Browse

This is a broad-ranging discussion of wartime children's literature and its effects. What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. In a unique time for British children, parental controls were often relaxed if not absent. Radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. The study is contextualised through a consideration of the British fiction exported to the USA, as well as that imported to the UK and through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban–rural division, ageism, and gender awareness are explored. Covering over one hundred writers, the book looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war on what children could read and their interpretation of it, the author reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit.

This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.

This book presents a new literary history of the twentieth century, setting a new agenda for literary-historical analysis. Far from the usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures, it cuts across familiar categories, focusing instead on literary ‘hot spots’: Freud's Vienna and Conrad's Congo in 1899; Chicago and London in 1912; the Somme in July 1916; Dublin, London and Harlem in 1922; and so on, down to Bradford and Berlin in 1989 (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the new digital media), Stockholm in 1993 (Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize) and September 11, 2001.

Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English “sympathy” and German “Einfühlung,” “empathy” is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks at the intertwined histories of empathy and modernist narrative in order to advance new portraits of both. Reconsidering the conditions of modernism’s “inward turn,” this book shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) tackle the so-called “problem of other minds” in ways that reflect and enrich early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. These authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another’s thoughts and feelings. Examining this literary shift helps us see how sympathy, once understood as the core of moral life, came to be widely understood as a “feeling for” that is inferior to empathic “feeling with.” It is no coincidence that “empathy,” an esoteric psychological term in the first years of the twentieth century, was widely known and lauded by the middle of the century. Modernist narrative trained readers to believe that a more radical joining of subjectivities was possible. But literary modernism is also teeming with voices that recognize potential violence in empathy, signalling that fellow feeling is an act whose dangers we must constantly assess.

This comparative study of Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Questions about the contingencies of history and the rupture of the real are hardly ever brought to bear on their highly self-reflexive texts. This book counters this critical gap by reading real-life exile as the ‘absent cause’ of Alfred Hitchcock’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant virtuosity. Its ‘cross-mapping’ of the two seemingly disparate authors takes as its point of departure the conditions of exile in which they found themselves, and goes on to show how the relentless playfulness of their language and irony points to the creation of a new home in the world of signs. The book’s close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt, exploring the connections between language, imagination and exile.

Horace Alexander was an English Quaker who played a significant part in relations between Indian nationalist leaders and the British Government in the years before the transfer of power in 1947. He came to know Gandhi well, and was trusted by him as an intermediary. At the same time he enjoyed the confidence of the British Conservative ministers R.A. Butler and Leo Amery, as well as, on the Labour side, Sir Stafford Cripps and Lord Pethick Lawrence. Alexander avoided publicity so successfully that his role has almost entirely escaped the attention of historians of the period. He taught international relations at Woodbrooke, the Quaker college in Birmingham, where many students came from Europe, including, after 1933, refugees from Nazi Germany. Such contacts formed the basis for involvement with efforts to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. This biography relates the development of Alexander's commitment to a humane and just international order from its origins in Quaker pacifism and the optimistic liberal ideology prevailing in early twentieth-century Cambridge, to its attempted realisation in the League of Nations. As it demonstrates, Alexander saw Gandhi's ideas as a fulfilment of this vision, and sought to interpret them in terms comprehensible to people in the West.

Haptic Modernism offers the first substantial account of the representation of the haptic sense modality in literature of the modernist period. That modality combines touch, kinaesthesis (the body’s sense of its own movement), proprioception (bodily orientation), and the vestibular sense (registering balance), four areas of sensory experience undergoing radical shifts, and new conceptualisations, in response to technological and scientific innovations in the modernist years. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence and Rebecca West is considered alongside other, non-canonical fictions, as well as scientific, philosophical, and journalistic accounts of bodily experiences in the realm of touch and the tactile. In a series of extended readings of significant novels, the book weaves together studies of the X-ray, atomic structure, the cinema spectator experience, the look-which-touches of the sculpture viewer, the touch-which-looks of the blind, the process of manicure, literary treatments of the writing hand, muscular responses to motorcar travel, and frightening tales of split skins, split selves, and severed hands run amok. Haptic Modernism asks why it is that modernist texts of various stripes return with unprecedented alacrity to the haptic experiences of the human body. On the other hand, it seeks to identify clusters of haptic happenings within modernist texts as a means of understanding the touch-transforming social and historical contexts out of which those writings emerge.

Identifying six significant writers – Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Lewis Carroll, Proust and D. H. Lawrence – this book explores their influence on Henry Miller's work as well as Miller's retroactive impact on their writing. The author explores four forms of intertextuality in relation to each ‘ancestral’ author: direct allusions; unconscious style; reverse influence; and participation of the ancestral author as part of the story within the text. The study is informed by the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva on polyvocity and of Blanchot, Wittgenstein and Deleuze on language games and the indefatigability of writing. By presenting Miller in intertextual context, he emerges as a noteworthy modernist writer whose contributions to literature include the struggle to find a distinctive voice alongside a distinguished lineage of literary figures.

This collection of original critical chapters launches a long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history. It covers the fiction, memoirs, criticism and journalism of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, John Grierson, Margery Allingham and Stella Gibbons, focusing on the qualities that distinguish these writers' literary efforts from those of the modernists or postmodernists. The chapters focus on three kinds of intermodern features in texts that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or the Auden Generation: cultural features (intermodernists typically represent working-class and working middle-class cultures), political features (intermodernists are typically radical) and literary features (intermodernists are committed to non-canonical genres). The book concludes with an appendix, ‘Who Were the Intermodernists?’, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Combining literary criticism, book history, biography and sociology, this book weaves together the stories of the lesser known authors, artists and press workers with the canonical names linked to the Hogarth Press. Using previously unpublished archived material, it presents case studies on West Indian writer C.L.R. James, Welsh poet Huw Menai, child poet Joan Easdale and American artist E. McKnight Kauffer; and studies the topics of imperialism, the middlebrow, religion, translation, the marketplace and poetry, which dominated the era of their work.