘ ‘‘precious’’ in the degraded sense of that word. Poetic dramas are precious in the primary sense of the word’, p. 37). Undoubtedly, though, this book is underpinned by a strong sense of scholarship, and does much to contextualize the work of Fry and Eliot. Jonathan Croall has updated his 2000 volume, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life. Now entitled John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star, little has been added in terms of the actor’s career. Instead, more information has come to light about his personal life, particularly the pain caused by having to keep his homosexuality secret. It might seem untimely to have yet another tome on Gielgud—Sheridan Morley also published a biography in 2001—but Croall’s evident enthusiasm for his subject and his elegantly turned phrases do much to flesh out the man behind the acting roles. Penny Farfan’s ‘Women’s Modernism and Performance’, in Linett, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, explores a range of politically motivated plays by female dramatists, including Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women [1907], Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon [1907], and— surprisingly—Edna St Vincent Millay’s allegorical Aria da Capo [1919]. In this latter work, the commedia dell’arte figures of Pierrot and Columbine are interrupted by the Masque of Tragedy. Like the musical form whose name it bears, the end of the play returns to the beginning as a commentary on the recently fought war. In exploring modernist staging techniques, Farfan argues that not only did ‘the performing body’ act as a ‘liminal zone between aesthetic practice and everyday life’ but also that ‘the corporeal intersection of performed role and performing subject functioned both as a way to understand the mundane practices of everyday life and as a strategic method for intervening in those practices’ (p. 56). She draws on Hamilton’s Pageant of Great Women [1910] as an example, to show how this allowed for ‘queer identification’ and increased awareness of lesbian identities. Elizabeth Robins is also the focus of an article by Maroula Joannou, ‘ ‘‘Hilda, Harnessed to a Purpose’’: Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen, and the Vote’ (CompD 44:ii[2010] 179–200). Here, Joannou explores the impact Robins had on championing Ibsen’s work in this country from the 1890s onwards. She acted in, and encouraged productions of, his work by setting up a theatrical management venture with Marion Lea. Vida Levering, the heroine of Robins’s suffrage drama Votes for Women!, owes much to Ibsenite women. Moreover, it can be seen both as a ‘theatrical hommage’ to Ibsen, and ‘a decisive radical break with Ibsen’s dramaturgy’ by turning Hilda Wangel ‘into the most shocking of modern termagants, a suffragette’ (p. 188). Three separate articles focus on aspects of classical drama on the early twentieth-century British stage. Rosemary Barrow’s ‘Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London’s Late-Victorian and Edwardian Popular Stage’ (TJ 62:ii[2010] 209–26) connects the staging of classical subjects at this time not just with education but with academic painting. Thus Rome
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5. Post–1950 Drama This year has been marked by the scarcity of full-length monographs, although the field continues to be well represented through the publication of journal articles. David Lane’s Contemporary British Drama is published in the Edinburgh Critical Guides series; yet it is far more than an introduction or general survey. Instead Lane sets out to re-evaluate some of the major developments and trends that have taken place in British theatre since 1995. Amongst its six chapters are reconsiderations of the so-called in-yer-face drama of the mid-1990s, speculation as to the popularity of verbatim theatre, and a materialist analysis of playwriting. Playwriting culture since 1996 is in fact the main theme of the book. Lane examines this process through a variety of different working methods such as devising, while the work of the 1990s is interpreted through three very different critical studies of the period, namely David Edgar’s edited collection State of Play [1999], Dominic Dromgoole’s The Full Room [2001], and (the most influential of the three), Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today [2000]. Throughout the book a number of illustrative (and illuminative) case-studies accentuate the more general points being made. For instance, there are discussions of contemporary writers Simon Stephens and Gregory Burke and of the work of Caryl Churchill since This Is a Chair [1997], while chapter 3 considers the devising process behind David Eldridge’s Market Boy [2006] on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, as well as collaborations involving the dance group Frantic Assembly and the playwright Bryony Lavery on Stockholm [2007]. There is also a thoughtful chapter on recent Black and Asian writing, and another on the writing of drama for specific communities, including Edward Bond’s work for the theatre in education group Big Brum and Kneehigh’s adaptation of the film Brief Encounter [2008]. Mike Bradwell’s autobiography, The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre, is an entertaining as well as informative account of his time running two influential theatre companies: Hull Truck between 1971 and
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was presented through realistic spectacle via the toga play, and the Hellenism and eroticism of Greece via tableaux vivants. Inevitably, the focus of both was the eroticized female body. Well written and illustrated, the article convincingly shows how these conventional representations held sway at a time when the suffrage movement was becoming increasingly militant. Two further articles explore the employment of Greek drama by early twentieth-century writers. Simon Perris, in ‘ ‘‘The Kingdom of Heaven within Us’’: Inner (World) Peace in Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women’ (CompD 44:iv[2010] 423– 40), describes how Murray’s translation of Trojan Women in 1905 is inflected by a Liberal reaction to the second Boer war. In ‘Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and The Elder Statesman’ (CompD 44:iv[2010] 509–28), Michael Simpson argues that T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman [1958] deliberately drew on Greek drama as a riposte to the work of John Osborne and Samuel Beckett.
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1982 and the Bush Theatre from 1996 to 2007. The biography allows scope for Bradwell to express his scepticism towards the widely held view that we live in a golden age of new theatre writing (p. xiv) as well as towards the vogue for ‘in-yer-face’ plays during the mid-1990s—of which the Bush, in plays such as Richard Zajdlic’s Dogs Barking [1994], is cited as a progenitor. There are also lively accounts of Bradwell’s run-ins with the Arts Council and the insidious processes instituted from the mid-1980s onwards where business and marketing practices started to gradually displace the principal decision-makers in theatres such as the Bush. The book also provides an informative first-hand account of the individuals and companies who since the 1960s have helped shape what has become known as fringe or alternative theatre. The list is extensive, and includes stories and assessments of Joan Litttlewood’s Theatre Workshop (pp. 7–12), The People Show (pp. 25–6), and Portable Theatre (pp. 26–7). There are also accounts of Bradwell’s work as an actor in Ken Campbell’s Roadshow for Bar Room Tales [1971] and The Warp [1979] and in Mike Leigh’s early plays such as Ecstasy [1979]. Bradwell’s time at the Bush also provides valuable insights into the background of plays such as Catherine Johnson’s Shang-a-Lang [1998], Simon Block’s A Place at the Table [2000], and Richard Cameron’s The Glee Club [2002], and serves as a reminder that this small London venue has always punched far above its weight as essentially a theatre space above a pub. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond’s edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, follows two other books on the playwright that were published last year—Philip Roberts About Churchill and Sian Adiseshiah’s Churchill’s Socialism. The editors take a thematic rather than a chronological approach to the chapters. Sheila Rabillard’s ‘Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Drama: Right to Poison the Wasps?’ (pp. 88–104) thus looks at work dating from the overlooked 1971 wireless play Not Not Not Enough Oxygen to more recent work such as Far Away [2000]. Complementing this chapter is Jean E. Howard’s ‘Owning and Owing: Caryl Churchill and the Nightmare of Capital’ (pp. 36–51), which highlights the destructive nature of capitalism as another recurrent theme in Churchill’s work alongside ecological catastrophe. There are also several contributions that look at the theatrical and performative dimensions of Churchill’s work. One of the most interesting approaches is Elaine Aston’s ‘On Collaboration: Not Ordinary, Not Safe’ (pp. 144–62), which discusses how, since early work with Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire [1976] and Vinegar Tom [1976], collaborative and devised work has run alongside themes and ideas that Churchill has subsequently gone on to investigate as an individual playwright. Aston’s chapter is complemented by Libby Worth’s ‘On Text and Dance: New Questions and New Forms’ (pp. 71–87), a more detailed exploration of Churchill’s collaborative work with music, choreography, and physical movement. Janelle Reinelt’s ‘On Feminist and Sexual Politics’ (pp. 18–35) brings together performance analysis and an assessment of Churchill’s politics in terms of particular gender relations that operate within the plays. These include the aforementioned Vinegar Tom as well as Top Girls [1982], Fen [1980], and Cloud Nine [1979]. Other chapters that touch on different areas of Churchill’s politics include Mary Luckhurst’s ‘On the
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Challenge of Revolution’ (pp. 52–70) and Elin Diamond’s ‘On Churchill and Terror’ (pp. 125–43). Churchill’s philosophical concerns are explored in R. Darren Gobert’s ‘On Performance and Selfhood in Caryl Churchill’ (pp. 105– 24), in which he explores performance and the nature of selfhood through time and space, ranging from Identical Twins [1968] and Traps [1977] to Blue Heart [1997] and A Number [2002]. The volume concludes with Dan Rebellato’s ‘On Churchill’s Influences’ (pp. 163–79), which attempts to assess Churchill’s place within post-war British theatre. Rebellato cites as chief amongst her achievements an ability to weave realist and experimental forms. The chapter also contextualizes Churchill’s place within the dramatic canon by assessing her impact on her peers. Patrick Lonergan’s monograph Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era devotes one chapter to the British-born dramatist Martin McDonagh and considers his use of intertextuality in respect of wider questions of globalization and theatre culture. Taking account of McDonagh’s reluctance to categorize himself as an Irish dramatist, Lonergan sees the work not only being informed by ‘an Irish critical tradition’ (p. 105) but, more pertinently, one informed by a diverse range of globalized sources: this diversity extends from Borges’s fiction to the Australian soap opera Neighbours. In this way Lonergan is able to convincingly argue that McDonagh draws from a globalized/mediatized tradition every bit as much as, according to existing scholarship, he uses Synge and O’Casey. Joshua Abram’s ‘State of the Nation: New British Theatre’ (PAJ 32:ii[2010] 8–16) provides an overview of a number of British plays since 2009 that represent what he calls ‘a perfect storm of ‘‘State of the Nation’’ questioning’ (p. 8). As such his article reads as a frontline report on several notable sea-changes in subject matter tackled in recent British drama. Abram’s analysis includes plays about nationhood, such as Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s novel Nation [2009] and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem [2009], a play Abram sees as about ‘a national mythology and the broad question of what makes England English’ (p. 11), Alia Bano’s Shades [2009], while the adaptation for the National Theatre of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Black Album [2000] Abram sees as exploring the changing identities and tensions faced by young British Muslims. In contrast, David Hare’s The Power of Yes [2009] and Lucy Prebble’s Enron [2009] move beyond being state-of-the-nation pieces and through their collective exploration of the world banking crisis instead become ‘state-of-the-world’ (p. 14) dramas. Abram’s observations also broadly follow those in Aleks Sierz’s review ‘New Writing 2009’ (ConTR 20:i[2010] 129–38), where he is in agreement that 2009 was ‘a good year for theatre as social comment’, with plays on ‘economic collapse, religious segregation and racial disharmony’ (p. 129). However, while praising the ambition of work such as the Tricycle Theatre’s thirteen-play season on Afghanistan, The Great Game [2009], and Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat [2009], Sierz also detects a lack of energy in many of the plays being produced by young writers. Adam J. Ledger’s ‘ ‘‘Does What?’’: Acting, Directing, and Rehearsing Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies’ (NTQ 26:ii[2010] 121–32) explores some practical problems of staging Martin Crimp’s drama, categorized by some as
