Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors’ chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.
Author(s): Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson, Mark Sandy
Series: Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 57
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Alternatives to Modernism: Dissonant Voices and Multiple Modernities, 1890–1939
PART I: Unsettled Voices: Imaginative and Cultural Encounters
1 Rhetoric and Feeling in Rupert Brooke
2 Strange Truths: Romantic Reimaginings in Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
3 ‘Now I Climb Alone’: Poetic Subjectivity in Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Stephen Spender
PART II: Dissenting Voices: Aestheticism, Gender and the Art of Identity
4 Pamela Colman Smith, Anansi and the Child: From The Green Sheaf (1903) to The Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1912)
5 Maverick Modernists: Sapphic Trajectories from Vernon Lee to D. H. Lawrence
6 ‘Modernistic Shone the Lamplight’: Arthur Symons among the Moderns
7 Richard Le Gallienne: A Jongleur Strayed into the Modern World
PART III: Double Voices: Central and Peripheral Transactions
8 ‘If I’m Not Very Careful, Something of This Kind May Happen to Me!’: The Preordained Role of the Reader in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories
9 ‘A Large Mouth Shown to a Dentist’: G. K. Chesterton’s Surgical Parodying of T. S. Eliot
10 Modernist or Realist?: The Double Vision of E. M. Forster
11 The Amateur Modernist: C. L. R. James in Bloomsbury
PART IV: Popular Voices: Questions of Realism, Politics and Modernity
12 The Iconoclasm of H. G. Wells and the Modernist Canon
13 Writing for a New Age: Arnold Bennett and the Avant-Garde
14 Parade’s End and the Modernist Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Literary Toryism
Selected Bibliography
Index
