Modern English Literature, Angielski, Język angielski - książki
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English Literature
JULIAN COWLEY, COLIN GRAHAM, LYNNE HAPGOOD, CHRIS
HOPKINS, DANIEL LEA, PAUL POPLAWSKI, JOHN NASH, JOHN
BRANNIGAN, MAGGIE B. GALE, MALCOLM PAGE, ALICE
ENTWISTLE AND FRAN BREARTON
The eight sections: 1. General; 2. Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945
Fiction; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. Pre-1950 Poetry; 7. Post-1950
Poetry; 8. Irish Poetry. Section 1(a) is by Julian Cowley; section 1(b) is by Colin
Graham; section 2(a) is by Lynne Hapgood; section 2(b) is by Chris Hopkins;
sections 2(c–e) are by Daniel Lea; section 2(f) is by Paul Poplawski; section 2(g) is
by John Nash; section 3 is by John Brannigan; section 4 is by Maggie B. Gale;
section 5 is by Malcolm Page; section 6 is by Alice Entwistle; section 7 is by John
Brannigan; section 8 is by Fran Brearton.
.
1. General
(a) British
Michael McKeon’s imposing and important anthology
Theory of the Novel
is ‘an
exercise in rebalancing’. Structuralist and post-structuralist narratologists are
pushed to the margins and emphasis falls upon theorists who have sought to
articulate ‘the coherence of the novel genre as a historical phenomenon’. The
principal value of structuralism, for McKeon’s purposes, is its usefulness in
dislodging partial, novel-centred views of narrative. This is exclusively a twentieth-
century collection, theorizing the novel as ‘a modern phenomenon’. The first section
focuses upon genre theory; the second and third (drawing on Walter Benjamin,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Freud amongst others) address the origins of the novel.
Substantial statements by Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin
(the ‘grand theorists’) follow, then more recent revisions designed to provide ‘a
more concrete or specific historicization of the novel’s origins’. Ensuing sections
draw out sociocultural implications (including those pertaining to women, privacy,
and subjectivity) and engage with relevant epistemological and psychological
matters. The well-worn topic of ‘realism’ is handled with vitality, and is followed by
© The English Association
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discussion of photography, film, and the novel that groups Henry James with Walter
Benjamin and André Bazin. The concluding parts review the novel’s inveterate
claim to novelty (extending through Woolf’s modernism to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
postmodernism), and the genre’s transportability from its west European locus of
origin into Latin America, Africa, and Asia. McKeon’s accompanying commentary,
observing dialectical method (as he explains), elaborates its own ‘syncretic theory of
the novel’. This is a richly stimulating volume, an invaluable resource and
challenging intervention for all serious researchers into the novel.
Critical discourse continues to promote pluralized conceptions of modernism, as
may be seen from the essays collected in Stevens and Howlett, eds.,
Modernist
Sexualities
. Edith Ellis was an energetic feminist and minor novelist, who shared the
sexological interests of her husband Havelock Ellis and argued optimistically for
social and sexual experimentation. Jo-Ann Wallace takes Ellis’s current obscurity to
be illustrative of that repression which helps constitute familiar histories of
modernism. Jason Edwards looks at Yeats’s ideas about masturbation and
homosexuality. Caroline Howlett seeks to retrieve suffragettes from the margins of
‘the modernist scene’. Bridget Elliott examines the use of decorative practices in the
work of painter Marie Laurencin as a means to rehabilitate decadent strategies
towards criticism of traditional gender constructions. Morag Shiach investigates the
typewriter as historical technology contributory to the emancipation of women. Con
Coroneos ruminates suggestively on desire, closed systems, and the fate of the heart
in modernism. Geoff Gilbert links adolescence and the avant-garde in the
‘delinquent’ figure of Wyndham Lewis. Pamela Thurschwell unpacks telling
identifications made during the First World War by Henry James. Marianne
DeKoven considers Stein and Woolf as public women concerned with feminine
privacy and interiority. Melanie Taylor places Woolf’s
Orlando
in relation to
transsexual autobiography. Hugh Stevens writes on ‘primitive’ male–male bonding
in Lawrence’s
The Plumed Serpent
. There are also essays on Cather, McCullers, and
Hemingway.