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an example of Lehman’s ‘post-dramatic theatre’. Ledger uses an account of student workshops he conducted on Crimp’ triptych Fewer Emergencies [2005] to test this assertion. He concludes that, while the experience of working with student actors was more akin to devising than working with a piece of dramatic writing, at the same time Fewer Emergencies still exhibits features of the closed text. Several articles this year look at the work of seminal women playwrights who first rose to prominence in the 1980s. Carina Bartleet’s ‘Sarah Daniels: Feminist Enque(e)ry within the Mainstream’ (NTQ 26:ii[2010] 145–60) returns to an area of criticism in Daniel’s drama; namely ‘its reticence in tagging lesbian relationships’ (p. 149). Bartleet argues that while this is a deliberate tactic, it has to be considered in the light of Daniel’s entire oeuvre. Through an analysis of early work such as Neaptide [1984] to the recent Flying Under Bridges [2005] ‘a sustained exploration of lesbian experience onstage’ (p. 158) can be discerned through representation of systems (such as mental health), homophobia, and the politics of gender. Sara Freeman’s ‘Tragedy After Darwin: Timberlake Wertenbaker Remakes ‘‘Modern’’ Tragedy’ (CompD 44:ii[2010] 201–27) observes that the play of the title ‘refigures . . . tragic principles and debates’ (p. 202) as well as chronologically representing a third stage in Wertenbaker’s writing where models of Greek tragedy are appropriated. Freeman argues that notions of the tragic are integral to understanding After Darwin [1998] and especially notions of the tragic failing to exist in modern and postmodern culture in an example of a play Freeman calls ‘a post-historical tragedy’ (p. 203). The death in November 2009 of playwright Clare McIntyre, who came to prominence during the 1980s, prompts fellow-writer David Edgar’s short, but incisive piece, ‘Assessing Clare McIntyre’ (ConTR 20:iv[2010] 255–7), in which he divides her work into two distinct halves consisting of plays up until My Heart’s a Suitcase [1990] and those that followed. As well as discussing her work for the stage, Edgar’s assessment extends to her work for the wireless. The fourth issue of Theatre Journal in 2010 was specially devoted to the work of contemporary women playwrights from a number of different countries. Janelle Reinelt’s ‘Creative Ambivalence and Precarious Futures’ (TJ 62:iv[2010] 533–56) outlines a number of positive developments in British women’s playwriting: these include the Tricycle’s season of eleven short plays, Women, Power and Politics [2010], to the work of new writers such as Polly Stenham, Alia Bano, and Anya Reiss. Yet Reinelt also observes that these plays are very much ‘solo acts’ (p. 555) in their failure to directly address feminism or exhibit a collectivist spirit. In the same issue, playwright April de Angelis’s ‘Troubling Gender on Stage and with the Critics’ (TJ 62:iv[2010] 557–9) echoes Reinelt’s misgivings over Caryl Churchill’s continued enshrinement as the great female post-war dramatist. De Angelis goes on to critique three recently acclaimed plays— Polly Stenham’s That Face [2007], Lucy Prebble’s Enron [2009], and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem [2009]—‘in terms of the gender trouble it proposes’ (p. 558)—in other words, how the three plays represent gender. In a series of provocative and insightful critiques de Angelis finds all three wanting in their representation of gender.
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The issue also includes Elaine Aston’s ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting’ (TJ 62:iv[2010] 575–91). In a long and ambitious piece of criticism, Aston starts with Sarah Kane’s notorious refutation of being identified as a female writer, a starting point before looking back to the 1970s and the conscious building of a female playwriting culture, against which Kane and the generation who followed have adopted ‘various dramaturgies and aesthetics that work affectively on audiences so that they might feel the loss of feminism’ (p. 577). Claire Warden’s ‘Reappropriating the Pace-Egging Tradition: Ewan MacColl’s St. George and the Dragon’ (MD 53:ii[2010] 232–43) argues that this unpublished reworking of a Lancastrian mummers’ play not only modernizes the plot but is illustrative of MacColl’s willingness to experiment with dramatic form in terms of narrative in order to find new ways of presenting political drama through folk culture. Bernard F. Dukore’s lengthy article, ‘Seriousness Redeemed by Frivolity: Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges (MD 53:iv[2010] 447–70), uses the play as a case study, and in a close analysis of a number of scenes argues that, contrary to received views on Ayckbourn, Intimate Exchanges [1982] is far removed from being another pie`ce bien faite, but in fact ‘subverts the basis of that structure’ (p. 447). Jonathan Bolton’s ‘Blasphemy in John Osborne’s A Subject of Scandal and Concern and Luther’ (MD 53:i[2010] 39–56) considers the use of the word ‘blasphemy’ in Osborne’s infamous 1961 ‘Damn you, England’ letter to The Tribune. Bolton argues that Osborne uses the word not in its religious sense but ‘as a form of hurtful speech’ (p. 39). It is this redefinition of the term, based on Osborne’s reading of George Holyoake’s account of his own trial for blasphemy in 1642, that Bolton sees as the impetus behind Osborne’s television play on the subject, A Subject of Scandal [1960] and stage play Luther [1961]. Trevor Griffith’s plays for television form the subject of Leah Panos’s ‘Realism and Politics in Alienated Space: Trevor Griffith’s Plays of the 1970s in the Television Studio’ (NTQ 26:iii[2010] 273–86). Here Panos argues that the aesthetics of the television studio complement the socialist critiques that informed his work during the 1970s in terms of what she identifies as its qualities of ‘alienation, construction or ‘‘constructedness’’, and intimacy’ (p. 273). Jon Foley Sherman’s ‘Steven Berkoff, Choral Unity, and Modes of Governance’ (NTQ 26:iii[2010] 232–47) looks at the appropriation of the Greek chorus in Berkoff’s work; from his adaptation of Agamemnon [1971] to Coriolanus [1988]. Sherman argues that a distinct style emerges through Berkoff’s practice as a director, where, despite the eschewal of a political stance, the chorus work is symptomatic of events then taking place in Vietnam and during the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Sherman also notes that some of Berkoff’s casting decisions for his chorus along racial grounds have been problematic, especially in his productions of Coriolanus, ‘in which a lone white man is the only salvation for a benighted local black population’ (p. 244).
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Derek Paget’s ‘Acts of Commitment: Activist Arts, the Rehearsed Reading, and Documentary Theatre’ (NTQ 26:ii[2010] 173–93) uses a historical framework to consider the feature of the rehearsed reading in verbatim drama, which in contemporary work often revolves around a single issue that places crucial importance on what is said as testimony, in plays such as Sonja Linden and Adah Kay’s Welcome to Ramallah [2008]. Nehama Aschkenasy’s ‘The Biblical Intertext in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (or, Saul and David in Eighteenth-Century Vienna)’ (CompD 44:i[2010] 45–62) argues that amid a whole range of biblical intertexts that inform Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus [1979] (ranging from the trying of Job to the story of Cain and Abel), chief amongst them is the dramatization of Saul, the first king of Israel, and his successor David, as the text that not only first interested Shaffer in writing Amadeus but also his next major play, Yonadab [1985]. As ever, Beckett’s work continues to prompt a steady output of criticism. However, 2010 saw discussion of the work in performance more or less restricted to the realm of journal articles. The major exception has been Anna McMullan’s monograph, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. In a wide-ranging study that encompasses work produced in the mediums of theatre, television, and film. McMullan argues that while imagery such as Mouth in Not I [1972] and the imprisoned figures in urns from Play [1963] have become familiar Beckettian motifs, the ‘presentation of derogated, vulnerable bodies that struggle to appear and to speak . . . continues to pose a challenge to contemporary culture and performance’ (p. 1). The book moves beyond the familiar Cartesian analysis that often accompanies discussions about the body in Beckett’s drama and instead concentrates on how disembodiment becomes represented in each of the three different media. For McMullan these in turn produce ‘new modes of intercorporal embodiment out of the materials of subjection and vulnerability’ (p. 8). The study moves chronologically from early work such as Le Kid [1931] and Eleutheria [c.1947– 9] in the chapter ‘Dehiscent Bodies’ to the ‘corporeal indeterminacy’ (p. 31) in the chapter ‘Intercorporeal Performances and the Hauntings of History in Waiting for Godot and Endgame’ (pp. 31–44). Here, all the characters from the two plays are united in the ‘vulnerability of the body to hunger, pain and malfunction, and to the tenderness or cruelty of others’ (p. 31). These sensations also become the impetus for McMullan to draw on work in phenomenology to argue that Beckett’s work produces ‘visible and audible traces . . . even though the personae of his drama are at times tenuously or partially embodied’ (p. 11). An illustrative example of this approach is discussed in the chapter ‘Radiophonic Embodiments’ (pp. 67–80) in Beckett’s first wireless play All That Fall [1956], where Maddy Rooney’s failing body is represented by means of ‘sonic embodiment’ (p. 67). Beckett’s drama for the wireless is also the subject of Jeff Porter’s ‘Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body: Beckett and the BBC’ (MD 53:iv[2010] 431–46), where he too revisits All That Fall. Like McMullan his analysis is also from the perspective of the absent body’s acoustic presence which, ‘freed of its materiality, exhibits a kind of Joycean glee, even in its perversity’ (p. 432). Porter, not unsurprisingly locates Maddy Rooney as ‘the acoustic centre of the play, both as maker of sound and its hearer’ (p. 435), and observes that, unlike
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6. British Poetry 1900–1930 Three major collections of critical essays appeared in 2010 containing important material relating to the study of British poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. The first volume of the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines covers the years 1880 to 1955 and is edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Long an established part of Victorian studies, research on periodicals has played an increasingly important role in the study of modernism in recent years (it’s worth mentioning here Faith Binckes’s fine study, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Gardes, which also appeared in 2010). In their general introduction to the Oxford Critical and Cultural History (pp. 1–26), the editors provide some theoretical and historical background to the volume, locating it within ‘the ‘‘material turn’’ in modernist studies’ (p. 5) and identifying their general premise that ‘Periodicals functioned as points of reference, debate, and transmission at the heart of an internally variegated and often internationally connected counter-cultural sphere, or what we describe . . . as a network of cultural formations’ (p. 2). Accordingly, although they cite George Bornstein’s work on the effect of periodical publication and typography on the poetry of Marianne Moore approvingly, there is little focus on the specific textual or material implications of periodical publication for individual poets or poems. Instead, the volume is highly valuable for the way in which it details ‘networks’ and interconnections. With regard to poetry, a repeated emphasis on the importance of particular individuals and their social connections emerges. So, for example, Dominic Hibberd identifies the crucial
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the majority of Beckettian characters to come, she is allowed a certain physical agency. In this respect Porter argues that this first foray into wireless drama ‘distracted Beckett from his usual interests in noteworthy ways’ (p. 435). David Williams and Chris Taylor’s ‘Peripheral Expressions: Samuel Beckett’s Marginal Drawings in Endgame’ (JBeckS 19:i[2010] 30–55) create a taxonomy of the marginalia that Beckett made to the original manuscripts for Endgame [1957] as well as offering some speculations that attempt to connect specific doodles to the content of the play. Erin Koshal’s substantial article ‘ ‘‘Some Exceptions’’ and the ‘‘Normal Thing’’: Reconsidering Waiting for Godot’s Theatrical Form through its Prison Performances’ (MD 53:ii[2010] 187–210) rejects the popular interpretation of the play as being an allegory of the human condition, or one that affords restricted latitude to directors and actors. Using accounts of early prison performances, Koshal argues that, instead, Waiting for Godot in performance operates ‘between social norms . . . the ‘‘normal thing’’ and ‘‘some exceptions’’ ’ p. 189). Amongst the best of this year’s offerings on Beckett was theatre director Walter Asmus’s letter of farewell ‘In Memoriam: Farewell Beckett’ (JBeckS 19:i[2010] 96–108), which consists of a series of anecdotal episodes that illustrate not only Asmus’s long professional relationship with Beckett and his theatre but also much of the character and humanity of Beckett himself.
