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Misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional conflicts that she believed were the cause of her tumultuous moods, her inexplicable behaviour and her writer’s block. This study rereads White’s writing within the context of manic-depressive illness to show how the misdiagnosis of her illness shaped the identity narratives White constructed in her life-writing and then used as the basis of her strongly autobiographical fiction. White’s self-narratives have skewed critical interpretations of her work; at the same time, her fiction has not been studied as expressive of affective disorder. By contextualising White’s work within the contexts of manic-depression and narrative identity, this study proposes a new model for reading White; documents the complex interplay of biological, psychological and environmental factors involved in affective disorder; and historicises the diagnosis and treatment of White’s illness in medical, psychoanalytic and Catholic contexts.

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.

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.

Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.

This book focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. The book explores how the work of Samuel Beckett intersects with such preoccupations of time as a ‘double headed monster’, of memory and multiplicity, of being and becoming that continue in an involutionary turn through the work of Gilles Deleuze. The book discusses Modernism; it examines the adaptations of Samuel Beckett's prose texts; it looks at the nature of memory, consciousness, dreams and perception; time and motion, intuition, and imagination.

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.

In the British Museum, one object attracts more tourists than any other: the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of the Stone by Jean-François Champollion and the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 contributed to creating a worldwide vogue for all things Egyptian. This fascination was shared by early-twentieth-century authors who invoked Egyptian writing to paint a more complicated picture of European interest in non-Western languages. Hieroglyphs can be found everywhere in modernist novels and in discussions of silent film, appearing at moments when writers and theorists seek to understand the similarities or differences between writing and new recording technologies. Hieroglyphic Modernisms explores this conjunction of hieroglyphs and modernist fiction and film, revealing how the challenge of new media spurred a fertile interplay among practitioners of old and new media forms. Showing how novelists and film theorists in the modernist period defined their respective media in relation to each other, the book shifts the focus in modernism from China, poetry, and the avant-garde to Egypt, narrative, and film.

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.

The first modern Irish playwrights emerged in London in the 1890s, at the intersection of a rising international socialist movement and a new campaign for gender equality and sexual freedom. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theatre in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Tracing the interactions and developments of these two revolutions from decadent London to Cold War New York, this book rereads both canonical and under-studied Irish plays and playwrights in the context of the history and culture of the international left—including utopian socialism, land nationalization, syndicalism, workers’ theatre, and McCarthyism. Drawing on archival research and contemporary queer theory, the study reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry. By examining the work of these Irish playwrights in the context of two other revolutions that defined the twentieth century, this book offers a richer understanding of the contributions of Irish playwrights to modern drama, and of the interactions between embodiment and ideology that continue to define the possibilities and limitations of left politics in the twenty-first century.

It is hard to overestimate how huge the “Russian influence” was on both Mansfield’s craft as a short story writer and her life choices, including, even, whom she most trusted to treat her tuberculosis. Growing up in New Zealand, young Mansfield began devouring Russian books in translation. The authors she read included Marie Bashkirtseff, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. After she moved to England, which at the time was undergoing its own passionate affair with all things Russian, Mansfield also discovered Russian art and Russian ballet. Later she became, with S. S. Koteliansky, a co-translator of Chekhov’s and Leonid Andreyev’s letters and autobiographical writings. And yet, other than Joanna Woods’ Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001), there have not been any significant publications dealing with this extraordinary aspect of Mansfield’s evolution as an artist and a human being. This volume goes a long way to remedy that. It includes contributions by both English and Russian scholars and explores many aspects of Mansfield’s personal and artistic response to Russian literature, culture, philosophy, and art, as well as to the actual Russians she met in England and — towards the end of her life — in France.

Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship – absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ – and its profound impact on their creative imaginations. Critical essays include Katherine Mansfield Essay Prizewinner Karina Jakubowicz on Woolf’s Kew Gardens, Maud Ellmann on disgust, Maria DiBattista on these artists’ distinctive takes on ‘reality’, Sydney Janet Kaplan on the Conrad Aiken connection, and Christine Froula on Mansfield’s secrets. Creative artists include Vanessa Bell in painterly dialogue with her sister’s classic manifesto A Room of One’s Own, the celebrated novelist Ali Smith -- ‘Scotland’s Nobel-laureate-in-waiting’, says Irish playwright Sebastian Barry – whose ‘Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat’ leads the creative section, ['and' deleted] Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation of Woolf’s story ‘Moments of Being: "Slater’s Pins Have No Points"’ and [deleted:original; add:] new poems by Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith.

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.

This monograph brings together the most recent research on Sinclair and re-contextualises her work both within and against dominant Modernist narratives. It explores Sinclair’s negotiations between the public and private, the cerebral and the corporeal and the spiritual and the profane in both her fiction and non-fiction. The essays contained in this volume are grouped under two sections entitled ‘The Abstract Intellect’ and ‘Abject Bodies’. They each address the various ways in which Sinclair endeavoured to formulate aesthetic techniques through which the subjective, physical and intellectual experience of ‘reality’ might be represented. Together, the two sections of the monograph investigate the many fruitful connections between Sinclair’s fictional, critical and philosophical output and the structures of epochal change traditionally associated with literary Modernism. They focus in particular upon Sinclair’s engagement with early-twentieth century cultural changes in perceptions of the construction and representation of the human subject. Such interrogations were made possible through contemporaneous shifts in humanist beliefs about subjective construction following thinkers like Freud, who theorized humans as constructs of unconscious drives and desires. Ultimately, the essays and the volume as a whole conclude that Sinclair’s work might be viewed in this context as a radical ontological challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human.

This book explores Siegfried Sassoon’s writing of the twenties, thirties and forties, demonstrating the connections between trauma and nostalgia in a culture saturated with the anxieties of war. Informed by the texts of Freud, W.H.R. Rivers and other psychological writers of the early twentieth century, as well as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, it examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon’s unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work. The book situates Sassoon’s ongoing anxiety about ‘Englishness’, modernity and his relation to modernist aesthetics within the context of other literary responses to the legacy of war, and the threat of war’s return, by writers including Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence. This study teases out the relationship between nostalgia, trauma and autobiography, and forges connections between the literatures of the two world wars. As a case study of modern nostalgia, the book offers an alternative to the perception that Sassoon’s historical and cultural relevance touches the First World War only.