Michael J. Meyer has edited
Literature and Homosexuality
out of a conviction
that gay and lesbian issues remain repressed ‘even in the most modern and liberal of
classrooms’. These essays were written in affirmation of the validity of alternative
sexual choices and to make a case for equity between literary works that express
those choices and texts that enshrine heterosexual values. Writing by the Americans
Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Alice Walker, Hart Crane, Gore Vidal,
Tennessee Williams, John Rechy and James Baldwin, and by the Uruguayan
Cristina Peri Rossi, is addressed. Roger Bowen discovers a challenge to sexual and
racial taboos in Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
. Kathy J. Phillips examines
Brecht’s writings about homosexuality. Thomas March unpacks E.M. Forster’s
narration of homosexual experience within the mode of the fantastic in the Arcadian
tale ‘Little Imber’, written in 1961. Thomas Peele contributes ‘Queering
Mrs.
Dalloway
’, identifying homosexual desire in Woolf’s novel. David Coad traces
lesbian overtones in Mansfield’s short stories.
Acknowledging that feminist scholarship has established the centrality of gender
to current thinking about modernism, Gerald N. Izenberg points out, in
Modernism
and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I
, that ‘manhood
in jeopardy’ is a recurrent theme in early modernist art and literature. His aim in the
book is to bring to light ‘a subjective sense of masculinity endangered’ that is rarely
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disclosed by standard accounts of the passage through crisis of the bourgeois ideal
of masculinity in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. Izenberg investigates
interrelationships between the work and lives of novelist Thomas Mann, playwright
Frank Wedekind, and painter Wassily Kandinsky in order to propose unfamiliar
connections between issues of masculine identity and modernist innovation.
Detailed analyses address Wedekind and freedom, Mann and transcendence, and
Kandinsky and abstraction, while depicting each of these men as caught between
desire to assimilate ‘the feminine’ and a need to exert mastery over it. Each held an
idealized femininity to embody ‘both autonomous creative power and connection
with the whole of being’. These localized case studies have implications, Izenberg
argues, for our understanding of modernism more generally.
Given the restlessness of critical discourse on modernism in its desire for new
meanings and refined distinctions, the task of creating a convenient introductory
guide to reflect current understanding poses evident challenges. Peter Childs’s
Modernism
, written for the New Critical Idiom series, struggles to find an
appropriate level of discussion and to sustain an appropriate focus on this volatile
topic. Childs opts to take Beckett’s
Murphy
as ‘an in some ways representative
Modernist piece of writing’ in an opening chapter that starts with dictionary
definitions of ‘romance’, ‘realism’, and ‘modernism’. The next section sketches the
influential roles of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and Saussure, a
conventional array of formative figures. Cursory overview of modernist cultural
production follows, with writing organized by genre, painting by movement, plus
brief mention of film. The final section, entitled ‘Texts, Contexts, Intertexts’, groups
representative authors thematically. Mew, Mansfield, and D.H. Lawrence coincide
under the heading ‘Freedom and Gender’; Woolf, West, and Eliot under ‘Identity
and War’; Forster, Yeats, and Joyce under ‘Symbolism and Language’; and James,
Conrad, and Ford under ‘Epistemology and Narration’. Childs observes that ‘to
develop a reasonable grasp of the subject there is of course no substitute for reading
the Modernist writers themselves’. A more complex sense of the contested identity
of those writers would be appropriate.
