XIV Modern Literature - DiVA Portal

XIV

Modern Literature

SHAWNA ROSS, FRANCESCA BRATTON,

CAROLINE KRZAKOWSKI, SOPHIE CORSER, ANDREW KEESE,

JOSHUA PHILLIPS, MARK WEST, SAMUEL COOPER,

REBECCA D’MONTE, GUSTAVO A. RODRIGUEZ MARTIN,

GRAHAM SAUNDERS, NOREEN MASUD, MATTHEW CREASY,

ALEX ALONSO, AND KARL O’HANLON

This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post-1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross;section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski;section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e)is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by SamuelCooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A.Rodrıguez Martın; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by NoreenMasud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section8 is by Karl O’Hanlon.

1. General

For the field of modernist studies, 2018 was a transitional year. Approaches thathave felt novel and urgent in the past five years continue to flourish, namelythose derived from archival studies, periodical studies, and the digital humanities,but publications adopting them are less likely to be imbued with a sense of self-conscious newness and more likely to be integrated with a variety of more trad-itional methods and engaged with long-established debates. Even more palpably,as scholars become more comfortable with the temporal and spatial expansionsof what counts as modernism, the perceived need for bold, defensive, ormanifesto-like theoretical justifications of these expansions has relaxed. As themoniker ‘modernism’ continues to be applied to more and more art producedoutside Europe and the Americas and for art produced before the 1890s or after

The Year’s Work in English Studies, volume 99 (2020) VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by OxfordUniversity Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved.For permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/ywes/maaa014

Dow

nloaded from https://academ

ic.oup.com/yw

es/article/99/1/865/5983807 by Uppsala U

niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022

the 1940s, attention to modernisms across the globe and across time continues tobe framed as a comparative venture. In other words, canonical modernist authorsand texts are being juxtaposed with figures and works of art to be brought underthe shared umbrella of modernism. One change is that scholarship published in2018 suggests that comparison is being supplemented by a second, newermethod, one that is attempting to re-examine local and national contexts withoutabandoning the hard-fought transnational framework characteristic of the newmodernist studies.

To put it more succinctly, modernist scholars are increasingly absorbed by thequestion of how to think nationally in a transnational context. In addition, amarked increase in the sciences and social sciences in recent publications onmodernism, as well as the mainstreaming of digital humanities tools and otherquantitative approaches to analysis, suggests that the historicism of the new mod-ernist studies is being supplemented by more empirical methods and to considertwentieth-century sciences and social sciences as themselves subjects for re-search. With more attention being given to the mechanisms by which bureaucrat-ic and corporate institutions regulate themselves and their populations, thenascent interest in infrastructure studies is another trend to note. At first glance,these trends may seem to threaten to fragment the field into a clutch of nicheconcerns, but they may be boiled down into two basic strands: first, a renewedinvestment in non-textual modernisms and their relation to textual production;and second, an interest in the sciences, social sciences, and empirical methodolo-gies particular to those disciplines. Considering the fine arts and the sciences, itseems, can provide modernist studies with new ways of thinking about the affor-dances and limitations of languages and about the specific advantages or disad-vantages of humanist ways of thinking and communicating, especially whencompared to other formalized systems of knowledge. Both threads are united bya curiosity about signs that do not signify, about processes that do not end, aboutstructures of knowledge that do not create meaning, and about formal strategiesthat do not unify works of art. Yet many of the books reviewed here strike anote of optimism in the face of these refusals, finding in them a salutary prefer-ence for revelling in the open-ended aesthetic possibilities of the philosophicaland technological, rather than crafting magisterial pronouncements and forcingspurious unities that would sour over the passage of time.

These shifts towards the fine arts and the sciences are evident in the novelstructure of The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited byUlrika Maude and Mark Nixon. The first major section of the companion com-prises twenty-one essays, sorted into four categories: ‘The Modernist Everyday’,‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, ‘The Sciences and Technologies ofModernism’, and the ‘Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’. The first cat-egory is eclectic, featuring essays on everydayness, geography, language scepti-cism, emotion, and myth. Michael Bell’s contribution, ‘Myth and Religion inModernist Literature’ (pp. 99–116), is the standout chapter in this section, not-able for its comprehensive scope. The second category features essays on music,the visual arts, film, popular culture, magazines, and (interestingly) manuscripts.This includes Dirk Van Hulle’s contribution ‘Minding Manuscripts: Modernism,Genetic Criticism and Intertextual Cognition’ (pp. 211–26), that wisely investi-gates periodical studies as a part of modernism itself and of modernist

866 MODERN LITERATURE

Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



scholarship. The third category enfolds essays on relativity, sexuality, and gender;on psychoanalysis’s roots in neuroscience; on modernism’s many engagementswith various psychological theories (psychoanalysis is also covered here); and ontechnology in general. Einstein, Freud, Heidegger, and other familiar theoristsdominate this section, although Laura Salisbury’s ‘Modernism, Psychoanalysisand Other Psychologies’ (pp. 285–306) fascinatingly investigates psychology’sgrowth as a field, and psychoanalysis as a practice current during modernism, ra-ther than as a set of concepts. The fourth section exhibits the strongest influenceof transnational approaches, with Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis’s ‘CanThere Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) offering a perfect first selectionfor this final section of the handbook’s first major part. After this part are threeextremely powerful tools: an ‘A to Z of Key Terms’, an annotated bibliographyof modernist criticism, and a timeline of modernism that should be maderequired reading for new scholars in the field. Prefacing all of these materials isMaude’s wide-ranging yet admirably succinct introduction, ‘Modernism,Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), which provides numerous close readingsto support her claim that modernist stylistic experimentation served to reveal thecontingencies of life, which (troublingly for the reader) brutally expose the lackof purposiveness and linear narrative structure that typify modernity. Maude’s se-lection of Joyce, Conrad, Beckett, Woolf, Eliot, and all the other usual suspectsfor these deftly worked close readings does little to illustrate her explanation thatmodernist studies is geographically and temporally capacious; the componentchapters show a similar preference for canonical modernists. Throughout thehandbook, there is a subtle tension between the handbook’s account of thedecreasing significance of canonical authors and historical periodization for deter-mining what is modernism, on the one hand, and the undoubted historicism andconservative choice of authors in many of the component chapters on the other.This tension is, perhaps, productive: it allows readers to survey both historicalapproaches and transnational approaches as potential ways into the field, observethe differences between them, and shuttle back and forth between the insights ofboth schools of thought, ultimately allowing readers to take advantage of both.Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction, undoubt-

edly one of the most ambitious new monographs of 2018, proposes a solution tocircumvent this tension between historicist approaches and transnational expan-sions of modernism’s temporal span. Following Rita Felski’s call to question thehermeneutics of suspicion that typically accompanies historicist approaches, allin the name of an ideological critique whose conclusions are all too knowable inadvance, as well as drawing on Paul Armstrong’s suspicion of historical contextas the primary methodology of modernist scholarship, Bronstein defines modern-ism not in terms of the past, but in terms of the future readings and rewritingsthat are opened up by particular stylistic choices. Understanding historicism as abackward-looking, closed operation in which the past provides all answers forcritics in the present, Bronstein instead examines the afterlives of modernist fic-tion as particular texts are taken by later writers as salient provocations or cuesfor responding powerfully to their own cultural and political situations. Formalexperimentation emerges as a tool for creating ‘antihistoricist strategies’ that‘enabled a wide array of later political uses’ (p. 19). This operation can beregarded as a variant of reception theory fashioned for modernists’ expanded

867MODERN LITERATURE

Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



boundaries; the responses of ‘unknowable readers of the future’ are queried byBronstein as they ‘turn the past to suit new purposes’ (p. 2). It can also be seenas a subversive rereading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, forreading modernism through its legacies is meant not to celebrate another ‘DeadWhite Man who wrote in an old-fashioned style’ (p. 4), but to identify a ‘recu-perative modernism’ that avoids the ‘negative affect’ associated with modernism(p. 16). Out of Context looks hopefully towards the future by employing ‘revolu-tionary literary forms’ in order to ‘preserve older epistemologies for the future’(p. 12). Bronstein reads Henry James through James Baldwin’s use of James,Joseph Conrad through Ng~ugı wa Thiong’o, and William Faulkner through KenKesey, showing the three modernists and the three mid-century writers to beengaged in ‘rescue work’ (p. 28) that forges ethically responsible ways to createorder out of modern chaos (chapter 1), to cultivate politically efficacious modelsof individualism (chapter 2), to structure narratives and knowledge according torhetorical effect rather than linear chronology (chapter 3), and to uncover failuresto communicate without wholly ceding the narrator’s authority or abandoning thepursuit of universal truths (chapter 4). In each chapter, Bronstein incisively yetreflectively meanders among a broad array of texts and authors, with manydigressions, returns, and qualifications ensuring that Out of a Context offers arichly peripatetic reading experience that, like the literature it analyses, needs no‘satisfyingly excerptable conclusions’ but revels in its ‘open-ended’ investment in‘processes’ over ‘endpoints’, allowing readers to ‘fill in the ends with a varietyof political and philosophical commitments’ (p. 220).