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role played by Harold Munro in shaping the reception of the ‘New Poetry’ before the First World War (pp. 176–97), and Andrew Thacker explores the reflexive aspect of Robert Graves’s decision to publish a magazine entitled Coterie after the war (pp. 462–84). In some of the best essays such connections help reorientate our understanding of particular poetic movements and the degree to which they functioned in isolation from or in opposition to each other. J. Matthew Huculak’s essay on The London Mercury, for example (pp. 240–59), traces hostile reaction to The Waste Land within that periodical to the conservative literary politics of editor J.C. Squire in initial reviews, but also points to the space given there to new writers, such as Stephen Spender, to act as advocate for Eliot’s poetry in the 1930s. Similarly, Mark Morrisson’s account of Thomas Moult’s Voices and Harold Munro’s Monthly Chapbook (pp. 405–27) observes the way in which both Georgian and modernist poets could be accommodated within the pages of particular periodicals. The narrative arc of the majority of essays in the volume is determined by the historical trajectory of whichever periodical is being addressed. But even such linear accounts provide useful insights. Jason Harding’s essay on the Criterion (pp. 346–63) charts the economic underpinnings of that journal against the fluctuations in the timings of its appearances and probes T.S. Eliot’s relationships with his contributors as editor. Jean-Michel Rabate´’s essay on the Egoist and New Freewoman reminds us how many key modernist texts first appeared in periodicals and argues that the impersonal poetics espoused by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ were shaped by his opposition to the egoist philosophy of editor Dora Marsden. Clearly this volume will become of great importance to anyone keen to understand twentieth-century poetry in its original contexts. Huculak’s observation regarding The London Mercury applies more widely to the impact of this Critical and Cultural History: these accounts complicate any ‘monolithic understanding of modernism as solely an avant-garde movement’ (p. 241), encourage thoughtful consideration of the material circumstances associated with texts, and draw significant attention to some previously neglected outlets for literary publication. A similar broadly new-historical attempt to revise previous understandings of modernism can also be found in Brooker et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, the second major collection to appear in 2010. Given the overlapping contributors and editors involved in these projects, this may not be surprising. The editors set out in an introduction their intention to ‘update’ previous publications, such as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s 1975 collection Modernism, and clarify their commitment to ‘a more culturally ‘‘thick’’ sense of modernism’s multiple connections to a wide variety of non-aesthetic practices’ and their interest in the ‘sociocultural matrix out of which it emerged’ (p. 2). In the event, Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery offer a familiar narrative in their contribution, ‘Innovation in Poetry’ (pp. 63–84): they survey the rise of Imagism before the First World War, the role of surrealism between the wars, and the influence of long modernist poems upon Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky after the Second World War. Of relevance to this section,
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Andrew Thacker’s essay on London (pp. 687–705) corresponds most closely to the agenda laid out in the introduction: he unpicks a ‘dialectic of engagement and retreat’ (p. 689) and invokes Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘cultural formations’ to lay out the patterns of continuity and severance between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. He traces thoughtful interconnections (as well as the occasional rupture) between the Rhymers’ Club, the Poets’ Club, and the Imagists within journalistic and literary circles in the capital city. In relation to British poetry, The Waste Land features prominently throughout the volume: identified by Hampson and Montgomery as ‘the iconic modernist long poem’ (p. 77), this is confirmed by the way in which Roger Luckhurst uses it in his essay on the complex relationships between modernism and forms of religious and supernatural belief (pp. 429–44). He concludes by citing Eliot’s fraught engagement with spiritualism, tarot, and the comparative study of ritual as exemplary. Similarly, John Xiros Cooper cites references to Tiresias in Eliot’s poem to illustrate his claims about ‘Modernism in the Age of Mass Culture and Consumption’ (pp. 300–14). The way that this elusive figure draws together the disparate voices in the poem is compared to ‘the modern consumer who accumulates things to convey the appearance of a person but is no person at all’ (p. 311). Other essays of relevance here include Alun Munton’s deliberations on modernism and politics (pp. 477–500), which give particular consideration to Eliot’s anti-Semitism. Citing Eliot’s correspondence with Horace M. Kallen, Munton finds the persistent influence of Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre in Eliot’s desire for order, but concludes that the poetry may be read ‘at variance’ (p. 499) with Eliot’s explicit political statements about culture. Nicholas Daly cites a wide range of early twentieth-century poetry in his essay on ‘The Machine Age’ (pp. 283–99). Reviewing ambivalent attitudes towards various technological achievements, he summons Louis MacNeice on cars and trains; John Rodker, W.H. Auden, and W.B. Yeats on airmen; F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington on the London Underground; and Thomas Hardy on the sinking of the Titanic. There is no doubt that this volume will be highly important in reflecting upon recent developments in modernist studies and in shaping their future course. The third major collection of essays from 2010 is Michael O’Neill’s Cambridge History of English Poetry. This drew comment from Clive Wilmer on the eccentricities of its inclusions, exclusions, and omissions, given its stated intention to focus on ‘English’ rather than British poetry (TLS [11 March 2011]). Nevertheless, several essays are of particular relevance here. As the title of Jason Harding’s essay, ‘Modernist and Modern Poetry: An Overview’, suggests (pp. 725–45), his survey is wide-ranging: starting from Pound’s disruptive Imagist poetics, Harding takes in Eliot’s poetic career in some detail, then offers a briefer view of Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid. Harding offers snippets of close reading—comment on a rhythmic decision here, a syntactic innovation there—which become, necessarily, tantalizing rather than satisfactory.
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In ‘Hardy and Mew’ (pp. 746–66) Ralph Pite seeks to recuperate Thomas Hardy from his usual positioning between the Victorians and the modernists. He points to continuities between Hardy’s poems and novels and draws out Hardy’s deft play with syntax for narrative effect and the complexities of his rhythms and metres. He brings similar metrical scrutiny to bear on Mew, tracing a common interest in ‘visionary rhythm’—the embodiment of a narrative situation within the form of a poem. Vincent Sherry’s essay on ‘Imagism’ (pp. 787–806) is largely devoted to American poets such as Pound and H.D., but it does touch in some detail on work by F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, and T.E. Hulme in its account of modernism’s early attempts to break from late nineteenth-century Decadence. Gareth Reeves sets himself at the familiar tension between the demands of ‘impersonal poetry’ and biographical readings in his account of ‘T.S. Eliot’ (pp. 807–23). This forms the basis of his emphasis upon persistent doubleness within Eliot’s poetry, from the self-conscious reflexivity of dramatic figures such as Prufrock to the pairing of memory and desire in The Waste Land. He concludes by exploring the self-conscious resort to pattern through motif, form, and allusion in Four Quartets. Mark Rawlinson begins his essay on ‘Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas’ (pp. 824–43) by referring to the distorting effect of previous scholarship on our perceptions of war poetry. There is a risk, he argues, that reading his chosen poets as ‘war poets’ diminishes understanding of their achievements as distinctive poets. Rawlinson then labours to avoid this by unpicking the distinctive qualities of his subjects: Owen’s pararhyming, Thomas’s quiet appeals to sensuous experience, and Rosenberg’s dramatization of physical indignities. John Goodby’s essay, ‘Dylan Thomas and Poetry of the 1940s’ (pp. 858–76), locates Thomas’s poetic achievements within an atmosphere of fragmentation and shattering on the literary as well as national scene in the war and early post-war years. As well as Thomas, Goodby considers Henry Treece and Keith Douglas as poets of the ‘New Apocalypse’. Break-up in the 1940s, he concludes ‘set the pattern for today’s pluralism’ (p. 876). Citing individual essays in this way inevitably cuts across O’Neill’s stated intention to ‘stimulate renewed interest in the history of English poetry, to narrate its developments and changes, to trace and explore its linguistic, generic and formal achievements and transformations’ (p. 6). Throughout the collection this is manifest in the close attention paid to the technicalities of form and the interplay between form and content in the poetry analysed. O’Neill’s own contribution, ‘Auden, Day Lewis, Spender: The Thirties Poetry’ (pp. 844–57), touches upon the major works by his chosen poets. The readings are deft and the judgements broad, but backed by a sense of genuine scholarship and matured appreciation. In this respect it exemplifies the virtues and the limitations of the collection as a whole: in comparison with the two Oxford collections considered previously, this volume appears conservative. With few exceptions, there is little impulse here to push at the limits of current critical opinion. And yet, in contrast with the ‘material’ concerns of the Oxford editors, this is a volume to turn to for close and scholarly appreciations of poetic form.