Caughie, ed.,
Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
, brings
Bloomsbury into intriguing configuration with Walter Benjamin. Woolf and
Benjamin are aligned as authors of critiques of commodity culture, urban spaces,
and systemic ideologies. Their standing and significance as cultural commentators,
and points of contact between them, are set out in essays by Leslie Kathleen Hankins
and Sonita Sarker. Woolf’s writing is shown, like Benjamin’s, embedded in the
early twentieth-century’s volatile technological environment and correlative new
formations of subjectivity. Melba Cuddy-Keane and Bonnie Kime Scott suggest
ways to locate Woolf in relation to the ‘New Aurality’ of wireless and gramophone.
Michael Tratner identifies the filmic qualities of
Between the Acts
. Holly Henry
explores Woolf’s interest in telescopes and cosmology. Makiko Minow-Pinkney
takes the motor car as focal point for her investigation of relationships between
Woolf’s writing and ‘the new technological conditions of the age’. Jane Garrity
places
Vogue
in relation to modernism and analyses Woolf’s ambivalent
involvement with the magazine. Maggie Humm revealingly looks into the
photographic interests of this great-niece of Julia Margaret Cameron. Mark Hussey
muses on Woolf in the age of hypertext. This collection affirms Woolf’s usefulness
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to cultural studies and to Benjamin’s continuing relevance to intelligent discussion
of mass culture.
Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
is a volume in the Border
Crossings series, whose editor Daniel Albright exercises his own considerable
interdisciplinary skills in
Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature
and Other Arts
, an erudite yet lively study that revises Lessing’s
Laokoon
towards
analysis of modernist multimedia projects. A division is observed here ‘not as a
tension between the temporal arts and the spatial, but as a tension between arts that
try to retain the propriety, the apartness, of their private media, and arts that try to
lose themselves in some pan-aesthetic whole’. Albright launches probes into
modernist collaborations such as Stravinsky’s work with the Ballets Russes, Weill’s
creative partnership with Brecht, Cocteau’s theatrical spectacles and Apollinaire’s
Les Mamelles de Tiresias
. Pound’s
Cantos
are considered in relation to Noh drama,
and reference is made to Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. The eurhythmic exercises of
Émile Jacques Dalcroze are regarded as ‘part of the Modernist urge to restore
corporeality to art’. Albright’s assured trajectories through the field testify to
impressive scholarship and produce some richly suggestive readings as well as a
clearly delineated argument. He is especially enlightening in his discussion of music
(often an area of weakness in comparative studies).
Editors Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby claim that
Modernism and Empire
is
‘the first book-length study that seeks to explore the pervasive but complex
interrelations between British colonialism and the modern movement’. Certainly it
offers some fresh angles. After Patrick Williams’s exposition of theoretical issues,
Rod Edmond traces the influence of degenerationist ideas in imperialist and
modernist discourse. Helen Carr shows imagist poetics emerging from ‘questioning
of Western representations and Western superiority, emerging in a climate which
took distrust of the British imperialism very much for granted’. Elleke Boehmer
investigates how Leonard Woolf (in his writings on Ceylon) and W.B. Yeats (in his
enthusiasm for Tagore) responded to challenges posed by cultural otherness. Janet
Montefiore makes a case for acknowledging Kipling as ‘an unrecognised modernist’
as well as a conservative imperialist. C.L. Innes differentiates Yeats and Joyce from
British and European modernists and connects them to post-colonial writers. Máire
ní Fhlathúin reveals the anti-colonial modernism of Patrick Pearse. John Nash writes
on Joyce’s deployment of newspapers towards a critique of imperialism in
Ulysses
.
Howard J. Booth looks at the fluctuating expectations that arose from D.H.
Lawrence’s search for regenerative resources in non-European cultures. Nigel
Rigby discloses Sylvia Townsend Warner’s subversion of imperialist ideologies in
her modernist fantasy
Mr Fortune’s Maggot
. Abdulrazak Gurnah addresses Elspeth
Huxley’s
The Flame Trees of Thika
and other settler writing in Kenya. Bill Ashcroft
and John Salter dislocate an imposed modernist classification in order to identify
‘creative articulation of Australian difference’ by twentieth-century artists and
writers. Mark Williams examines adaptations of modernism towards a bicultural
dialogue within New Zealand literature in his ‘Mansfield in Maoriland’.