This open ending renders Out of Context an appropriately optimistic choice forthe final title appearing in Oxford’s Modernist Literature and Culture series,edited by Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger. The venerable series’ penultimateoffering is Tim Watson’s Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in theMidcentury Atlantic World, which also adopts a comparative structure to illumin-ate the modernist aspects of a selection of mid-century texts, whose politicalcharge can be better understood through the comparison. In Watson’s case, thecomparison reveals under-appreciated but palpable links between literature andanthropology, while the political thrust is to recover dissenting voices withinmid-century anthropology during a period of decolonization. Watson’s archiveincludes literary fiction, genre fiction, Cold War scholarship, manuscripts, andnotebooks. This mix reveals writers borrowing images and plots from ethnog-raphy (which he terms ‘the anthropological novel’) and anthropologists con-sciously adopting literary techniques (which he terms ‘literary anthropology’)decades before Clifford Geertz’s thick description inaugurated anthropology’s ‘lit-erary turn’. Culture Writing is a thus a prominent example of the recent escal-ation of interest in modernism’s relationship to the social sciences. Inspiredcombinations of authors do not revolve around figures or concepts well knownby modernist scholars (for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead,Zora Neale Hurston, Mass Observation, primitivism), but include later writersand developments across the anglophone Atlantic (Barbara Pym, Ursula Le Guin,Laura Bohannan, Saul Bellow, Bessie Head, Mary Douglas), the francophoneAtlantic (Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss), and beyond(Amitov Ghosh, Erna Brodber, Chinua Achebe). Culture Writing is thus an ex-ample of undiminished scholarly investments in charting modernism’s late


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



manifestations, global permutations, and interdisciplinary forms. Particularlycompelling readings include Watson’s re-evaluation of middlebrow writerBarbara Pym as a critic of the functionalist school of anthropology then domin-ant in Great Britain; his recovery of Saul Bellow’s training in the field; and hisextended readings of Glissant as a self-consciously literary writer. Less compre-hensive is Watson’s account of Ursula Le Guin’s extensive knowledge of anthro-pology, her use of fieldwork as a plot device, her adaptation of ethnography as anarrative genre, and her interactions with prominent figures in anthropology (be-ginning with her anthropologist father, Alfred Louis Kroeber) who emphasizedthe role of language in enculturation. Watson’s conclusion that literary anthropol-ogy and the anthropological novel from 1945 to 1965 enacted a turn back toVictorian novel conventions may seem startling, but in the context of recent re-evaluations of realism’s multiform presence within modernism, Culture Writing’saccount of literature and anthropology’s mutual influence provides a compellingexplanation for why and how realism persists within modernism.Watson pinpoints interdisciplinary exchanges as a mechanism through which

modernism reaches across time and space and Bronstein posits reader responsesas another mechanism, thereby attributing the transnational and transhistoricalreach of modernist scholarship to the art itself. In comparison, Aarthi Vadde’sChimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (pub-lished in 2017 but not received in time for consideration last year) straightfor-wardly acknowledges that her century-long set of texts was assembled through ascholarly process of ‘grafting’ (p. 2). This grafting serves ‘to deprovincialize aonce exclusively European aesthetic category’, acknowledge the influence ofmodernist scholarship on our perceptions of modernism, and connect her texts to‘the intellectual history of globalization’ (p. 2). What unites these texts is the fig-ure of the chimera, which Vadde explores in two veins: first, as a challengingtextual vision created by formal strategies that represent the unsayable and thinkthe unthinkable, in a list that boasts the playfulness of Jorge Luis Borges’s‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’, Vadde specifies ‘autotransla-tions, alternating asymmetry, stories without plots, archival legends, and rootcanals’ (p. 7); secondly, as a political dream that, if realized, would result inpositive international relations, global justice, and autonomy. The latter is madepossible, or at least thinkable as an ‘unachieved ideal’ (p. 4), through the former.Like Bronstein, then, Vadde does not regard a narrator’s or character’s failure tocommunicate clearly or reach a stated goal as a failure of the text or as a whollynegative outcome, but as a deliberate and effective strategy adopted by writers toshape better futures. Vadde tempers this optimism with an explanation thatthough such optimism ‘can be judged naıve and unrealistic’, we should notundervalue the political chimera as a ‘powerful illusion, one with traction overthe hearts and minds of people and connectedness to the institutions of state thatgive it a concrete political apparatus’ (p. 10). What is less persuasive, perhaps, isthe sleight of hand that allows Vadde to avoid clarifying the relationship betweenher definition of internationalism and accounts of globalism and postcolonialism:‘I am allowing the chimeras of form that populate this study to affect the book’sown methodological self-understanding’, she explains (p. 20). But perhaps inves-ting too much in these long-dominant definitional excursions would havediverted Chimeras of Form from its primary task, that of investigating the formal


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



strategies that conjure political chimeras as they appear in the texts themselves.Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, MichaelOndaatje, and Zadie Smith all ‘revisited the principles and practices of the liter-ary form that we call modernist to imagine more interdependent models of na-tionhood and to reflect upon as well as diversify styles of political belonging andinternationalist expression’, which include the textual acts of translation, colla-tion, circulation, comparison, reinscription, and demythologization (p. 221).These textual acts show political promise because they make use of social ties of‘obligation and fellowship” in order to contest ‘isolationist aspects of nationalcultures and even take narratives of communal cohesion beyond identitarianclaims’ (p. 220).

In a similar vein, Anna Teekell explores the textual interrogations of the nationfrom a transnational perspective in Emergency Writing: Irish Literature,Neutrality, and the Second World War. Distinct from the globe-trotting archivesassembled by Bronstein, Watson, and Vaade, Teekell maintains a more intimatefocus on one country (the Irish Free State) during a restricted period (the SecondWorld War). However, by exploring the outward-facing performance of neutralitystaged by a newly independent Ireland specifically for audiences abroad, Teekelldoes not abandon the lessons of transnational approaches but instead reveals thatadopting the comparative method associated with them is not strictly necessary.Indeed, a clutch of texts written by citizens of one nation can be investigatedfrom a transnational lens, although it must be noted that Teekell engages withIrish studies scholarship more than with transnational scholarship. Notably, thefirst chapter analyses political rhetoric, rooting Teekell’s history in non-fiction,before the remaining four chapters move on to the poetry and fiction at the heartof Irish studies. The political rhetoric of Eamon de Valera’s Irish government,particularly through constitutional amendments, debate records, and the dis-courses disseminated by the Censorship Board, ‘created a slippage between belli-gerence and neutrality that would trouble daily life in Ireland, where many feltthey experienced war and neutrality simultaneously’ (p. 14). Consequently, theIrish government failed to create a genuine alternative to Axis and Allied propa-ganda, leaving room for late Irish modernists to criticize the government’s incon-sistencies, acts of censorship, and unconvincing projections of a communal,cohesive cultural nationalism that had yet to develop. Chapters 2 and 3 focus onpoetry: Teekell reveals that Patrick Kavanagh’s and Denis Devlin’s adaptations ofthe pilgrimage poem satirize the government’s mobilization of Catholic rites ofprayer and attitudes towards peace to posit a coherent national position of neu-trality, while Louis MacNeice’s war lyrics interrogate modernist writers’ compli-city with devastating national policies. Chapters 4 and 5 cover fiction, delvingdeeply into the strained uses of language during the Second World War as fictionand government rhetoric experiment with new tropes to produce or counteractpropaganda and to represent trauma adequately. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat ofthe Day, Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman de-bunk official accounts of Ireland’s isolationism, showing how language itselfbecomes infected by the inconsistencies of neutrality rhetoric. Like Vaade,Teekell investigates the moments when language fails under the pressures of na-tional identity and international conflict; like Vaade, she ends with a contempor-ary text, the play Improbable Frequency, which debuted in 2004, to reveal how


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the state of linguistic emergency that precipitated artistic production persiststoday and prompts revisitings of the political cruxes that inspired and frustratedlate modernists. For a book about wartime trauma, Emergency Writing is an un-expected pleasure to read. Its untortured prose is beautifully suited to gatheringTeekell’s diverse and impressively large archive of non-fiction, fiction, poetry,and drama gently into an orderly, cohesive group without flattening the differen-ces between the various solutions and critiques offered by late Irish modernists.Teekell’s framing of a transnational, transhistorical problem within a tight na-

tional, historical context, though very much unlike the first three books reviewedhere, demonstrates that exciting work continues to be possible outside trans-national scholarship’s comparative methodology. In Modernism and the Law,Robert Spoo scrutinizes Anglo-American institutional networks of laws, lawyers,jails, juries, judges, and the writers and publishers whose private and professionallives interpolated them into these networks. Part of Bloomsbury’s NewModernisms, Spoo’s work is the latest addition to the exciting series of referencevolumes on major issues in modernism, edited by Sean Latham and GayleRogers. Like Teekell, Spoo crafts a thoroughly entertaining account of subjectmatter that, at first glance, may seem unlikely to court eager readers: thebureaucracies and other formal institutions of individual nation-states. To negoti-ate a variety of legal issues—from libel, censorship, and obscenity to privacy,and piracy, and copyright—a variety of ‘legal and extralegal mechanisms . . .shaped, inhibited, and sometimes deformed literary production and dissemination’to the degree that the law can be seen to have ‘regulated modern literature’ (p.3). Chapter 1 provides a new account of Oscar Wilde’s obscenity trial by contex-tualizing it within legal battles of self-censorship and copyright infringement thatwere fought by other modernists, while chapter 2 focuses more strictly on ob-scenity and literature in the United States (here is where Spoo’s account ofUnited States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses may be found). The economicallyminded chapter 3 tackles issues related to artists’ remuneration, including copy-right law and patronage. Chapter 4 is the volume’s most engrossing chapter,which covers ‘the reputational cluster: the modern expectation that the law willguarantee a person’s domestic privacy and intimate secrets, the freedom fromfalse imputations, and her exclusive right to exploit her name and likeness’ (p.103). Legal cases involving defamation, blackmail, privacy, and publicity serveas a stage where changes in the modern subject’s availability and visibility to thegovernment and to mass publics become dramatically visible. Indeed, in all ofSpoo’s chapters, the intersections between modernism and the law are fascinatingbecause they tread inexorably across any presumed boundaries between the au-thor as a private individual and the author as a public figure. Nowhere are theseboundary-crossings more vividly illustrated than in chapter 5, which nimbly cov-ers all of the various legal battles Ezra Pound waged during his life. A series ofvignettes paint a compelling portrait of Pound as ‘a moralist crying in the wilder-ness of modernity’ with his ‘indictments of grasping financiers, corrupt politi-cians, and pandering publishers’ (p. 128), which appear in his poetry as well asin major events of his life, most notably during his fight for free speech duringthe Second World War and his resulting detention at St. Elizabeths Hospital.Spoo’s final favour to his readers is his ‘Annotated List of Statutes, Treaties, andCases’, which is invaluable even though some critics may wish they could trade


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



its comprehensive coverage of late nineteenth-century law for a more thoroughdocumentation of post-1950 legal milestones.