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Neil Corcoran begins his monograph Shakespeare and the Modern Poet with a thoughtful disquisition upon the language of influence and literary relations, advocating a more various critical vocabulary: negotiation and ‘even collaboration’ (p. 3), he argues, should sit alongside more familiar critical touchstones such as ‘intertextuality’, ‘appropriation’, and ‘the anxiety of influence’. The book’s scope is broad, but the sections on T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden are relevant here. Corcoran’s first essay on Eliot (pp. 63–89) surveys the criticism, looking for continuities and key points within reviews and essays, published and unpublished. He identifies ‘the self-interest of Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism’ (p. 81), noting links between Eliot’s conception of Shakespeare and his own developing career as a poet, but also writing with an enthusiastic appreciation of Eliot’s critical insights. A second essay on Eliot (pp. 90–120) turns on the ethics and implications of his poetic borrowings from Shakespeare. Corcoran quotes from Marjorie Garber to argue that quotation ‘is always ‘‘in quotation’’ ’ (p. 90); with regard to Eliot’s poetry, this reflects the way that Shakespearian quotation or allusion seems to register moments of pained self-consciousness and conscious negotiation with a powerful precursor. There is, Corcoran notes a ‘ferocious complexity’ (p. 104) about some of Eliot’s dealings with Shakespeare, and this includes such moments as the discarded, plainly anti-Semitic drafts of The Waste Land. Corcoran attempts to redeem Eliot with a reading of his ‘supreme symbolist poem’ (p. 120), Marina and its saddened, suffering combination of Pericles and Hercules Furens. The section on Auden is also split in two. The first essay, addressing Auden’s criticism (pp. 123–46), dwells on Lectures on Shakespeare, posthumously recreated by Arthur Kirsch in 2000. Corcoran explores Auden’s ‘reinvention of Shakespeare’ (p. 125) and his exploration of Christian psychologies alongside his ‘self-projection’ (p. 140) into such naughty figures as Falstaff. Auden liked Shakespeare, Corcoran concludes, because he didn’t take himself too seriously. The second essay, on Auden’s poetic response to Shakespeare (pp. 147–79), considers first three shorter poems, often categorized at ‘light verse’: ‘Under Which Lyre’, ‘The Truest Poetry is Most Feigning’ and ‘Forty Years On’. This allows Corcoran to explore the variety of forms Auden brought to his longer poem, The Mirror and the Sea from ‘camp irony’ (p. 165) to ‘brilliant performance’ (p. 168) and the way that Auden mixes meditations upon the power of art with an imaginative fascination for human fallibility and helplessness. Corcoran’s approach to influence is not as ground-breaking as he suggests, but his readings are compelling. The Art of the Sonnet by Stephen Burt and David Mikics brings together 100 sonnets from across languages and times. The editors grant themselves the luxury of including ‘only poems we admire’ (p. 3) and supplement the text of each poem with a short essay. Of relevance to this section, they include Hardy’s ‘A Church Romance’ (pp. 234–7); Ivor Gurney’s ‘On Somme’ (pp. 257–60); Yvor Winter’s ‘The Castle of Thorns’ (pp. 277–80); and Auden’s twenty-seventh sonnet from the sequence In Time of War (pp. 287–90). Although Burt and Mikics survey the origins of sonnet form in their introduction, there is no particular thesis here about the modern sonnet, just thoughtful, attentive, and appreciative readings of their choices.
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It seems to have been a sparse year for new books on the work of T.S. Eliot. John Paul Riquelme’s collection, Critical Insights: T.S. Eliot, brings together a mix of new writing and already published articles and essays dating back to the late 1980s to provide a useful, if stolid, general introduction to Eliot’s work. Neil Heims provides the first new essay in the collection, a brief overview— heavily dependent upon James Miller’s The Making of an American Poet (see YWES 86[2007] 849)—of Eliot’s early years up to the publication of The Waste Land. He traces the influence of Eliot’s family background and studies at Harvard upon his later career (pp. 24–39); John Paul Riquelme provides a rapid survey of Eliot’s reception, from the first reactions of his contemporary readers to a useful summary of the major trends in more recent scholarly work on Eliot (pp. 40–54); Matthew Bolton (pp. 55–73) identifies Eliot’s criticisms of the nineteenth century as a case of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ and (in the words of Carol Christ) ‘a smokescreen’ (p. 58). Instead, he argues, we should recognize Eliot’s debt to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. Poems such as ‘Portrait of a Lady’ represent Eliot’s fractured ‘negotiations with and containment of Victorian themes and forms’ (p. 69). The last new contribution to the collection is Allan Johnson’s analysis of voice in The Waste Land (pp. 74–89). This starts from Eliot’s initial, rejected, choice of title, ‘He do the police in different voices’, taken from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and then provides a roughly sequential reading of the poem. Without great originality Johnson identifies both the ambiguous resonance of Eliot’s speakers and their origins in allusion in order to explore whether there is any unity within the poem. Amongst the previously published material in the collection is an essay by Louis Menand on Eliot’s ‘anti-Romantic’ and ‘anti-expressive’ aesthetics and Ronald Bush’s careful probing of the biographical sources of Eliot’s visions of terror in The Waste Land. Riquelme concludes the collection with a summary chronology of Eliot’s life, and bibliographies of his major works and selections of critical work on his writings. Elsewhere, in addition to his presence in the general collections of essays already mentioned, consideration of Eliot also features within longer works. Anthony Cuda devotes two chapters to Eliot in The Passions of Modernism, his study of what ‘moves’ modernist writers despite the seemingly dispassionate technical structures of their work. For Cuda, this means seeking exemplary moments (‘Passion scenes’) within a writer’s work wherein the mind finds itself fascinated by ‘being moved, the processes by which it is acted upon and the ways in which it responds’ (p. 2). Cuda’s wider argument asks that we readdress the role of ‘emotion, passivity and suffering’ within modernism, and draws upon philosophical and psychological theories about the effect of passion upon bodies in order to avoid the suspicion that he is simply resurrecting a Symbolist aesthetic. His first chapter on Eliot (pp. 31–61) examines the ways in which the poet learned to confront and dramatize states of passion through the figure of the patient’s disquieting experience of anaesthesia, from the early marionette poems to ‘East Coker’. The second chapter on Eliot (pp. 62–88) explores moments of recognition across his poetic career, but concentrates on the later poetry of Four Quartets and Eliot’s dramatic writings. Such moments, Cuda argues, allow Eliot to dramatize and
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‘endure’ (p. 88) the possibility of self-dissolution and the Other. Cuda offers, then, compelling and informed readings of Eliot’s own moments of ‘imaginative compulsion’ (p. 2). Thomas J. Brennan S.J. devotes a chapter of his psychoanalytical study, Trauma, Transcendence and Trust to a reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land (pp. 119–62). Figures of loss, castration, and impotence associated with Lacan’s theories of trauma re-emerge here in the emasculated figure of the Fisher King. Drawing on Melanie Klein, Brennan also pursues the link between loss and broken trust. Eliot’s fractured voices in The Waste Land, he suggests, disperse a traumatized experience of history that is not allowed to inhere in any one figure. Timothy J. Sutton surveys Eliot’s career as a poet and dramatist in a key chapter of his study, Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists (pp. 91–128). Sutton rejects the division between secular readings of the early poetry and Eliot’s explicit and public engagement with religious questions to argue that his work manifests ‘a more or less religious mind’ (p. 93) throughout. His reading of The Waste Land is slewed towards an emphasis upon St Paul and St Augustine, even in those passages that explicitly invoke Hindu and Buddhist texts, but subsequent sections of the chapter on the doctrinal and historical background to Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism provide more convincing material. Sutton is most thoughtful where he examines the prickly frictions between religious and national identity that trouble any smooth reading of Eliot’s development as a religious thinker and poet. Although access to the Yeats Eliot Review was oddly unobtainable in 2010, work on Eliot continues to have a sustained presence in other journals. Suzanne Smith’s article, ‘Elias Canetti and T.S. Eliot on Fame’ (P&L 34:i[2010] 145–60), begins its examination of judgement in Eliot’s prose with Elias Canetti’s bitter hostility towards the poet’s fame and reputation. Smith then considers the models of literary and ethical value underpinning Eliot’s critical writings and his attitude towards reviving the critical fortunes of neglected writers, such as Andrew Marvell. The essay concludes paradoxically with a vision of Canetti’s understanding of literary immortality as more inclusive than that of Eliot. In 1921 T.S. Eliot spent some weeks in Margate recovering from a breakdown and writing parts of The Waste Land; in ‘The Meaning of Margate: G.K. Chesterton and T.S. Eliot’ (English 59:ccv[2010] 194–211) Luke Seaber argues that Chesterton chose to set ‘The Purple Jewel’ in Margate as a means of connecting the poet figure in his short story to Eliot. Margate’s status as a popular seaside resort and the spectacle of holidaying masses on the beach offered Chesterton, Seaber argues, a means of criticizing the ‘profoundly undemocratic’ (p. 202) qualities of modernist poetry. The narrative of the essay, however, concludes by citing the warm epistolary relations between Eliot and Chesterton towards the end of Chesterton’s life. It is unlikely that Eliot attended Pierre Janet’s lectures at Harvard in 1906, or that he travelled to nearby Worcester in 1909 to hear Freud talk, but he was familiar with their work, and Murray McArthur argues that their investigations of hysteria and hysterical symptoms play an important role in Eliot’s early poetry (‘Symptom and Sign: Janet, Freud, Eliot and the Literary
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Mandate of Laughter’ (TCL 56:i[2010] 1–24)). McArthur connects the internal structures of repetition and the representation of laughter in ‘Mr Apollinax’ and ‘Hysteria’. Compulsive actions do not merely evoke psychoanalytical theories, for McArthur; borrowing from Zˇizˇek, he argues that these poems are intimately connected with the circumstances of Eliot’s ‘mandate’: his decision to pursue the vocation of poet and arrival at a mature poetic voice. Eliot’s criticism features in Ellen Levy’s essay, ‘Borrowing Paints from a Girl: Greenberg, Eliot, Moore and the Struggle between the Arts’ (Mo/Mo 17:i[2010] 1–20). Starting from the writings of Clement Greenberg, Levy considers the notion of ‘a dominant art form’ in the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is among the resources she draws upon to show the ways in which the terms of this debate had a tendency to come down to the contrasting claims of poetry and the visual arts. But Levy is also interested in broad questions about the role of institutions in such debates and the place of Eliot’s essay in establishing the role and value of the academy. Finally, Eliot features prominently, albeit inconclusively, in Neil Powell’s ponderings over the place of difficulty in modern poetry, ‘Difficulties with Difficulty’ (PNR 195[2010] 195–6). The most significant publication in 2010 relating to W.H. Auden was the next volume in Edward Mendelson’s ongoing edition of his complete works. Prose, vol. 4: 1956–1962 covers the years in which Auden was Oxford Professor of Poetry and, most importantly, includes his lengthy collection of essays and observations The Dyer’s Flood. The introduction examines how his public status at Oxford troubled Auden intellectually and personally, but otherwise Mendelson has a relatively light touch, providing little by way of annotation to Auden’s text. The depth of his erudition and the extent of his researches are evident, however, from copious appendices relating to unpublished essays and lectures by Auden, from detailed notes about the textual origins of the volume’s contents and from the sheer length of the book. The Dyer’s Hand takes up approximately a third of the volume, the rest of which is taken up with other essays and reviews by Auden. At nearly 1,000 pages, this book continues to attest to the range and variety of Auden’s prose output: we start with his comments upon the final volume of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and close with his masterly reflections upon Shakespeare’s Prospero. As with the other volumes in the series, this will become the standard point of reference for anyone interested in Auden as a poet, as a critic, and as a thinker. The eclectic materials he gathered for The Dyer’s Hand will surely make this one of the more enjoyable volumes. Aidan Wasley’s study, The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene, is discussed most properly elsewhere in this volume, since it is predominantly concerned with Auden’s influence upon modern American poets, from Elizabeth Bishop to John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. However, it is worth noting that Wasley’s ‘Prologue: Auden in ‘‘Atlantis’’ ’ (pp. 1–29) offers a thoughtful account of Auden’s ‘struggle to articulate a new American self’ (p. 8) after the Second World War. It ranges from his ‘first American poem’ (p. 2), ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, through public lectures, reviewing,