Angela Smith has written
Katherine Mansfield
for the Literary Lives series.
Mansfield’s development as a writer of short stories is traced through a matrix
formed from issues arising out of her colonial identity, gender, and failing health.
Her authorial identity is delineated in relation to varied facets of her experience,
including marriage to John Middleton Murry, involvement with the arts magazine
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Rhythm
, and exposure to Wilde’s aestheticism, Bergsonian philosophy, Fauvist
painting, Arthur Symons’s writings on symbolism, A.R. Orage’s Nietzschean
vision, and the Russian Ballet. Smith observes a chronological framework and brief
analyses of key stories illustrate Mansfield’s literary positioning of her self.
David Wykes has contributed
Evelyn Waugh
to the ‘Literary Lives’ series. It is
much closer to straight biography than the Mansfield volume, and argues that as a
novelist Waugh’s strength was not invention but embroidered transformation of
lived experience; his ‘dependence on his own history was almost total’. Wykes
critically surveys the oeuvre, and recounts Waugh’s struggle against the literary
reputations of his father and brother, his education and brief flirtation with
modernism, his youthful taste for travel and life-long susceptibility to privileged
social standing, his interest in cinema, the failure of his first marriage, his
conversion to Roman Catholicism, and his war service. These are taken to be
formative influences upon Waugh’s literary identity, as considerable as the
persistent influence of Gibbon and Dickens.
In
A Route to Modernism
, Rosemary Sumner traces the contours of a concern for
‘the undefinable, the unanalyzable, the unresolved’ that runs through fiction by
Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf. Sumner argues that this is a current in modernist
literature distinct from the experimentation of Joyce and Stein yet equally
significant in terms of formal innovation. She indicates how the shared concern of
her chosen three authors for ‘the unknown, the unconscious’ led to rejection of
conventional plotting in favour of rhythmic forms adjacent to poetry and music.
These are precariously balanced between awareness of chaos and desire for
harmony, loyalty to the everyday and acknowledgement of the limits of common
understanding. Sumner describes the emergence of modernism in a range of Hardy’s
texts, identifying him as a pivotal figure between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Her study looks forward rather than back (Schopenhauer receives just one
brief mention). Hardy’s fiction is considered in relation to Beckett’s absurdity and
(provocatively) to surrealism and (still more recklessly) to composer John Cage’s
predilection for indeterminacy. More substantial connections are made to
Lawrence’s exploratory achievement in
The Rainbow
and
Women in Love
, and to
Woolf’s advances towards communication of the inexpressible. After following her
chosen route, Sumner concludes that ‘modernism is not a fixed destination’.
Hapgood and Paxton, eds.,
Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel
(also reviewed in section 2(
a
) of this chapter), is a stimulating collection of essays
employing various critical approaches drawn into alignment by shared
understanding of ‘realism and modernism as terms which describe literary
techniques rather than define conflictual literary movements’. English novels often
held to represent opposing sets of aesthetic assumptions are here brought into
significantly closer relationship within the early twentieth century’s ‘nexus of
social, psychological and literary change’. The basic contention is that the ‘modern’,
as it was perceived between 1900 and 1930, was not exclusively the province of high
modernism. Hapgood investigates Galsworthy’s depiction of suburban life in
The
Man of Property
; Paxton locates Forster’s fictional India between modernist
aestheticism and popular colonial novels, such as those of Maud Diver. John Rignall
challenges the orthodox position that the First World War marked a disintegration of
European values that necessitated modernism’s disjunctive forms. He examines
narrative coherence in relation to the persistence of communal life in fiction by
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