Caroline Hovanec’s Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and BritishModernism is another notable 2018 publication that assembles a nation-basedgroup of texts and phenomena. Like Spoo, Hovanec touches on questions of eth-ics, subjecthood, and relationality, but whereas Spoo’s relations are interpersonalconnections mediated by legal discourses, Hovanec’s are human–nonhuman con-nections mediated by scientific discourses and practices. In Victorian studies,investigations of science and nature dominate the field in the same way thattransnational investigations have dominated modernism in the recent past, soHovanec’s intervention may well spur interest in the nonhuman world in thesame way that Harriet Ritvo, Gillian Beer, Bernard Lightman, and others did forVictorianists. It is likely too late for an ‘animal turn’ for modernism: the antici-pated rise of animal studies within literature, influenced by theorists like DonnaHaraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, never quite happened; but this is allto the good, as Hovanec’s analysis is not overdetermined by the philosophicalquestions of justice, subjectivity, and ontology that animate these theorists.Instead, Hovanec roots Animal Subjects in modernist scholarship’s signaturebrand of historicism and incorporates popular culture, historical events, literature,and science writing in a way that resembles current work on animals in Victorianstudies (indeed, Hovanec cites Beer as a direct influence). She discussestwentieth-century disciplinary developments in biology, physics, and ecology inways that recall Watson’s treatment of anthropology as a field undergoing greatchange at the mid-century mark. Darwin, Freud, and William James provide thescientific theories and texts against which modernists react, including the Huxleyfamily (which includes the writer Aldous, but also his brother Julian, a biologistlike their evolutionary scientist father, Thomas Huxley), H.G. Wells, D.H.Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Hovanec traces problematic uses of animals inmodernist texts, including anthropomorphism, primitivism, and allegorical sym-bolism, all of which reduce animals to the qualities that connect them to humanconcerns, whereas liberatory or productive modes of incorporating animals inmodernisms are marked by ‘curiosity, observant seeing, and respect for animals’,which amount to a ‘folk zoology’ that produces desirable aesthetic effects with-out instrumentalizing animals (p. 30). Though the Huxley family’s scientificendeavours are well known, the generous two chapters Hovanec affords themrender Animal Subjects easily some of the best and most comprehensive coverageof the two brothers’ scientific interests designed for modernist scholars. Chapter4 surveys the Bloomsbury Group’s theories and representations of animals as anexpression of their interest in comparative psychology; Woolf, Bertrand Russell,Julian Huxley, and J.B.S Haldane are equally drawn by empiricist models of theworld, derived from the philosophy of John Locke and the psychology of ConwyLloyd Morgan, John B. Watson, and Niko Tinbergen. These scientists bringHovanec’s work far from the stalwart presences of Darwin, Freud, and James,hinting at new work to be done to extend modernist scholars’ consideration ofempiricism, sensory experiences, and scientific phenomena.

One might venture to pronounce Hovanec’s investigation of comparativepsychology and Watson’s anthropology as not only evidence of heightened inter-est in the intersections of science and literature, but also as indicative of a new


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



disciplinarity in the field (as opposed to interdisciplinarity). Or an incipient ‘aca-demic turn’ might be diagnosed here, given that these works take seriously thegrowth of and discourses endemic to particular scholarly disciplines. We are nowpositioned to analyse how shifts in the way that various disciplines formally or-ganize knowledge sparked the ire or fascination of modernist artists. Two exam-ples of this trend focus on mathematics: Baylee Brits’s Literary Infinities:Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction and Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism,Fiction and Mathematics. Brits, whose interest is in pure (as opposed to applied)mathematics, opens by explaining that modernists found numbers fascinating fortwo reasons. First, numbers comprise ‘a formal language’ rather than a semioticone; instead of symbolically representing a pre-existing object or phenomenon, anumber ‘is the thing itself’ (p. 1). As a result, ‘literature and mathematics are atonce inextricably intimate and implacably oppositional’ because ‘the form ofwriting peculiar to mathematics—pure presentation—is excluded from what weunderstand to be relevant to literature’ (p. 6). Consequently, the alien abstractionof numbers both repels and attracts writers drawn to humanist values. Second,numbers provided a way for understanding infinitude that contrasted with human-ist approaches to it, due to the work of German mathematician Georg Cantor,known for his work on set theory and transfinite numbers. By proposing the em-pirical existence of multiple infinitudes and by assigning infinitude a marker (thealeph of the Hebrew alphabet), Cantor made it possible for mathematicians tomanipulate this difficult concept in the same way as they could any other num-ber. Both of these unusual characteristics attracted career-long interest in numberson the part of Borges (especially in ‘Thing Itself’, ‘The Library of Babel’, and‘The Lottery of Babylon’), Beckett (seen in the novels Molloy and Watt and inthe short prose texts All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine), and J.M.Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country and The Childhood of Jesus). In these texts,Brits finds a ‘literary transfinitude’, defined as a kind of ‘allegorical doubling’ bywhich readers who perceive two systems of meaning operating on one strand oftext: the extra-textual (the ‘phenomenology of reading’) and the intra-textual (the‘formal processes of the text’ (p. 45)). Essentially, readers always interact withtexts in two ways, one properly linguistic (representational) and the other math-ematical (presentational), but Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee are particularly awareof this doubling and consciously manipulate it to highlight the indeterminacies oflanguage and ‘to explore literary propulsion: the capacity of prose to move for-ward’ (p. 191). Brits’s account of these three authors’ frustrated depictions of theimpossibility of overcoming the paralysis caused by modern traumas partakes ofthe same interest in the future shown by Bronstein and Vadde, weaving a subtlethread of hope and amelioration (if not progress) through a field of enquiry moreoften associated with cynicism and critique.Nina Engelhardt’s account of modernism and mathematics, entitled simply

Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, may share a common field of interest withBrits’s, but her methodology more closely resembles that of Hovanec, because itexplicitly draws on science studies and surveys a wide range of developments ina particular non-humanist discipline and then identifies literary authors whoobserved these developments and commented on them in their texts. Readerswho wish for more of an overview mathematics as a field in the twentieth cen-tury, or who would like to encounter a vigorous argument calling for more


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



scholarship on modernism and science, should therefore consult Engelhardt’s vol-ume first. Herman Broch’s Sleepwalkers trilogy, Robert Musil’s The Man withoutQualities, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day brushup against the concepts of C.P. Snow, Norbert Wiener, L.E.J. Brouwer, DavidHilbert, and Kurt Godel, who are then juxtaposed with Friedrich Nietzsche,Oswald Spengler, Hans Vaihinger, and other modernist philosophers. (Note herethe easy absorption of Pynchon into modernism: another symptom of the normal-ization of modernism’s expanded temporal boundaries.) These intersections aretruly provocative, as well as unforced. The book feels, quite simply, easy in itsglobal and transhistorical scope: ‘easy’ in the sense of secure and untroubled, ra-ther than simple or unearned. Clearly, Engelhardt could have written an entiremonograph on Pynchon and modernist mathematics alone, but a fuller portrait ofmathematics as an alternative way of forging meaning during modernizationemerges. For example, Broch incorporates concepts from analytical philosophyand from mathematical theories of relativity and intuitionism to contextualize thetortured psyche of a bookkeeper brought to existential crisis when he faces theultimate lack of meaning and coherence lurking underneath the formal order ofhis numerical tables. Meanwhile, Musil’s Man without Qualities, which exploresthe unfulfilled promises of mathematics to serve as a guiding, salutary rational-ism powerful enough to supersede mysticism and spirituality, leads Engelhardt toconclude that, in modernist fiction, ‘maths becomes a model not only of exacti-tude but also of vagueness, and in this paradoxical double function it serves toinspire the critical trust needed to adapt epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics to atime of rapid change. Maths thus takes on a mediating or bridging function be-tween seeming opposites, not least between the domains of science and literaryfiction’ (p. 121). The payoff for scholars is a new pragmatism that enables a‘critical trust, based on a methodology of constant questioning’, one that persistsin spite of the stubborn refusal by numbers to signify in the same way as lan-guage or to create the satisfying sense of meaning generated by narrative struc-ture (p. 121). This is why, even though Engelhardt’s analyses of Against the Dayand Gravity’s Rainbow do emphasize the failure of mathematics to offer fulfillingmodels of causality or reliable cues for ethical living (an example of modernistdisillusion with the rational institutions and assumptions dependent onEnlightenment philosophies), Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics provides an-other example of a nascent, optimistic, process-focused (not conclusions-focused)scholarly attitude first observed in Bronstein’s Out of Context.