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and his private life to his libretto for Paul Bunyan. The freedom of choice Auden associated with America, Wasley argues, also filled him with loneliness. Matthew Mutter’s essay, ‘ ‘‘The Power to Enchant that Comes from Disillusion’’: W.H. Auden’s Criticism of Magical Poetics’ (JML 34:i[2010] 58–85), mixes Auden’s critique of magical thinking with Mutter’s own dissatisfaction regarding some recent critical work on the importance of magic and the occult to modernism. Auden, he argues, came to eschew magic in the belief that the proper effect of art is ‘disenchanting’ (p. 59); art must mediate, Auden saw, between mystical explanations of the world and a historical sense of experience in relation to the real existence of other human persons. Mutter also takes issue with critics who idealize magic as a tool for resisting and subverting the hierarchies of imperialism and secular capitalism. The essay ranges deftly across Auden’s career, paying most attention to Prospero in The Mirror and the Sea, but also offering an intelligent account of Auden’s interests in Freud and Marx. Auden also features in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins’s collection of essays, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Heather O’Donoghue’s essay ‘Owed to Both Sides: W.H. Auden’s Double Debt to the Literature of the North’ (pp. 51–70), aims to recalibrate understanding of Auden’s use of allusion to topics and forms from Old Norse. She traces his debt in Paid on Both Sides to the ‘familiar secular ‘‘social realism’’ ’ (p. 57) of Norse family sagas, but also identifies allusions to mythic tellings of the catastrophic death of the God Baldr. In The Age of Anxiety she connects Auden’s apocalyptic visions to Ragnarok, before identifying in close detail his use of kennings and dro´ttkvaett, arguing that critics have previously failed to understand the distinctive nature of this skaldic metre. Stan Smith describes the value of islands to Auden’s poetic imagination in ‘Island Distractions: W.H. Auden’s Ethical Topographies’ (in Cianci et al., eds., Transits, pp. 225–41). Smith discovers an association with doubleness, from Auden’s feelings of split allegiance towards America and England to Gonzalo’s feelings towards the island he is leaving in The Sea and the Mirror. John Betjeman has been well served critically since the recent celebrations of the centenary of his birth in 2006. With Betjeman’s England Stephen Games continues to anthologize his writings thematically, and 2010 also saw the publication of two monographs that aim to review and revise Betjeman’s position as a poet and public figure. Philip Payton’s John Betjeman and Cornwall: ‘The Celebrated Cornish Nationalist’ addresses cosy readings of Betjeman’s attitude towards national identity. This biographical study emphasizes the importance of Cornwall to Betjeman, from childhood visits to his decision to live (and die) in north Cornwall after the Second World War. Payton explores a wealth of material, from church architecture and local history to Betjeman’s interest in the pan-Celtic movement. Engaging and idiosyncratic figures, such as Robert Stephen Hawker, are shown to influence Betjeman with his peculiar ‘entwinement’ of Anglo-Catholicism and Celtic Christianity. Betjeman’s enthusiasm for Cornwall, Payton argues, is connected to ‘a deeper search for personal identity’, one complicated by factors such as Betjeman’s own Dutch heritage, his feelings for the complexities and
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difficulties of national and regional identity, and the difficulties of living as an ‘outsider’ in a part of the country with a strong ‘insider’ mentality. As the editor of Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman [2006], an anthology of Betjeman’s religious verse (see YWES 86[2007] 865), Kevin Gardner is well placed to survey his career as an Anglican poet in Betjeman and the Anglican Imagination (published in the USA as Betjeman: Writing the Public Life). Just as Payton aims to adjust our understanding of Betjeman’s attitude towards national identity, Gardner is concerned to refute those critics who hold that Betjeman’s faith was largely a matter of aesthetics—a commitment to bells, smells, and old buildings. So the book incorporates chapters on his doubt, which Gardner sees as characteristic of Betjeman’s peculiarly Anglican faith, as well as the social and public aspect of Betjeman’s religious views: his commitment to discussing matters of faith in radio broadcasts, as well as through his poetry. Much of the book is biographical in nature, the sections on Evelyn Waugh’s sinister interventions into Betjeman’s married life and the faith of his wife Penelope are compelling. But this means that there is less of a full defence of Betjeman’s poetry on formal grounds than seems promised at first. Stephen Burt offers a refreshing and lively rereading of William Empson’s career as a poet and critic in ‘Empson and the Censor’ (MP 107:iii[2010] 447–74), which considers difficulty in Empson’s poetry as a ‘particular, psychologically necessary, sort of self-censorship’, as a means of offering and withholding disclosure of difficult or forbidden feeling at the same time. Poems like ‘High Dive’, he argues, sound ‘ ‘‘esoteric’’ because it describes in part a desire not to be found out’ (p. 452). Burt measures this against Empson’s critical impulse to spill the beans and uncover the preoccupations informing the work of Donne and Marvell that may not be obvious to readers at a historical distance. The essay concludes by pointing to Empson’s habit of addressing questions which perplexed his own fraught and complicated personal life, by identifying similar concerns in his chosen writers (Joyce, Rochester, Marlowe). By taking this ‘handle to hold the bundle’ (in a favoured phrase of Empson), Burt moves nimbly between biographical questions of Empson’s sexuality, his poetic practice, and the values of his critical prose. Jim McCue’s essay ‘William Empson and the Wykehamist Dilemma’ (LitI 12:i[2010] 30–44) seems at times to concern Empson only tangentially. Inspired by Mark Thompson’s comparison of Empson and Irving Berlin (LitI 8:i[2006] 30–44), McCue asks ‘what’s a liberal pluralist to do when he knows that he knows best?’ (p. 30). McCue couches this dilemma in terms of Empson’s experience as a pupil at Winchester: aware that their education has likely equipped the pupils to make better judgements than others, these public school boys apparently felt guilt at their possible superiority. How should someone, convinced of his or her own rectitude, legislate for others? His discussion encompasses an account of the logic of T.S. Eliot’s apparent anti-Semitism in After Strange Gods but also covers contemporary problems of multiculturalism and the difficulties he himself has experienced (the accusations of racism) in criticizing multicultural society. McCue seems to labour under the difficulty he attributes to Empson, since he concludes that ‘large proportions of the population’ hold views or subscribe to ideas that ‘deserve
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no respect’ (p. 44). ‘Labour’ is perhaps the wrong word here (New Labour is a likely target throughout), since McCue appears to suffer from none of the scruples that perplexed Empson’s perception of the superiority of his own point of view. Works on war poetry were scant in 2010 compared with recent years, but still significant. Elizabeth Vandiver’s lengthy contribution to Oxford University Press’s Classical Presences series, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, provides a highly detailed account of classical allusions and tropes in poetry of the First World War. Vandiver ranges from the history of classics teaching in schools at the end of the nineteenth century to detailed consideration of the history and usage of particular motifs such as the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori tag, most famously reworked by Wilfred Owen. As well as public schools such as Eton and Marlborough, she scrutinizes the curricula of grammar schools and the ways in which classical texts were encountered both in the original and in translation. Hers is an inclusive study of poets and poems from across social classes and military ranks, devoting detailed attention to familiar figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, as well as less well-known writers, such as J.L. Crommelin Brown and Joseph Streets. As well as the array of scholarship on display and the acuity informing the readings of individual poems, Vandiver’s study is also thoroughly engaged with current critical debates. The volume offers a revisionist approach which seeks to dispel reductive accounts of poetry from this period as inherently anti-war: the sheer variety of material in the study reflects her overall argument that: ‘The extraordinarily prevalent refigurings of classics in First World War poetry were not limited to any one outlook on the war’ (pp. 29–30). This is an important study and it is to be hoped that its length will not dissuade readers from taking Vandiver’s arguments seriously. Pointing out that women wrote ‘over a quarter’ of the poetry printed during the First World War (p. 434), Claire Buck seeks to redress an imbalance in male-dominated criticism of war poetry by re-examining Vera Brittain’s first collection, Verses of a V.A.D. In ‘First World War English Elegy and Disavowal of Women’s Sentimental Poetics’ (ELT 53:iv[2010] 431–50), Buck examines the consequences of taking women’s elegiac poetry into account for standard histories of the period, which insist upon the replacement of nineteenth-century elegy with unconsolable modern forms of elegy. Buck ranges quite widely, drawing Elizabeth Barratt Browning into a discussion of Hegel’s theories of nationhood in terms of gender and considering historical changes within the opportunities for women to speak for their nation. Buck uses the Times Literary Supplement to put this all in contemporary context, citing an exchange of poems between Maud Allen Bell and Mary O’Rourke and a separate series of essays debating the role of patriotism in poetry. She concludes by noting the way that subsequent adaptations of Brittain’s more famous work, Testament of Youth, replace her own sentimental verse in favour of the embittered poetry of Sassoon and Owen. Pericles Lewis makes some interesting and important claims at the opening of his contribution to Michael Walsh’s collection, London, Modernism and 1914. In ‘Inventing Literary Modernism at the Outbreak of the Great War’
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7. Modern Irish Poetry ‘All begins in Yeats and all ends in Yeats’, George Moore once opined, and with so many books being churned out by the Yeats industry each year it can be difficult to summon the appetite for more, but even this Yeats-fatigued reader had to admit to being energized by the appearance of the recently published W.B. Yeats in Context, edited by David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, a trusty compendium—or ‘composite picture’ as the editors stress in their introduction—of comprehensive, critically acute, densely packed essays, each of which provides a securely laid foundation and launch-pad for further scholarly investigations. Even as one can dip in and out of the book as one chooses, the study has a cumulative power that gains force as it progresses as the essays, although not directly in conversation with each other, often
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(pp. 148–64), Lewis claims that modernism was ‘invented during the First World War . . . by writers who had little direct involvement with it’ (p. 148), citing the influence of Rupert Brooke’s poetry upon non-combatant writers such as Pound, Yeats, and Lawrence. What follows, though, is more of a historical survey of various forms of literary output during the early years of the war and some detail from retrospective response to conflict during the 1930s. Unfortunately a copy of Stephen Wilson’s short study, Isaac Rosenberg, was not available at the time of writing. In their exploration of different kinds of memorial activity in relation to war, ‘Memorial Poems and the Poetics of Memorializing’ (JML 34:i[2010] 162–8), Andrew Palmer and Sally Minogue consider a number of early twentieth-century poems about war memorials, including Rudyard Kipling’s ‘London Stone’, Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, and Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Cenotaph’. Although only the first part of a larger argument extending to the present day, Palmer and Minogue use these examples to illustrate debate about the value of public monuments in the wake of the First World War. Close consideration of the form of Mew’s poem shows that it embodies an ambivalence about the capacity of such monuments to compensate for the violence of war or vouchsafe its future avoidance. The remainder of the essay broaches similar concerns in relation to Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and W.D. Erhart and Yusef Komunyakaa. The introduction to John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems indicates that he is hopeful about the answer to his own question. For the purposes of this section, it is worth noting that he offers readings of ‘Larks Singing over No Man’s Land’ by Edward Thomas (pp. 130–5) and the importance of landscape to Thomas Hardy’s poetic imagination (pp. 88–93) amongst the forty-two short essays that make up this volume. The misery associated with Hardy’s poetic landscapes avoids morbidness, Felstiner argues, through the formal rhythmic and technical achievements of the verse; appreciation of landscape and natural life, in comparison, were heightened for Thomas by his friendship with the American poet Robert Frost prior to his early death in the First World War.
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supplement each other, filling in each other’s gaps, so to speak. Although it offers little in the way of new insights and is more a work of consolidation, it should prove indispensable for students coming to Yeats for the first time as a handy, all-in-one resource on the major contexts for study, the dominant thematic concerns, key critical debates and most influential modes of reading. The book is evenly divided into seven sections which inevitably overlap— imbrications of many kinds are strongly felt throughout—the first dealing with Yeats’s ‘Times’, followed by ‘Places’, ‘Personalities’, ‘Themes’, ‘Philosophies’, ‘Arts’, and ‘Reception’. There is something for everyone therefore, and very few stones are left unturned. The ultimate value of the book is its manageability: each sure-footed contributor presents on their expected topic and we find it all under one vast and commodious roof. Yeats, as we know, contains multitudes, and competing versions of the poet and the work are never shied away from. What the reader will inevitably miss are sustained close readings of the poetry, although there are some scintillating moments of insight in Stephen Regan’s essay on ‘The Fin de Sie`cle, 1885–1897’. Having said this, ill-considered generalizations about the poetry such as a throwaway one in David Fitzpatrick’s essay on Yeats and Sligo concerning ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ as ‘maudlin but inescapable’ are thankfully rare, and for anyone who needs convincing of that poem’s enduring merit I would point them to Stephen Regan’s more nuanced reading which not only manages to provide a concise overview of its topic but also incorporates moments of fine poetic sensitivity into its discussion, as when, on the same poem, he attends to its ‘acoustic appeal’: ‘if this is a poem about the imaginative recovery of lost territory, it is also about the recreation of place through sound’. Such moments are valuable for readers of the poetry. Other nutritious offerings include Roy Foster on Yeats and fascism (or ‘Fashism’ as Yeats once fortuitously misspelt it), James Longenbach on Yeats and ‘Modern Poetry’, Nicholas Allen on ‘The Church in Ireland’, and Nicky Grene’s penetrating account of the relationship between Yeats and J.M. Synge. The collection opens with a rather idiosyncratic essay by W.J. McCormack on the rather sprawling topic of ‘Church, State, Childhood and Youth’ which is at least valuable for the way that it sets up what will be a recurring consideration, that of the gap between the ‘facts’ of the life and the ‘fictions’; Yeats’s propensity for self-editing, self-mythologizing, and self-remaking is reiterated throughout. Ben Levitas’s essay on ‘Yeats and War’ is particularly intelligent in the way that it stresses Yeats as a poet of doubts, uncertainties, and anxieties, and the relation between his ‘external conflicts’ and ‘inner battles’ in poems that pivot on indeterminacy and ambivalence. Duality is also a key consideration of Paul Stanfield’s essay on Yeats as a mover and shaker in his contributions to political life in the Irish Free State. Following on from this, the ‘Places’ section of the book is marvellously unanchored—just as it should be—a condition indicated by just looking at the opening sentence of the essays. Thus: ‘In Yeats’ personal mythology Sligo was trebly home’; ‘W.B. Yeats was born in Dublin on 13 June 1865 at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue’; ‘He was primarily, of course, a Londoner. Though born in Dublin, he followed his father to London at the age of two’; ‘To claim that
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Yeats was a Londoner is to assert too much’. All of which pronouncements are of course instructive and all correct in their way. Anthony Roche is especially good on Dublin as a performative site, a site of conflicts for this most conflict-inspired of writers, and the way that the city complicates the binary division of London and Sligo that is often mapped out in critical accounts. His reading of ‘No Second Troy’ as a ‘Dublin poem’ adds to the interest. Jonathan Allison’s essay is also perceptive in the way that it examines Coole as an ‘unstable signifier’ in the oeuvre. In terms of Yeats’s contemporaries, the essays on Synge, Lady Gregory, and Maud Gonne are particularly fascinating—in one of the book’s few shortcomings Catherine Paul’s look at Yeats and Ezra Pound seems to promptly abandon our favourite ‘Celtic Eagle’ in its focus on Pound. There are important essays on ‘Yeats, Class and Eugenics’ and on ‘Nationalism and Postcolonialism’; the latter in particular, by David Lloyd, is fascinating on Yeats and the will and how this relates to postcolonialism. Moreover, it contains intelligent readings of the poems, in particular of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. ‘Anyone who writes about Yeats’s poems or plays without considering their histories of composition has no excuse but sheer laziness’ David Holdeman professes in his indispensable offering on ‘Manuscripts and Revisions’—required reading, along with George Bornstein’s on ‘Publishers and the Material Text’, for every undergraduate student. Inevitably, certain topics or contexts will interest readers more than others, but there is overall something here for everyone; fun for all the dysfunctional, modern family. What unites every contributor in their essays on a dizzying range of topics is their alertness to instability, ambivalence, conflict, and indeterminacy in Yeats and their understanding that it is from these that the dynamism and vital, enduring power of the work derive. It would be impossible to go through every single essay here; the highlights are many. As Rob Doggett correctly observes at the end of his exhaustive overview of ‘Critical Debate 1970–2006’: ‘the multifarious nature of Yeats scholarship needs to be understood within a multiplicity of contexts, some discrete, many overlapping’. One of the words that haunts the essay collection is ‘performative’ and at times it feels as though the thesaurus does not contain enough alternatives for words that recur over again such as ‘multiplicity’, ‘multifarious’, ‘indeterminate’, ‘complex’, ‘context’, ‘conflict’, ‘antimony’, ‘antithesis’, and so on. Yeats, as we know, contains multitudes, and his scholars continue to show themselves to be similarly indefatigable. As a guide for students this collection is indispensable. Critical readings of modern Irish poetry tend to overlook its formal properties, as if the poem can be separated from its form, and for close readings of some of Yeats’s key poems I would point readers to Michael O’Neill’s essay in Edward Larrissy’s collection of essays on the poet, part of the suggestively entitled Visions and Revisions series by the Irish Academic Press. Although Larrissy’s collection packs far less critical punch than that of Levitas and Holdeman, it does contain this one outstanding essay by O’Neill on the early poetry: his reading of ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’, for instance, is particularly valuable and far more illuminating than James Pethica’s reading of it in an otherwise assured and elegant essay on ‘Yeats and Aesthetics’ in the Holdeman and Levitas collection. O’Neill relates how Yeats
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remakes Romantic poets such as Shelley in his own image and, in the process of looking at Yeats and the Romantics, produces a beautifully written, sensitive reading of certain poems from this period and what he calls the ‘symbolic adventures’ of Yeats’s restlessly searching poetry, making exemplary use of manuscript material as he goes to chart the revisions and reworkings. Statements such as that on The Wind Among the Reeds as a ‘poetic challenge to contemporary history in the name of ancient Irish myths’ revivify the poetry in much-needed ways, and such carefully supported, finely judged assertions place crucial focus on the early work, which is too often dismissed as ‘vague’ in favour of the later and greater poetic achievement. Sadly, not all of the essays attain this level of critical brilliance. Anne Margaret Daniel’s essay on ‘Yeats and Women’ should have been properly edited. ‘Just listen to Olivia’s language’ the reader is instructed at one point, a sure give-away that this was written for the purposes of oral delivery, and an over-long, chatty, and slang-ridden one at that. Weighing in at over thirty pages this is by far the longest essay in the collection (and it feels it), throwing the rest of the book off balance, particularly when considered alongside Larrissy’s own impressive but too-short contribution on ‘Yeats, Gender, History and the Esoteric’. Lamentably, the essay on the more original topic of ‘Yeats’s Thought’ completely fails to read the poems themselves as dynamic vehicles of thought. James Longenbach, in his excellent essay on Yeats and modern poetry in the Holdeman and Levitas collection, insightfully describes ‘The Second Coming’ as a ‘dramatization of the route through which a mind might come . . . to apocalyptic conclusions’, and the poems should be read as active processes of thought. Indeed, Helen Vendler’s 2006 study Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats might have served as a helpful model of a more sophisticated consideration of Yeats as a thinker, a poet who, in the words of Louis MacNeice, ‘cast his thought in regular patterns’. Although this assortment of essays is altogether a much less wholesome affair than the Holdeman and Levitas collection, it is worth looking into for its well-intentioned and often successful attempts to give due significance to the poetry at the level of poetic formal procedure. ‘Yeats is a poet almost everyone associates with violence’, Michael Wood asserts in the opening of his study Yeats and Violence. The truth or otherwise of that statement aside, the book’s main attraction lies in the way that it lovingly focuses on closely reading one poem (thoughtfully presented at the beginning of the study for the reader’s convenience) and, in the process, shows just how much lies within even just this single poem’s orbit and, inevitably, how impossible it is to discuss any poem by Yeats in isolation. The poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is thereby squarely the focus of the book, indeed it is ‘the subject of the book’ and, according to the dedicated author, ‘worthy of much painful reading’; it must be said that the reading does become painful in places, more of which anon. Interesting in the book’s opening chapter is the discussion of Yeats and random violence, Yeats as a poet for whom violence is ‘always sudden and inspiring’; David Lloyd’s essay ‘Rage Against the Divine’ is instrumental here. There are, contained throughout, a number of profound meditations: on Yeats and time (or forms of time), and, in chapter 3, entitled ‘The Temptation of Form’, on form itself—the