Non-linguistic signs also form the object of Jesse Schotter’s HieroglyphicModernisms: Writing and New Media in the Twentieth Century. LikeEngelhardt’s monograph, Schotter’s work appears in Edinburgh UniversityPress’s Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series, curated by series editors TimArmstrong and Rebecca Beasley, whose editorial labours have been stepping cap-ably into the vacuum left by the end of Dettmar and Wollaeger’s own series onmodernist culture for Oxford University Press. Rather than thinking about non-linguistic signs in a disciplinary context, Schotter shifts our attention from sci-ence and physics to the fine arts and visual culture. Emphasizing the appearancesof such signs in new media, Schotter uses them to investigate the proliferation ofvisual languages in modernism. Egyptian hieroglyphs in particular, thrust intocultural prominence by the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



inspired a wealth of textual and new media productions that partook in the ‘longhistory of misinterpretation in the West’, where they were seen ‘as potentiallymystical or sacred visual sign’ that ‘supposedly directly depicted the object[they] signified’ and therefore, just like photography and cinema, ‘promised torender the images of the natural world directly into recorded form’ (p. 5). Intruth, Schotter explains, hieroglyphs constitute a phonetic system, not an embod-ied, immediate one, merely another alphabet that combined visual and oral ele-ments. Consequently, like the new media used to disseminate images ofhieroglyphs, hieroglyphs cannot be immediately, intuitively, and universallyunderstood. However, the misunderstanding that hieroglyphs bypassed semioticprocesses (a claim that, we have seen, mathematics also presented to modernists)produced a curious and aesthetically valuable response. Modernists attempted toincorporate hieroglyphs directly into their works or were indirectly inspired to‘leave out narrative all together’ because hieroglyphs suggest that ‘language willcommunicate not at all or totally, without the need for narrative processes of“description” or “commentary”’ (p. 6). As chapter 1 shows, misunderstandingsare at the heart of the hieroglyphic excursions of Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay,Sergei Eisenstein, and Hollis Frampton. Chapter 2 focuses on Virginia Woolf,who, excitingly, appears as a theorist of film and new media and uses hiero-glyphic imagery as a bridge capable of traversing the gaps between language andcharacterization. Chapter 3 reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Orson Welles’sCitizen Kane as hybrid texts that exploit productive tensions between languageand image to produce experimental forms. Thankfully, chapters 4 and 5 addressthe problem of cultural appropriation: chapter 4 corrects a potential oversight inSchotter’s method by investigating hieroglyphs as they were used by Egyptianartists and impacted modern Egyptian politics, while chapter 5 considers howAnglo-European modernism engaged with hieroglyphs in a less insular, more in-clusive way by revealing Joyce’s anti-fascist applications for hieroglyphs inUlysses and Finnegans Wake. A final chapter on contemporary American newmedia samples from postmodernism (Pynchon), cyberpunk (William Gibson,Neal Stephenson), and Afro-Futurism (Ishmael Reed) to reveal that the artisticuse of hieroglyphs as a medium for exploring visual languages and non-symbolicrepresentation in new media is still in operation today.Another new book rooted in new media is Alix Beeston’s In and Out of Sight:

Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. This is powered by a trulyinterdisciplinary gathering of proofs and examples taken from photography, lit-erature, history, and theory from the modernist moment and our own. Beestondevelops a ‘method of citational reading’ suited to the ‘composite modality of lit-erary modernism’ (p. 27). Also packed with well-chosen illustrations and lit byvivid verbs and unusual adjectives and adverbials, the may be the most thrillingoffering of 2018. While incidentally providing a fantastic primer for the scholarlyanalysis of photographs and debunking stale truisms about modernism and cin-ema, Beeston argues that photography interacts with literature dialecticallythrough relations of ‘interdependence and reciprocity’ (p. 12). This argumenteschews simple connections (for example that Virginia Woolf kept meticulousphoto albums and admired her photographer pioneer aunt) in favour of teasingout the cognitive logic of photography as a serial or composite, rather than mi-metic or realistic, form. In and Out of Sight mobilizes Gertrude Stein’s early


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Three Lives, Jean Toomer’s multigeneric Cane, John Dos Passos’s collageManhattan Transfer, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon as casestudies whose collage-like structures are analogous to composite photography,particularly those that present the ‘woman-in-series’. This textual and visual fig-ure, which is both a still and moving form, multiplies and withholds ‘femalebodies along the linear track of the written word’, bodies whose ‘conspicuousappearances and disappearance’ are ‘constituted in, and constituent of, [modern-ist] narration’ (p. 5). Beeston regards these deaths, dissolves, and disconnectionsas central to modernism, whose stylistic signature of ‘the gap or interval’ signi-fies ‘at once as a mark of trauma, the wounding of typologized representation,and as a vehicle for evading or defending against such trauma: a zone of with-drawal, incompliancy, or active recalcitrance’ (p. 7). These gaps therefore holdtremendous political potential to denaturalize essentialist models of identity andthus ‘serve as sanctuaries from, or passageways out of, the social and politicalorder whose injurious dictates they also materialize’ (p. 8). Intersectional feministreadings made possible through these gaps include Stein’s surrealism, whosemedicalized, racialized bodies ‘demonstrate that those who seem most irreparablyimpaired by their typologized representation bear a radical potential for enduringand curtailing its violence’ (p. 34). Toomer’s Cane is an ‘act of resistance to theproduction of racialized images as the props of white supremacy’, particularlyscenes of lynching (p. 67). Beeston centralizes Manhattan Transfer’s aspiring ac-tress Ellen Thatcher to highlight her role in ‘reclaiming the resistant and recalci-trant gaze of the nonwhite, non-middle-class woman’ and thereby critiquinghegemonic white feminism (p. 110). The gradual, glossy, deadening transform-ation of Thatcher’s body as she is trained to perform as a machine reappears inThe Last Tycoon, which exposes ‘the reiterative logic of studio-era Hollywood’and ‘the iconographic syntax of stardom’ which freeze actresses into glamourshots and reproduce them through body doubling (p. 149). This cannot, howeverprevent the woman-in-series from making ‘herself heard the very moment thatshe seems to be silenced’ (p. 187).

Angela Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and theNovel also links new sensory technologies to the development of the modernistnovel. Whereas Beeston eschews drawing direct causal links from photographiccauses to modernist effects, Frattarola boldly claims that particular acoustic tech-nologies inspired particular modernist interventions. Dorothy Richardson’s streamof consciousness and free indirect discourse open up a quiet space to oppose thedisplacement of the silent movie by the talkie, while Woolf’s experiences withphonographs led to experiments with onomatopoeia meant to reduce the levels ofmediation that removed readers from direct perception. Beckett’s fascination withthe tape recorder and the looping and splicing of magnetic tape led to his uniqueforms of repetition that conveyed the ultimate paucity of language but also cre-ated new ways for artists to connect more directly to their audiences. Joyce andJean Rhys, however, have more wholly positive experiences with these auditorytechnologies: Joyce’s monologues exhibit an ‘auditory cosmopolitanism’ thatinserted other voices into the privatized, silent world of listening made possibleby headphones, and Rhys’s snippets of radio programmes over the wireless pep-pered her protagonist’s first-person narratives, thereby providing momentary res-pites from her narrator’s own melancholic headspace. This is an intriguing array


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



of devices, although Frattarola’s primary concern is the aesthetic patterns peculiarto these various machines and their reproducibility in narrative form, rather than(as scholarship in modernist sound studies tends to analyse) the circumstances oftheir invention, production, marketing, and distribution, the conditions underwhich radio programmes and other recorded spans of audio information were cre-ated, or the operational and proprietary details related to individual user experien-ces over the device’s lifespan. Frattarola’s mission is to upend the ocularcentrismof modernist scholarship by examining how modernists ‘represent the act of lis-tening, describe the soundscape, and formally make their narratives auditory’ andby revealing how modernism’s characteristic innovations ‘are in part a result of agrowing awareness of and shift toward sound perception made possible throughnew auditory technologies’ (p. 4). Whereas ocular information is linked to ‘aCartesian visual-based perspective’ of which modernists were suspicious, andwhereas modernists are often accused of ‘solipsistically turning inward’, aural in-formation and the technologies that delivered it in novel ways to audiences, bycontrast, questioned Cartesian values of distance and objectivity and created‘new forms of intimacy’ that modernist writers used ‘to connect charactersthrough listening and sound’ (p. 5). In the end, the greatest contribution made byauditory technologies to the modernist novel is their promptings towards ‘newways to listen’, new ways to listen to the inner world and the outside world that‘draw attention to language as sound: not a transparent medium of communica-tion but textured rhythmic patterns that we continually chant and listen to to-gether’ (p. 163). Like Bronstein, Engelhardt, and Teekell, Frattarola provides anew account of the precise cultural mechanisms that forced modernists to facethe limitations of language, and explores how they forged new avenues for recu-perative aesthetic production nonetheless.For Frattarola, direct experiences of particular auditory technologies caused in-

dividual modernists to perceive new problems to be solved by textual experi-ments with sound. Heather Fielding, by contrast, in Novel Theory andTechnology in Modernist Britain, takes a more conceptual approach by revisitingthe ontology of the novel. How definitions of the novel changed in the twentiethcentury is the quite substantial question that drives Fielding’s exploration ofmodern technological change. As the twentieth century dawned, ‘rethinking thenovel’s relationship to reading was an urgent task’, Fielding explains, because‘both novel and machine were increasingly reduced to an instrument for meetingan end that had been determined in an advance’ (p. 5). The novelist’s taskseemed to be reproducing known quantities, satisfying readerships who knewprecisely what they wanted to read and engaging in the same kind of mass pro-duction of the same enabled by technology. At the same time, however, thinkingof the novel itself as a machine with two useful features was empowering formany modernists: an autotelic self-containment allowed the novel to ‘unfold and“move” without requiring input from or the participation of a reader’ and an abil-ity to ‘produce knowledge’ as machines produced commodities or power (p. 6).Instrumentalized, the novel form was impoverished, but as an instrument wieldedby these authors, it was revitalized and capable of intervening in ‘a series of on-going debates about the cultural and philosophical meaning of technology’ (p.23). For The Ambassadors, Henry James seized on projection as a metaphor forthe novel’s autonomous existence apart from the reader, while for Wyndham


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Lewis, the industrial machine prompted similar literary experiments to circum-vent the vagaries of linear reading practices beyond the control of the author. ForParade’s End, Ford Madox Ford found the telephone a useful figure for under-standing how narrative techniques of impressionism serve to connect and separ-ate the disparate units that comprise a novel, whereas Rebecca West, in a 1928essay on James Joyce, turns away from attempting to take control of the novelback from the reader and theorizes the novel as ‘an experimental tool for gather-ing information’ (p. 119). As these chapter summaries reveal, for Fielding, ‘tech-nology’ is a kaleidoscopic term revolving loosely around the figure of themachine; and definitions of the novel can be discerned by reading novelists’ ownaccounts of their work, particularly non-fiction reflections on writing that featurecreative adaptations of technical imagery as metaphors for narration. As a result,Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain does not fit easily alongsidethe other titles examined here. Even its opening salvos on Marshall McLuhanand hypertext feel almost as if teleported in from a different dimension. This isprecisely the value of Fielding’s intervention: it is almost tailor-made for answer-ing Bronstein’s call for clear alternatives to the context-based historicistapproaches to modernism, even as Fielding is interested in making argumentsabout changes in literature over time.

Also fundamentally absorbed in tracing the influence of machines on modern-ism, Michael Osman’s Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation inAmerica takes nearly the opposite approach. An example of infrastructure stud-ies, Modernism’s Visible Hand contributes to the investigation of the history andculture of the built environment, especially as it relates to the physical instanti-ation of machinery providing the means of industrial production, sanitation, andventilation; waystations for storage and distribution; and access to utilities likegas, water, electricity, and (more recently) Internet connectivity, along with thebureaucracies and knowledge-gathering systems that supported them. WhereFielding understands the symbolic freight of machinery, Osman elaborates thedetails of machines’ concrete existence: the ‘legal, technical, and economicinstruments’ that make up the ‘visible hand of management’ of modernity (p. xi);and he considers their effects on the architectural styles that emerge within thecultures that produce them. Like Teekell and Spoo, Osman generates excitementout of a topic that might elicit gravity. ‘This is not a history of enthusiastic peo-ple doing interesting things’ (p. xx), Osman apologizes, yet his set of illustrationsis as beguiling as Beeston’s, with pipes, ducts, braces, conduits, and wiresstretching like orderly jungles of modern vines across blueprints, diagrams, pho-tographs, and advertisements. Material and bureaucratic mechanisms of regula-tion and control become, in the hands of modern architects, aesthetic inspirationsappreciated for their own formal merits, rather than for the utility that originallyinspired the design. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Osmandiagnoses a ‘belated architectural reaction’ (p. xvi) that regarded ventilation sys-tems as clues for liberating women from housework drudgery. This is set out inchapter 1, which features feminist reformers Catherine Beecher, ChristineFrederick, and Mary Pattison. Chapter 2 explores cold storage facilities as ele-ments of a visual language, ultimately rooted in mass commodity production andfinancial speculation, for creating monumental buildings. It features the architectsLouis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, and William Gibbons Preston. Chapter 3


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



discusses two academic buildings for the sciences, the Chicago Academy ofSciences and the Illinois Vivarium, which were designed to perform in brick andmortar emergent theories of ecology. Chapter 4 turns to Frederick WinslowTaylor and the scientific managers trained by him, whose complex diagramswere meant to increase industrial efficiency but which also created a new visuallanguage that were taken up by modernist architecture. By investigating the ‘ap-propriation of managerial tools, diagrams, and office furniture’ and by formulat-ing new building designs to ‘interpret the products and functions of industry thatmight have otherwise escaped visual attention’ (p. xxiv), Osman demonstrateshow modernist scholars may adapt infrastructure studies as a fresh method ofrelating the historical data that has been used to drive mainstream historicist anal-yses of modernism. Bureaucracy and industry are not simply concepts forOsman, but embodied, physical entities whose material forms could inspire pro-gressive aesthetic experimentation even though their ideological connectionswere far from savoury to many modernists. Indeed, as Osman concludes, ‘mod-ern techniques for governance are an essential, if unacknowledged, part in mod-ernist history’ (p. 189). With publications like Modernism’s Visible Hand,Modernism and the Law, and Modernist Soundscapes, these connections can con-tinue to be combined with newer variations on transnational approaches to pro-duce work that is informed by the wealth of theoretical discussions of thetransnational and transhistorical over the past two decades without remainingsolely fixed on those conversations.

2. Fiction Pre-1945

(a) Fiction 1900–1930

Critical work in 2018 on fiction published between 1900 and 1930 cleaved to arange of familiar and refreshing themes and approaches, augmenting studies onliterary and material cultures, the medical humanities, ecocriticism, animal stud-ies, necropolitics, reception history and networks, periodical studies, theAnthropocene, and the transnational turn. A number of studies work to resistconventional literary-critical historical boundaries, traversing the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, while several monographs and edited collectionssought to align the anxieties of the inauguration of the ‘machine age’ with cur-rent debates surrounding new media and their effect on personal, social, and pol-itical health.Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon’s Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist

Literature offers a comprehensive guide to a number of ideas and debates in thefield, covering the modernist everyday, literature and the arts, textual and archivalapproaches, and geopolitics, reflecting the recent transnational turn in moderniststudies. A useful resources section includes an annotated bibliography. This vol-ume makes a vital addition to Bloomsbury’s publications in early twentieth cen-tury literature and Companion series. The Bloomsbury Companion to ModernistLiterature contains a wealth of discussion on H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford,Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield’s style iscarefully considered in Ulrika Maude’s ‘Introduction: Modernism,Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), alongside Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the Day. ‘Mansfield’s short stories’, Maude writes, ‘indicate that female modern-ists often find value in the undoing of a self-hood that for male writers tends tofunction as an ambivalent locus of power and autonomy’ (p. 10). With careful,deft close readings contained within a compelling and comprehensive selectionof essays, this volume will prove an indispensable resource for students andresearchers. The timely questions posed by Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis in‘Can There Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) will no doubt find diverseand innovative responses in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology,edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, expected in 2020.

Barbara Straumann’s monograph Female Performers in British and AmericanFiction adds to a growing field of work on performance and interpretation in heranalysis of literary stagings. While her focus, in general, lies with Victorian andlate twentieth-century novels, Strausmann’s final chapter takes on continuities be-tween late nineteenth and early twentieth-century texts. Focusing on George duMaurier’s Trilby and Isak Denison’s ‘The Dreamers’, ‘Fin de SiecleVentriloquism and Modernist Self-Authorship’ (pp. 236–66) suggests a lineage ofcontinuities that may be traced through the trope of the female performer. Thisfinal chapter speaks to emerging scholarship in the field of modernism, dance,and performance, and may provide a fruitful line of further enquiry.

Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration inModernism, and the Avant Gardes, edited by Harri Veivo, Jean-Pierre Montier,Francoise Nicol, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, and Sascha Bru, offers awide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion of the cultural dimensions and contextsof the avant-garde and modernism in Europe. Beyond Given Knowledge movesbeyond standard canonical configurations, with essays on marginalized figures inEuropean literary history, covering Czech, English, French, German, Italian, andSpanish literature, and transnational intersections between European and LatinAmerican avant-gardes. The collection’s admirable focus on figures studied lessoften includes Joel Hawkes’s ‘Primitive Modern Practices of Place: Mary Buttsand Christopher Wood in Paris and Cornwall’ (pp. 315–30). Hawkes delves into‘conflicts of space’ in Butts’s writing, noting the affinities between Butts’s frag-mentary prose and Wood’s landscape paintings, and their ‘troubled’ presentationof the rural (p. 326).

Heather Fielding’s Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain offers atimely perspective on ‘ongoing debates about the cultural and philosophicalmeaning of technology’ (p. 23) within modernist literary circles, opening with anintriguing parallel between modernism and our current struggles with a perceivedsurfeit of information. Modernist writers, Fielding argues, ‘thought specific tech-nologies modeled ways of engineering the novel to protect itself from the badhabits of modern middlebrow readers, who manhandle novels to produce desiredemotions’ (p. 87). For Ford Madox Ford, Fielding writes, ‘the surfeit of informa-tion made it all but impossible for the modern subject to understand the worldaround her’ (p. 59). Fielding rethinks literature’s relationship with technology,offering an astute reading of narrative form, tracing the ways in which modernistwriters reshaped novel theory through these considerations, shifting criticismaway from reader’s experiences in favour of the work as an autonomous object.Fielding analyses the work of modernist writers who ‘reconceptualized’


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



technologies, developing the novel ‘to resist the instrumentalizing tendencies ofreaders’ (p. 24).In ‘What Carries the Novel: Ford Madox Ford, Impressionistic Connectivity,

and the Telephone’, Fielding holds in hand Ford’s concern ‘about the state ofmodern reading’ (p. 59). ‘Overwhelmed subjects’, she writes, ‘had lost the abilityto connect disparate fragments of information and competing points of view’ (p.25). Ford, Fielding argues, ‘theorizes the impressionistic novel as the last bastionof connective thought: it fragments but then connects the pieces by emphasizingforward narrative momentum’ (p. 25). Crucially, Fielding suggests, ‘Ford shiftsaway’ from ‘visual metaphors, emphasizing instead the media channel implicit inhis formulation that the novel must be “carried” forward . . . the telephone’ (p.25). In Ford’s hands, Fielding concludes, the telephone functions as a ‘conduit’that enables the assemblage of narrative fragments, ‘modeling for its readers away to stitch the fragments into a meaningful, synthesized whole’ (p. 86).In his contribution to Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm’s Sacrifice and