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temptation of the poem being ‘to make the redemptive act too final and too perfect’ when in fact its ‘radical imperfection’ is among its glories. Wood possesses a winning capacity for scrutinizing his own procedures as a formalist reader and his critically alert reflections on the process of reading itself are often valuable, but there is perhaps a too-extended focus on the place of automatic writing in Yeats’s oeuvre. One wonders at times why Wood didn’t opt to take the poem stanza by stanza; the exegesis of rhyme and alliteration becomes plodding as Wood goes about studiously ‘counting the consonants’ (as he himself puts it at one point in the same chapter). Indeed, the loneliness of the long-distance formal reader becomes more and more apparent as the study drags on, dutifully attending to its basic formal characteristics, only to conclude finally that in the poem Yeats uses form to point beyond form, to the ‘formless darkness’, and all is forgiven (just about) as Wood’s analysis rewards forbearance. In the fourth chapter however, the book opens out and refreshes its approach as it reads the poem alongside the work of Andrew Marvell, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, and Eavan Boland, with Ireland as a prime site of violence in poems that allow us to, crucially, see the poets thinking. Not surprisingly, Peter McDonald’s scholarship on poetic form and violence in Yeats is an important forerunner in all of this. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen but its drunken soldiers are always on the move’, Wood reformulates the tired cliche´ like a Confucian riddler and the final chapter deals ambitiously with Brecht, Blok, Benjamin, and the idea of ‘new disorder’ in Yeats. There is throughout a tendency for self-correction along with moments that speak of a lack of confidence, and one might fault the book’s inconclusive ending were it not that one suspects that this is probably a deliberate move in favour of open-endedness. In all, it is a worthy classroom text for opening up discussion, for beginning Yeats’s work, providing contexts for analysis, and enabling a community of interpretation. Lively and lucid, it moves along at a steady pace and sustains interest for the most part despite the aforementioned moments of over-labour. In all, this is a wide-ranging, sometimes eccentric, but irrefutably passionate, penetrating, and personal tribute from one reader to a poem and a poet that we will never exhaust. There are, however, times when one feels that Yeats scholarship does not know where to end and seems to exhaust itself. Such is the case throughout Patricia Silva McNeill’s study Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles. Fernando Pessoa’s famously heteronymic poetic world, or ‘parade of myself’ as he termed it (consisting of the poets Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis), continues to gain appeal with contemporary scholars, and he is by now well established as a major modernist poet. The reasons for McNeill forcing together the work of Pessoa and that of Yeats, instead of some other poet, evade this reader for, apart from Pessoa’s fleeting interest in ‘the Irish movement’ (about which he wrote a letter to Yeats that was never sent), there is not much to go on here. Indeed, Pessoa’s understanding of Yeats’s work was at first limited, only to then become outright dismissive. Despite the author’s attempts to convince us of the ‘striking resemblances’ and ‘remarkable similarities’ between the work of Yeats and Pessoa there is little evidence of this; the affinities are superficial and by no means unique to this pair. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that Yeats and Pessoa were the
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only two poets in the world drawing on the expected influences of tradition: Romanticism, the Victorians, and Symbolism, as though no other poets were interested in myth or history. The most we can say remains at the level of the thematic: both have studied their inheritance, both use occult symbolism and myth, both are invested in ideas of a national literature and culture, both use personae and are interested in the self. So far, both are typical modernist poets, but of course we already knew that. To start with, McNeill endeavours to bring Yeats and Pessoa together mainly through their respective uses of personae and strategies of self—Pessoa’s ‘outrar-se’ and Yeats’s ‘remaking’— but such a comparison would have been better suited to a chapter-length article as it cannot be sustained across an entire book-length study. And so we get sentences that reek of the desperation of the matchmaker: ‘the personae of Pessoa’s The Mad Fiddler and Yeats’s ‘‘King Goll’’ resemble each other in that they are both . . . ‘‘mad’’ and both . . . play a stringed musical instrument’. This is hardly a cunning observation. These poets refuse to come together quietly and behave, and as the study of their work progresses, the author’s attempts to get them together lead more and more to vagueness and shortcomings in the critical language. There is a growing tendency to be repetitive—the verb ‘endow’ is used more often than one can count across the concluding chapters as things begin to unravel. Added to this, Pessoa’s poems in English are ‘uneven’ (to use a polite critical euphemism) while the translations of his Portuguese work into English could not be further removed from Yeats’s poetic style. Constantly throughout the study the phrase ‘stylistic diversification’ is repeated as a basis for the investigation. The author’s argument is that both poets practise this over their careers, but readers certainly won’t learn anything new about Yeats here— don’t come here for any insights into the poetry—indeed, McNeill is often happier letting other Yeats scholars do the reading for her. One of the most glaring shortcomings concerns the lack of contextual awareness: because the author imparts little knowledge of other contemporaneous poets and modernist poetic practice—apart from invoking Eliot now and again for the choice definition—the tendency is to present Yeats and Pessoa as though they were utterly unique, as if no other poets were addressing the same themes in their work or using similar techniques. Modernism is described finally and fleetingly on page 207 as: ‘The period in which the poets started to write was marked by a dramatic awareness of the fragmentary and chaotic mature of modernity, resulting in numerous reactions from intellectuals and artists’—the kind of sentence that one is used to encountering in an undergraduate essay and then underlining it with the terms ‘unsupported’, ‘too general’, and ‘vague’. It might have been better, one feels after reading this study, to have left Yeats and Pessoa to themselves, as Pessoa himself would write in one of his very few mentions of the Irish poet: ‘Away with you, Yeats of the Celtic mist circling a signpost with no directions, bag of rotten debris that washed onto the beach from the shipwreck of English Symbolism.’ McNeill, as a dutiful student of poetic influence apre`s Bloom, has to interpret this as ‘anxiety’, but given the lack of any real evidence of influence this cannot be upheld. Why not simply accept that it means what it says; that Yeats was not helpful for Pessoa, and leave it at that? The most we can say is that Yeats was briefly for Pessoa a
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potential model of the literary nationalist, but as early as 1914 Pessoa is dismissing Yeats for his ‘fairy nonsense’, testament to what was a brief flirtation and little more, and so surely a subject more fitting to an essay than an entire book. Comparative studies surely must do more than merely present the work of poets alongside each other, pointing out similar themes and images. For a far more successful study of Pessoa and influence one would do better to consult Irene Ramalho de Santos 2003 Atlantic Poets. Santos has carried out a far more persuasive and sophisticated comparative reading of Pessoa’s Mensagem and Hart Crane’s The Bridge, for example. Here, Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin [1889] and Pessoa’s Mensagem are granted an entire chapter merely because both use occult symbolism. In Santos’s study of Whitman and Pessoa in particular what is valuable about this mode of reading lies in the ways that it not only sheds light on the work of both poets and their poetics but also forces reconsiderations of how we read poetry more broadly, in this case the modern lyric, facilitating a fresh sense of Anglo-American modernist poetry. The fact that Whitman is never referred to in McNeill’s study (although the eminently useful catch-all ‘Whitmanesque’ graces the final page) is telling. Whitman was Pessoa’s ‘brother in the universe’ and a far more suitable candidate for a comparative study than Yeats. Little is gained from McNeill’s study, earnest and effortful though it undoubtedly is, and it reads as little more than a diligently researched and accomplished Ph.D. exercise— which is exactly where it started life and quite probably should have ended it— a fact that raises larger issues to do with current academic scholarship and the destructive rage for a monograph that continues to force wide-eyed early career academics to mutate Ph.D. exercises into books before their time. Staying with Yeats, Joseph M. Hassett’s Yeats and the Muses provides a truly absorbing biographical guide to the powerful women in Yeats’s life and their influence on the major phases of his career. A formidable cast they were too: ‘nine exceptional women’, as the author announces them, and they do not disappoint. The relation between sexual energy and creativity in Yeats’s work is made clear throughout the study as it illuminates Yeats as love poet and as a muse-poet informed by the Greek notion of the muse and by the muse-theory of poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, of course, Robert Graves’s poet as worshipper of the White Goddess. Accordingly, Hassett negotiates between muses and sirens: while Maud Gonne is truly the muse of the courtly love tradition, Margot Ruddock is ‘both siren and muse’; Florence Farr is ‘an equal rather than a muse’; George ‘more oracle than muse’; Ethel Mannin a ‘Mother-Goddess’ (in Yeats’s phrase). Hassett as intrepid muse-detective carefully combs his definitions, never reducing these women to one-dimensional objects of use to serve his critical-biographical narrative. It is at all times a clear-sighted account, particularly in its addressing of feminist charges, which it pre-empts with lucid, sensible argument, particularly evident in the reading of ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. Inevitably perhaps, the poetry suffers owing to this largely biographical approach, but we do gain insight into Yeats’s poetics, particular into Yeats the love poet, and, crucially, into the creative process itself. From the point of view of the poetry, the chapter on Iseult Gonne sheds light on the ‘Helen’ of ‘Long-legged Fly’, Olivia Shakespear inspires ‘After Long Silence’, and Florence Farr Emery the
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poignant ‘All Souls’ Night’. The lively account of Dorothy Wellesley and Yeats relates his discovery of ‘the woman in me’ through reading Wellesley’s ‘masculine’ verse. Yeats, in Ethel Mannin’s choice epithet, was ‘full of burgundy and racy renaissance’, and this is heady, intoxicating stuff, the creative and sexual energy going hand in hand as new powers are stimulated: the automatic writing sessions with George engendered the poetry of The Tower and The Winding Stair—the poetry of ‘self-possession’. Thus, the poet of ‘lust and rage’ emerges in all his glory in the book’s final chapters. Ultimately, of course, Hassett is blessed with subjects that never grow old and grey, even if Yeats described Florence Farr as ‘an enduring friendship that was an enduring exasperation’: exasperating, undoubtedly, but dull never. The wisdom, intelligence, and vitality of these larger-than-life and threedimensional female presences are such that they often upstage Yeats himself. Ultimately the book traces in detail how Yeats’s own poetics and major ideas of art evolved and were explored and expanded through these intensely important relationships. ‘My glory was I had such friends’ Yeats declared, and, as Hassett’s authoritative and engaging account proves, he wasn’t wrong. Clearly in competition with Yeats for laying claim to the most glamorous celebrity muse, Medbh McGuckian boasts Gregory Peck among hers, and readers of Irish poetry who have for too long been baffled and ‘perplexed’ by the ‘bewildering’ poetry of this quirky Northern Irish poet can now get the support they need as it is elucidated by a team of plucky scholars in Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Richard Kirkland’s The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words. As the standard introductory spiel lays on with a trowel, this is yet another sad tale of poetic neglect and an ‘oeuvre that tends to be overlooked’. But not for long. Keeping a close eye on McGuckian’s Amazon wish-list, Alcobia-Murphy is fast becoming known as the poet’s pre-eminent stalker, as he himself remarks in a charming moment of scholarly self-awareness where, alluding to his own trademark brand of research methodology, he asks the poet if he should just ‘stalk you when you visit the library’. And indeed McGuckian helpfully tips him off as to her current Belfast library location and reading subject matter of choice. This is more than just a humorous aside of course and may be seen to go to the heart of McGuckian’s poetics and the challenge of her poetry. Indeed, what the collection brings to light more than anything else is the extent of the challenge that McGuckian’s poetry presents to poetry scholars. The least successful approach to the work thus appears to be the heavily theoretically based one, where various theories are imposed on the poetry in what often read as desperate attempts to make sense of McGuckian’s poetics and reduce the poems to straightforward communicable meanings. Unsurprisingly, these engagements with the poems are more often than not limited and unconvincing, reading more like the transcript of a game of Charades as certain lines extracted from their place in the poems are defined as ‘sounding like’ what one or other theorist has said in sentences that typically begin with, ‘As Derrida said’ or ‘As Le´vinas said’. Such lazy over-deployment of theoretical soundbites serves only to diminish the richness, scope, and mystery of the poems.