Modern War Literature: The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror, VincentSherry considers the figure of sacrificial offering in representations of the FirstWorld War. ‘The Failing Sacrifice of the First World War’ (pp. 92–112) uncovershow Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, and David Jones record the ways inwhich the ‘old model’ of ‘the proportionate economy of individual sacrifice iseventually disrupted by indiscriminate slaughter’ (p. 92). Compelling, contextual-ly argued and drawing on fine close readings, Sherry’s chapter notes a sectariandivide between Aldington and Jones, contrasting Jones’s ‘pre-Reformation wayof thinking about sacrifice’ (p. 106) with the ‘economy of sacrifice in a form ofexpressive disorder’ in Aldington’s Death of a Hero (p. 105). Noting Ford’s con-version to Roman Catholicism, Sherry concludes that Ford’s cultural if not reli-gious ‘Protestant Englishness’ results in a ‘combination [that] makes his workthe register of a sort of ecumenical dissolution, where current and older econo-mies of sacrifice are recorded as undone’ (p. 111).In ‘Personal Landscape: Ford Madox Ford, War, and the Mind’ (Rudaityte,

ed., History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture, pp. 54–64),Andrea Rummel discusses Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction as a workof life writing. Focusing on its ‘interweaving’ of autobiographical and fictionalwritings, Rummel views Ford’s work as ‘A Tale of Reconstitution’. Rummelargues that Ford’s landscapes work as ‘visual memory-scapes’ that ‘transformmomentous experience into visionary tableaux symbolic of emotional and psy-chological longings’ (p. 63).In ‘Narrative Order in the First-Person Novel’ (PoT 39:i[2018] 131–58),

William Nelles and Linda Williams analyse Genette’s model through attention toThe Good Soldier, alongside David Copperfield, The Sound and the Fury, and anumber of other texts. Complicating Dorrit Cohn’s narratological work, wherein‘a radically dechronologized order is typical of memory narratives and mono-logues’, Nelles and Williams ‘question her claim that autobiographical narrativesand monologues follow a chronological order’ through a series of datasets(pp. 131).It was a busy year for work on Wyndham Lewis. Heather Fielding devotes a

chapter to him in Novel Theory which situates him within ‘the context of thephilosophy of technology’ (p. 26). For Lewis, she writes, ‘the modern subject,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



captured by the rhythm of the machine, was reduced to the status of a “machineminder”’ (p. 26). The novel is for Lewis similarly ‘unable to escape the tempor-ality of the reader’s experience of reading’ (p. 26). Fielding considers Lewis’scritical reception as ‘the most technophilic of high modernists’, associated withreadings of Lewis as linked to protofascist side of modernism (p. 87). She arguesfor a reading that accommodates Lewis’s idiosyncrasies, showing the writer ‘try-ing to define novel and machine against their most stable contemporary charac-teristics’ (p. 116). Through an intricate examination of narrative form, Fieldingargues that Lewis ‘wants to imagine the novel as a machine at the moment itstops being read . . . as a contained, geometric work’ (p. 115).

In ‘Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women throughThe Apes of God and Ulysses’ (in Beloborodova, Van Hulle, and Verhulst, eds.,Beckett and Modernism, pp. 81–94), Jose Francisco Fernandez explores the influ-ence of Lewis and Joyce on the development of Beckett’s writing. Fernandezargues that, despite Beckett’s ‘dislike’ of Lewis, the latter’s influence was crucialto the young Beckett’s working through Joyce’s influence. ‘He took advantage ofthe material in Apes that suited his needs, along with his own criticism ofUlysses, thus leaning on Lewis in order to surpass his own master and to moveforward’, writes Fernandez (pp. 93–4).

Modernism/Modernity published a Lewis cluster, ‘New Perspectives onWyndham Lewis’, uncovering his periodical networks, the political formation ofmasculinities in his works, and his enmeshment in aesthetic debates over person-ality and impersonality. Nathan O’Donnell’s ‘“The Most Broadminded‘Leftwinger’ in Europe”: Wyndham Lewis and The New Age’ (Mo/Mo25:iv[2018] 749–69) explores Lewis’s connections with the networks surroundingThe New Age. Outlining ‘the shared theoretical territory’ between Lewis and themagazine, O’Donnell shows correspondences between ‘certain radical prewar andwartime British socialisms, and the development of fascist ideologies in the1920s’ (p. 749), ‘recognizing the complex interweaving of radical political theo-ries in the prewar period, and after’ (p. 766). Turning to gender politics, Erin G.Calston’s ‘“Acting the Man”: Wyndham Lewis and the Future of Masculinity’(Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 771–89) reassesses Lewis’s ‘configurations of gender’, longdeemed ‘unsalvageable for any kind of progressive or even very interesting polit-ics of gender and sexuality’ (p. 771). Calston, unusually, proposes that ‘we mightsee Lewis’s entire project as an excavational endeavour, digging into the founda-tions of structures of (gendered and other) domination in order to expose them’(p. 773). She sees Lewis as ‘a modernist whose work merits careful reassessmentfor what it can tell us about the complex rearrangements of gender taking placein the early twentieth century’ (p. 789). Heather Arvidson’s ‘Personality,Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis’ (Mo/Mo25:iv[2018] 791–814) steps into enmeshed debates surrounding personality andimpersonality. Arvidson sketches out Eliot’s formulation of ‘impersonality’ andits entrenchment through the New Critical institutional consensus, uncovering thefascinating ‘less when known’ fact that ‘“impersonality” lived an equally vibrantdiscursive life outside of art in transatlantic print culture’ (p. 791). Arvidsonmoves on to propose a theory of ‘personified detachment’, the effect of which ‘isto carve out space for the author, even in cases where a first-person showmanfills the role’ (p. 809).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



One hundred years on from the first publication of Tarr in novel form, theJournal of Wyndham Lewis Studies investigates its resonance for current readers.‘Reading Lewis’s “Preface” in 2018’, the editors write, ‘it’s hard not to think thatour current moment of testing and trying forces would benefit from Lewis’s con-structive scorn’ (p. 7). Jeffrey Meyers contemplates ‘Wyndham Lewis’s CruelSatire’, ‘an invective that can salve our anger as well as express it’ (JWLS9[2018] 90–6). Meyers probes the ‘sharp focus’ (p. 98) of Lewis’s satire. UdithDematagoda examines ‘National Allegory as Negative Dialectic in WyndhamLewis’s Tarr’ (JWLS 9[2018] 68–89). This draws on Fredric Jameson’s observa-tion that ‘Lewis was an internationalist, the most European and least insular ofall great contemporary writers’ alongside his ‘brash and incongruous subtitle’,‘The Modernist as Fascist’, Dematagoda considers the staging of the idea of ‘na-tional allegory’ in Tarr. This analysis, Dematagoda writes, allows the confronta-tion of Lewis’s ‘dialectic in which nationalism is the thesis; cosmopolitanism itsantithesis—and anti-Semitism its synthesis’ (p. 100).Turning to narrative form, Allan Pero offers a finely grained phenomenological

reading in ‘“Paris Hints of Sacrifice”: Necropolitan Aesthetics in Tarr’ (JWLS9[2018] 1–23), arguing that death informs the narrative form of Tarr and its com-position. David Mulry similarly discusses ‘“This . . . feeling of indifference”:Tarr’s Importance in Lewis’s Narrative Design’ (JWLS 9[2018] 24–43), analysingLewis’s ‘striking choices in his narrative design, and bold innovations in charac-ter and form’ (p. 136). Finally, Flora de Giovanni’s ‘A Psychological Dynamismof the Boa-Constrictor Type: Tarr and Dostoevsky’ (JWLS 9[2018] 24–43) sit-uates Tarr alongside his forebears, rereading moments in Tarr that suggest aDostoevskian inheritance. Giovanni argues that Lewis ‘reveals himself capable ofidentifying in Dostoevsky’s works a paradigmatic alternative to the monologicnovel of the European tradition’ (p. 76). A mark of the issue as a whole the waythat it draws parallels between current political climates and those of the earlytwentieth century. ‘More than ever’, Meyers writes, ‘we need contemporary sati-rists who, like Lewis, understood how our decaying democracy infects our cul-ture’ (p. 108).Joong-Eun Ahn’s ‘T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis: 1923–1925’ (TSESK

28:iii[2018] 127–53) analyses correspondence between the two writers, includingletters relating to Lewis’s publications in The Criterion, and details the intricaciesof the publishing process alongside their complex friendship. Ahn places Lewisand Eliot’s interactions within the broader social context of 1920s London, high-lighting their encounters with Sydney and Violet Schiff, the Sitwells, and LyttonStrachey.Nicole Cosentino and Wendy Ryden take an innovative health studies ap-

proach in ‘Unspeakable Horror: Outing Syphilis in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart ofDarkness’ (in Nixon and Servitje, eds., Syphilis and Subjectivity: From theVictorians to the Present pp. 137–62). Alongside a number of 2018 studies,Nixon and Servitje’s collection resists and complicates disciplinary time-frameboundaries through attention to a particular trope or idea, here ‘looking at literarytreatments of the disease as they shifted from the Victorian to the Modernist’ (p.9). For Cosentino and Ryden, Conrad yokes medical fears and sexual moralitywithin the broader context of a global violence that inflects ‘self-congratulatoryEuropean benevolence and charity’ (p. 9). Cosentino and Ryden argue that


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Conrad’s vision of death includes ‘a literal one . . . intertwined with the obviouscolonial violence being perpetrated in and on the Congo’ (p. 138). The horror ofMarlow’s journey might simultaneously refer to ‘the existential hollowness ofmodernity’ as well as syphilis, understood by the late Victorian population as ‘adegenerative menace to Western civilization’ (p. 138).

Russell West-Pavlov’s edited collection The Global South and Literatureexplores the history, meanings, and cultural and literary applications of the termthe ‘Global South’. In his own chapter in the ‘Applications’ section of this col-lection, ‘Extractive Industries in the Global South: Development, Necropolitics,Globalization and Planetary Ethics’, West-Pavlov turns his attention to The Heartof Darkness (pp. 145–60). West-Pavlov contrasts Marx’s ‘glimpses of colonialforms of “primitive accumulation”’ with Conrad’s ‘more pointed equivalent ofthe same process’ (p. 145). West-Pavlov wields this complex of literary figuresand geopolitical and global economic strategies, ‘setting the contemporary ex-tractive industries, refracted via two fictional texts from Indigenous Australia andthe Democratic Republic of Congo in the context of the triple notions of devel-opment, bio- and necropolitics’ (p. 146).

Sara Saei Dibavar and Hossein Pirnajmuddin return to familiar territory intheir readings of Heart of Darkness in ‘Deixis and Delayed Decoding in JosephConrad’s Falk’ (Neoh 45:ii[2018] 789–806). This suggests that Falk portrays thecannibalism of a white man to suggest that ‘cannibalism can find its moral justi-fication within the society that abhors such actions’ (p. 789). This effect, theauthors argue, is achieved through ‘simultaneous narrative distance and involve-ment’, created through Conrad’s technique of delayed decoding. Dibavar andPirnajmuddin propose that this produces an ‘uncanny effect’ which is ‘in linewith epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility’ (p. 804).

Studies in the Novel published two contrasting analyses of ‘atmosphere’ inConrad’s novels. Drawing on �Zi�zek, Adam Meehan’s ‘Spectres of Ideology inJoseph Conrad’s Nostromo (SNNTS 50:iii[2018] 359–77) suggests a unique formof ‘spectral narrativity’ in Conrad’s novel (p. 360). Meehan argues that Conrad’s‘spectral engagements produce a self-contained form of ideology critique thatoperates simultaneously within and outside the world of the novel’ (p. 360), inwhich Nostromo straddles the ‘fault line[s] of social antagonism’ (p. 375). In thesame issue, Anna Jones Abramson’s ‘Joseph Conrad’s Atmospheric Modernism:Enveloping Fog, Narrative Frames, and Affective Attunement’ (SNNTS50:iii[2018] 336–58) proposes ‘atmosphere’ as a new paradigm for theorizing lit-erary modernism and reading practices. Abramson suggests that the frame narra-tive is both crucial to atmosphere and creates a ‘fog’ for the reader whichmirrors Marlow’s crisis of knowledge (p. 354).

Claire Wilkinson rereads the so-called ‘empty centre’ of Nostromo in ‘TheEmpty Centre of Conrad’s Nostromo: A New Economic Approach’ (CQ47:iii[2018] 201–21). Wilkinson’s article begins with the familiar premise thatthe ‘necessary difficulty’ of Conrad’s style has a ‘stylistic, as well as a moralfunction’ (p. 201). Unusually, however, Wilkinson suggests that economic tradeis at the heart of the mysterious centre of Nostromo. The novel ‘presents a neces-sary void in the spiritual and substantial manifestation of the commodity at itsown centre’ (p. 221).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Drawing on similar themes, Jim Holstun’s ‘“Mr Kayerts. He is Dead.”:Literary Realism in Conrad’s “Outpost of Progress”’ (ELH 85:i[2018] 191–220)dwells on ‘modernist selective tradition’ and Conrad’s ‘complex and unresolved’reception history (p. 192). Holstun proposes that Conrad’s story ‘connects imper-ial causes to horrific but intelligible colonial effects’ (p. 191), a counter to Heartof Darkness, he argues.Shifting to a different set of contingencies, Thomas H. Ford’s ‘Ecohistoricism:

Aristotle, Dryden, Conrad’ (JRCC 24:iii[2018] 278–93) delves into literature that‘self-reflexively attributes to literature the potential to suspend these determiningmilitary events’ (p. 279), tracing a lineage from Aristotle through Dryden toConrad. Noting Conrad’s allusions to Dryden, Ford suggests that ‘literary rever-berations also communicate another potentiality to our categories of historicalunderstanding, even returning to the past event its contingency’ (p. 291).In ‘The Fateful Impact: Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness’, Jeffrey Meyers

explores Conrad’s debts to Melville (Style 52:iii[2018] 212–21) in both the pat-tern of the plot to Heart of Darkness and the central figure as survivor. Meyersincludes careful close readings, noting subtle correspondences between the use oflanguage in both novels (p. 214). Elsewhere, Eduardo Valls Oyarzun’s ‘FromCarlyle’s Hero to Conrad’s Depraved: Hermeneutics of Morbidity in Heart ofDarkness’ (PragueJESt 7[2018] 65–78) considers how Conrad’s characterizationsmight borrow from Carlyle’s concepts of ‘great men’. Andrew Hewitt placesConrad in a different milieu in ‘Conrad, Woolf, and the Title of Moments ofVision’ (THSJ 14:i[2018] 63–7), tracing Woolf’s use of the phrase back to LordJim and reconsidering Woolf’s lines of influence. ‘Woolf still thinks of ‘momentsof vision’ as pertaining to Conrad’, writes Hewitt, ‘but by 1928, she has re-assigned the phrase from Conrad to Hardy by including it in his obituary’ (p.65).Pouneh Saeedi’s ‘Winnie Verloc: A Case of “Female Malady” in The Secret

Agent’ (CRCL 45:ii[2018] 315–27) engages with an ekphrastic influence onConrad’s novel: the correlation between an ink sketch found in Conrad’s belong-ings and his character Winnie Verloc (p. 315). Saeedi intervenes in scholarshipon the novel, noting the relegation of this character, despite The Secret Agent’soriginal title, ‘The Story of Winnie Verloc’ (p. 316). This article ‘unveils’ themysterious character of Verloc, reading her as ‘an embodiment of what ElaineShowalter has called the “female malady”’ (p. 316). In another assessment ofConrad’s women, Joyce Wexler augments critical narratives of ‘Conrad’s EroticWomen’ (CollL 45:iii[2018] 424–48). Drawing on careful close readings of TheRescue, Wexler argues that Conrad’s ‘plot, imagery and dialogue’ are used to ex-press erotic feelings that, in turn, give his female characters ‘imagination andagency’ (p. 443).In ‘Modernist Low Vision: Visual Impairment and Weak Narrative in Conrad

and Joyce’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 60–78), Robert Volpiecelli sheds light on Conradand Joyce’s ‘shared interest in the aesthetic qualities of bad eyesight’. Drawingon advances in disability theory, Volpiecelli proposes that ‘low vision’ offers ameans of contesting narrative’s seemingly intrinsic desire for normative develop-ment and the constitution of bodily wholeness (p. 60). Disability, Volpiecelli sug-gests, ‘turns to defamiliarize the very foundations of modernism itself’. ‘Theselow-vision novels’, he argues, ‘encourage us to see how modernist aesthetics


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



may begin with upheavals in the body that are then followed closely by a revolu-tion in how we see our own capabilities’ (p. 67).

Reflecting a wider recent ecocritical and economic turn, Caitlin Vandertopreads Heart of Darkness as a world-ecological text, in ‘“The Earth SeemedUnearthly”: Capital, World-Ecology, and Enchanted Nature in Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness’ (MFS 64:iv[2018] 680–700). This examines ‘themes of sociologicalviolence, waste, and exhaustion as theorized by the world-ecology paradigm’ (p.680). ‘Conrad’s nature appears as a vast socioecological assemblage’, writesVandertop, ‘organized into commodity frontiers for resources as diverse as silver,petroleum, coal, sugar, coffee, silk, bananas, tobacco, and ivory’ (p. 682).Effortlessly tying together several common themes in recent work on Conrad,Vandertop argues that ‘it is no longer enough to talk about nature without identi-fying the role of colonial economic activity’; this ‘continue[s] to be imbricated incontemporary climate issues from land dispossession to toxic dumping’. To thisend, she explains, ‘Conrad’s fiction invites a historical examination of theentwined activities of nature and capital’, and ‘it continues to be an invaluableresource for ecocritical scholars today’ (p. 694).

In ‘Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-history of Climate Denial’ (VS60:iv[2018] 543–64), Allen Macduffie reassesses the roots of ‘soft denial’, thetendency to accept the scientific consensus while continuing to live as normal.Macduffie’s fascinating article discusses ‘Darwinian plots’ in Heart of Darknessalongside Tennyson’s poetry and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In these texts,Macduffie argues, ‘everyday life is exposed as an artifice designed to keep nat-ural reality materially and imaginatively at bay’ (p. 544). ‘To read Heart ofDarkness’ as a climate change novel, writes Macduffie, ‘is to notice the ways inwhich Conrad both critically exposes and implicitly reinforces the logic of dom-ination that is at the root of the crisis’ (p. 545). This entails reading ‘reparativelyand suspiciously at once, to see it as a text that reveals the hypocrisy and ir-rationality at the root of Western anthropocentric rationalism, while also main-taining its exclusionary and dehumanizing biases’ (p. 545). Macduffie followsthis line of argument in his analysis of Wells’s The Time Machine, workingthrough ‘the cognitive dissonance involved in trying to, in H.G. Wells’s phrase,“live as though it were not so”’ (p. 545).