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Accordingly, the two stand-out essays are Richard Kirkland’s fascinating exploration of McGuckian’s diaries and Leontia Flynn’s rigorous enquiry which in its clear-eyed, intelligently probing analysis, comes as a much-needed tonic after so much unquestioning use of theory. Flynn, as a poet herself, truly engages with the poetry, asking hard questions regarding its reception that include a critique of Alcobia-Murphy’s own approach—questions that would otherwise have remained overlooked in a collection that too often reads as an unblinking homage to a difficult poet from her helpless readers. It must be said that despite Flynn’s reservations about the Alcobia-Murphy method of chasing sources (and stalking the poet through Belfast), the source-aligned readings are without doubt the most persuasive and informed throughout the essay collection, a fact that is particularly evident in Kirkland’s essay on her poetry and ethics, where her use of Shoah literature is illuminated. Theory seems only to inspire a lack of clarity and cogent analysis and a blinkered view that excludes possibility. The essays that use theory with discernment and that focus most of all on the poetry itself, its sources, allusions, and technique, are the most lucid and engaging of all. The book concludes with a valuable interview with the poet herself in which a number of insights are presented and which reminds us of the living nature of the poetry and its status as an oeuvre in progress. What is most lacking is any engagement with, or indeed mention of, McGuckian as translator—Nuala Nı´ Dhomhnaill’s name does not appear in the index and the book lacks any real understanding of McGuckian’s obvious and to my mind profound affinities with poets from other countries— one thinks especially and most obviously of the collage methods of the American modernist poet Marianne Moore and her disciple John Ashbery (tellingly, Ashbery’s name is repeatedly misspelt as ‘Ashberry’ as if he is a type of fruit and not a major contemporary poet of international renown, all of which is painfully reminiscent of Philip Larkin’s myopic remark that he would ‘prefer strawberry’ over the American, postmodern Ashbery). Very fruitful lines of influence between McGuckian and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Moore, and a contemporary poet such as Canadian scholar Anne Carson, exist; thankfully Yeats’s role for McGuckian is examined, if fleetingly. The focus overall remains rather narrow in terms of poetic readings and knowledge of poetry more broadly. Ultimately, McGuckian remains a force to be reckoned with and, as Flynn remarks, readers of resilience are required. Hopefully, this collection will usher in and inspire further readings by scholars possessing the necessary creative and critical adventurousness and imagination who are willing to venture beyond the safe house of theory; the poetry demands it. Finally, Seamus Heaney’s work fares little better after a year in the critical limelight that had him granted his very own Cambridge Companion. 2010 saw the publication of Richard Rankin Russell’s hopefully-titled study ‘‘Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Northern Ireland’’, an examination of the work of both Heaney and Longley as the poetry of ‘reconciliation’ within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the peace process as it has developed into the present moment. Unfortunately a review copy was not available at the time of writing. David-Antoine Williams’s chapter on Heaney’s poetry in his impressive-sounding Defending Poetry: Art
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Books Reviewed Alcobia-Murphy, Shane, and Richard Kirkland, eds. The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words. CorkUP. [2010] pp. 262. E39 ISBN 1 8591 8465 0. Alfer, Alexa, and Amy J. Edwards A.S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. Contemporary British Novelists. ManUP. [2010] pp. xiv þ 194. £50 ISBN 9 7807 1906 6528.
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and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill provides little more than the usual collection-by-collection survey of the poet’s development in a chapter that is plagued with serious inaccuracies: for instance, the unforgettable opening line of ‘The Tollund Man’ (‘Some day I will go to Aarhus’) is given here as ‘Some day I will travel to Aarhus’, a graceless fumble that signals the profound lack of close, meaningful engagement with the poetry at the level of form and technique. The subject here is, as the title makes plain, the more trendy one of po-ethics—Williams in his introduction notes the ‘turn to ethics’ that has become fashionable on the literary catwalk and proceeds to deliver an overview of the usual, well-worn philosophical debates concerning the relation between literature and ethics, the aesthetic and the ethic, poetry’s ethical role, and the poet’s service to his community and to politics, the polis. As Geoffrey Hill sagely states in a quotation presented at the chapter’s beginning, all ‘serious’ poetry of the present time is ‘inextricably’ caught up in politics. Williams bases his argument around what he terms the ‘connective, incorporative, allusive style which Heaney gradually adopts after North’. According to this view, Heaney has become more outward-looking, inclusive, and therefore more ‘ethical’ as his poetry has evolved, becoming a better citizen, a more productive member of society one might say, as the years have gone by. As one would expect, Heaney’s ‘9/11 poem’ ‘Anything Can Happen’ from his most recent collection Human Chain [2010] is lit upon for investigation, although Williams’s moral reservations about the poem fail to convince. The author’s objections to Heaney’s handling of his theme are not clearly explained; none of this is strengthened by the fact that Williams gets the place of this very public poem’s first publication wrong; it was published in the Irish Times in 2001 and not the Times Literary Supplement. Curiously, the book lacks a concluding chapter and thus a summary or attempted answer to the questions it sets up for itself in its ambitious premise. ‘Ethics, Literature and the Place of Poetry’, for all its grandiloquent gesturing, fails to deliver us to the place itself. T.S. Eliot’s influence on Heaney—particularly with regard to Heaney’s own ‘auditory imagination’—is propounded throughout, but Williams himself would have benefited from Eliot’s cautionary statement from his preface to The Sacred Wood (quoted by Williams himself as it happens) that ‘when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing’. The damaging lack of attentiveness to the relation between poetic form and poetic meaning is widespread, as too many of the offerings in modern Irish poetry scholarship this year attest.
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Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. EdinUP. [2010] pp. x þ 133. £60 ISBN 9 7807 4863 6754. Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham, eds. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past. Palgrave. [2010] pp. xxvi þ 198. £55 ISBN 9 7802 3020 5574. Arrington, Lauren. W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State: Adding the Half-pence to the Pence. OUP. [2010] pp. ix þ 210. £63 ISBN 9 7801 9959 0575. Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard. Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde. OUP. [2010] pp. xiii þ 228. £60 ISBN 9 7801 9959 3699. Ashton, Paul, and Hilda Kean, eds. People and their Pasts: Public History Today. Palgrave. [2009] pp. xiv þ 304. £55 ISBN 9 7802 3054 6691. Aston, Elaine, and Diamond Elin, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. CUP. [2010] pp. 193. pb £18.99 ISBN 9 7805 2172 8942. Barker, Simon, and Jo Gill, eds. Literature as History: Essays in Honour of Peter Widdowson. Continuum. [2010] pp. xiv þ 189. £60 ISBN 9 7808 2643 3855. Barnett, Ryan, and Serena Trowbridge, eds. Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond. CambridgeSP. [2010] pp. 170. £34.99 ISBN 9 7814 4382 5672. Baxter, Katherine Isobel. Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance. Ashgate. [2010] pp. vii þ 163. £55 ISBN 9 7807 5466 9029. Beedham, Matthew. The Novels of A.S. Kazuo Ishiguro: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave. [2010] pp. vii þ 176. hb £42.50 ISBN 9 7802 3051 7455, pb £13.99 ISBN 9 7802 3051 7462. Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. Palgrave. [2010] pp. ix þ 188. £55 ISBN 9 7802 3023 7872. Binckes, Faith. Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading ‘Rhythm’, 1910–14. OUP. [2010] pp. xii þ 260. £61 ISBN 9 7801 9925 2527. Bishop, Ryan, and John Phillips, eds. Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception. EdinUP. [2010] pp. ix þ 238. £60 ISBN 9 7807 4863 9885. Bluemel, Kristin, ed. Intermodernism. EdinUP. [2010] pp. 264. £19.99 ISBN 0 7486 4285 4. Bradwell, Mike. The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre. Hern. [2010] pp. 319. pb £14.99 ISBN 9 7818 5459 5386. Bray, Suzanne, and Richard Sturch, eds. Charles Williams and his Contemporaries. CambridgeSP. [2009] pp. 225. £34.99 ISBN 9 7814 4380 5650. Brennan, Thomas J., S.J. Trauma, Transcendence and Trust: Wordsworth, Tennyson and Eliot Thinking Loss. Palgrave. [2010] pp. xiv þ 206. £52.50 ISBN 9 7802 3010 4969. Brinson, Charmian, and Richard Dove. Politics by Other Means: The Free German League of Culture in London, 1939–1946. Vallentine Mitchell. [2010] pp. ix þ 253. £45 ISBN 9 7808 5303 8627. Brooker, Joseph. Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed. Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature. EdinUP. [2010] pp. xi þ 236. £65 ISBN 9 7807 4863 3944.
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Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. OUP. [2009] pp. xvii þ 955. £110 ISBN 9 7801 9921 1159. Brooker, Peter, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. OUP. [2010] pp. xviii þ 1,182. £89 ISBN 9 7801 9954 5445. Brown, Ian. From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth. EdinUP. [2010] pp. vii þ 278 £60 ISBN 9 7807 4863 8772. Brown, Judith. Glamour in Six Dimensions, Modernism and the Radiance of Form. CornUP. [2009] pp. 224. £30.50 ISBN 0 8014 4779 8. Burns, Barbara, and Joy Charnley, eds. Crossing Frontiers: Cultural Exchange and Conflict. Rodopi. [2010] pp. 269. ISBN 9 7890 4202 9972. Burt, Stephen, and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. HarvardUP. [2010] pp. xii þ 451. $35 ISBN 9 7806 7404 8140. Butler, Alison. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic. Palgrave. [2010] pp. xiii þ 225. £50 ISBN 9 7802 3022 3394. Butler, Christopher. Modernism. OUP. [2010] pp. xii þ 124. £7.99 ISBN 9 7801 9280 4419. Campbell, Lori. M. Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy. McFarland. [2010] pp. x þ 216. £31.50 ISBN 9 7880 7864 4645 2. Cianci, Giovanni, Caroline Patey, and Sara Sullam, eds. Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism. Lang. [2010] pp. xvii þ 339. £60 ISBN 9 7830 3911 9493. Clark, David, and Perkins Nicholas, eds. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Brewer. [2010] pp. xiv þ 283. £55 ISBN 9 7818 4384 2514. Clarsen, Georgine. Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. JHUP. [2009] pp. 216. pb £27 ISBN 0 8018 8465 9. Cockin, Katharine, and Jago Morrison, eds. The Post-War British Literature Handbook. Literature and Culture Handbooks. Continuum. [2010] pp. xiv þ 255. hb £60 ISBN 9 7808 8264 9501 3, £18.99 pb ISBN 9 7808 2649 5020. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. PrincetonUP. [2010] pp. xiii þ 306. £27.95 ISBN 9 7806 9114 0650. Cohler, Deborah. Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. UMinnP. [2010] pp. xxii þ 296. $25 ISBN 9 7808 1664 9761. Conley, Tim, ed. Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined. UCDubP. [2010] pp. 188. £45. ISBN 1 9063 5946 6. Conrad, Joseph. Last Essays. CUP. [2010] pp. 536. £60 ISBN 9 7805 2119 0596. Copsey, Nigel, and Andrzej Olechnowicz, eds. Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period. Palgrave. [2010] pp. xxi þ 275. £60 ISBN 9 7802 3000 6485. Corcoran, Neil. Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. CUP. [2010] pp. vi þ 248. £53 ISBN 9 7805 2119 9827. Corporaal, Margue´rite, and Evert Jan Van Leeuwen, eds. The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790–1910. Rodopi. [2010] pp. 278. £65 ISBN 9 7890 4202 9996.
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