In ‘“An Animal among the Animals”: Wells and the Thought of the Future’(pp. 96–129), a chapter of his monograph, Animal Fables After Darwin, ChrisDanta explores how Wells uses the ‘animal’ to ‘figure the narrator’s emotionalresponse to the untethering of the present from the historical past’ (p. 99). Dantaargues that the rise of the biological sciences in the later nineteenth century pro-vided writers such as Wells with new ways of approaching the fable, leveragedto interrogate the notion of human exceptionalism. Built through astute closereadings, Danta’s essay explores The War of the Worlds, The Island of DoctorMoreau, and The Time Machine in this light, questioning how Wells plays with‘the vertical order of things’ and the ‘orientational metaphor “human is up; ani-mal is down”’ (p. 113). Gustavo Generani’s article, ‘The Island of DoctorMoreau by H.G. Wells: A Pre-Freudian Reply to Darwinian Imperialism’(English 67:cclvii[2018] 235–61), takes a similar tack, but argues that Wells cre-ates a specifically political work, a ‘double sided representation of civilization,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



capitalism and imperialism’, developing ‘a chaotic universe without aim or pur-pose, full of monstrous uncertainties’ (p. 235).It is worth noting here that C.W. Marshall’s ‘H.G. Wells and Horace’ (N&Q

65[2018] 405–8) details Prendick’s library in The Island of Doctor Moreau andhis ‘small crib of Horace’ (p. 406). Marshall argues that this detail ‘reinforcesthe association between Moreau and Charles Darwin’ (p. 408). Another brief art-icle, Terry W. Thompson’s “The Door in the Wall”: H.G. Wells’s Paean to theVictorian Age’ (ANQ 31:iv[2018] 248–52) unpicks allusions in Wells’s Door inthe Wall and Other StoriesIn his fascinating monograph Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian

Revolution, David Ayers examines responses in literature and journalism to theRussian Revolution following 1917 and the founding of the League of Nations.Ayers offers novel insights into the relationship between early twentieth-centuryliterature and the geopolitical shifts which governed the period. This inaugurated,he argues, a new age of transnational politics. In ‘British Visitors to Russia’ (pp.93–129) Ayers reads H.G. Wells’s writings in Russia in the Shadows alongsideaccounts from Bertrand Russell, Arthur Ransome, John Cournos, and RobertWilton’s deeply anti-Semitic dispatches. Refreshingly, Ayers situates Wells withina broader consideration of the climate of ideas that shaped modernism followingthe First World War.Edited by Gregory Benford, Gary Westfahl, Howard V. Hendrix, and Joseph

D. Miller, Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy presents essays from the J.Lloyd Eaton conferences, inaugurated in 1979. While these essays are broad inscope, focusing on formal qualities, tropes and the cultural production of sciencefiction, a number contain insightful discussions of H.G. Wells. PatrickParrinder’s opening essay, ‘Science Fiction as Truncated Epic’ (pp. 5–18), care-fully unpicks the relationship between prophecy and ‘truncated’ narrative formsin The Time Machine. Gregory Benford’s ‘Effing the Ineffable’ (pp. 58–69)makes glancing reference to ‘sensations of encounter’ in Wells’s works (p. 62)and offers a more general discussion of ‘Modernist Aliens’ (pp. 63–4). RobertCrossley’s ‘In the Palace of Green Porcelain: Artifacts from the Museums ofScience Fiction’ (pp. 86–97) provides an interesting account of the ‘historicalrise of science fiction’ alongside ‘the opening of museums as public buildings’(p. 86). Crossley investigates the portrayal of museums and museum culture inMary Shelley’s The Last Man alongside The Time Machine: ‘Shelley and Wellsseem to almost work in tandem’, Crossley writes, ‘she pioneering an intellectualstrategy and he discovering its more streamlined narrative form; she articulatingthe archetype and he imagining the fictional prototype’ (p. 90). Like Crossley,Paul Alkon seeks to map Wells’s anatomy of influence; his ‘Cannibalism inScience Fiction’ argues that The Time Machine augments a ‘semiotics of canni-balism’ drawn from Swift’s A Modest Proposal (pp. 126–37). Tom Shippey’s‘Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition’ (pp. 178–94) discusses Wells’sposition in the cultural and economic place of the science fiction marketplace,while Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay’s ‘Shapes from the Edge of Time’ dis-cusses Richard M. Powers’s cover art for The Time Machine (pp. 203–14).Louisa MacKay Demerjian’s ‘“And Imperfect Beings Cannot Make Perfect

Decisions”: Future Humans in The Time Machine and Oryx and Crake’ (inDemerjian, MacKay, and Stein, eds., Future Humans in Fiction and Film, pp.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



16–31) discusses the use of biblical tropes in Wells and Atwood, and attempts tocontextualize conceptions of ‘the future human’ in both writers, offering a glossof each work. Meanwhile, Alessandra Albano’s ‘The Science of Degeneration inStoker’s Dracula and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau’ (JDS 20[2018] 54–81)explores connections between both works, focusing on their formal and aestheticmodels of degeneration and their scientific models.

Jessica R. Valdez’s ‘“Our Impending Doom”: Seriality’s End in Late-VictorianProto-Dystopian Novels’ (JModPerS 9:i[2018] 1–29) delves into the fascinatingrole of seriality in relation to Wells’s The Time Machine, in part of a broader spe-cial issue on serial forms, demonstrating the increasing tendency within periodic-al studies to marry material and formal aesthetics. Augmenting current debates inthe field, Valdez argues that the temporal form introduced by seriality mingleswith the futuristic orientation of utopian subjects. Writers ‘dismantled rigid ideasabout temporality and serial form’ through these enmeshed experiments (p. 24).

Aaron Rosenberg’s ‘Romancing the Anthropocene: H.G. Wells and the Genreof the Future’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 79–100) ‘considers how the representation ofdeep times affects, and is affected by, literary genres’, arguing that Wells ‘repur-poses the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansivetemporal scales that exceed the representational capacity of the realist novel’ (p.79). Rosenberg concludes further ‘that organizing them under the heading“Anthropocene” serves to reframe those events into narratives whose structures,tropes, and rhetorical devices enter the purview of literary analysis’ (p. 99).

In ‘Utopia in the Future Histories of Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells’(Foundation 47:i[2018] 6–19), Iren Boyarkina situates Wells within the broaderfield of utopian studies, working through a comparison of Stapledon and Wellsto approach a definition of literary utopia. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower andRachel Piwarski, meanwhile, approach ‘The Gothic Uncanny as ColonialAllegory in The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (Gothic 20:i–ii[2018] 358–72), offer-ing analysis of the uncanny and animalism in Doctor Moreau and the colonialcontext of fin-de-siecle Europe. Boosung Kim takes a similar line in ‘TheUncanny, Normalcy, and the EnLIGHTenment: Reversing the Hegemony ofVision in H.G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”’ (BAF1900 25:i[2018] 125–44), reading Wells against Freud.

Finally, The Journal of the H.G. Wells Society published a number of interest-ing articles on Wells, with Lisa M. Lane on Wells and pedagogy in ‘Cram andCriticism: H.G. Wells and Victorian Education’ (Wellsian 41[2018] 28–42), andUna Brogan’s ‘Liberation on Two Wheels: Social Change and the Bicycle inH.G. Wells’s Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly’ (Wellsian 41[2018] 5–27) addsto research on Wells and bicycles.

Monica Cure’s monograph, Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at theTurn of the Century stakes out new territory in material and cultural studies,recovering the fraught history of the postcard as a powerful piece of communica-tion technology. Cure uncovers the postcard’s representation in fiction, whichCure links to the current obsessions and anxieties that surround new socialmedia. In a chapter, ‘Return to Sender: The Postcard Terror’ (pp. 117–96) Curesurveys the object in E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which ‘con-fusion in the intention behind sending a postcard leads to the death of a child’(p. 36). For Forster, Cure writes, the postcard, and its limited form, is presented


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



as a ‘force beyond the control of the user’ (p. 36). ‘In the world that Forster cre-ates’, she argues, ‘letters stand for reliable, conventional social relations, whilepostcards threaten this order’ (p. 128). Cure suggests a possible queer reading inForster’s use of the trope: the postcard, she writes, is used to ‘signal the irre-pressible and unpredictable nature of desire in the presence of stifling conven-tionality’ (p. 127).Kevin J. Hayes’s edited volume Herman Melville in Context contains a useful

discussion of the ways in which ‘the Melville revival of the 1920s’ (p. 307)shaped British fiction. This includes helpful, if brief, discussion of E.M. Forsterscattered through two chapters. David M. Ball’s ‘Modernism’ (pp. 307–16) pla-ces Forster within a transnational network of Melville’s interlocutors. Ball dwellson Forster’s analysis of Moby-Dick in Aspects of the Novel [1927], which readsMelville through Bronte, Dostoevsky, and Lawrence (p. 312). In ‘Opera’ (pp.147–56), Hayes writes on Forster’s collaboration with Benjamin Britten on BillyBudd. Delving deeper into this rich vein of scholarship, Tsung-Han Tsai’s ‘Musicas Queering in E.M. Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’ (M&L 99:i[2018]1–15) suggests that music plays a key role within Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinsonin representing Dickinson’s homosexuality. It argues that musical pieces, such asBeethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata, layer biography with a queer subtext.Tabish Khair’s ‘Muslim Migrants and the Global South’ (in West-Pavlov, ed.,

pp. 161–72) contrasts Raja Rao, Rudyard Kipling, and Forster, while in the samevolume Simon During’s ‘Political Theology, Literature and the Global South’(pp. 209–22) explores the prevalence of political-theological dimensions in ca-nonical novels about the Global South. During places Passage to India alongsideSalman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Roberto Bola~no’s By Night in Chile, andJ.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. This essay argues that these novels ‘as-sert both political theology’s limits and its continuing force’ (p. 212), with reli-gious and special differences used to structure these novels, to different ends (p.216).Claudia Rosenhan rereads Maurice [1971] and The Longest Journey [1907] in

‘“We Can Only Interpret by our Experiences”: Nature/Culture in Forster’s“Cambridge” Novels’ (GL 22:iii[2018] 275–87). Carefully investigating their re-ception, Rosenhan argues that the attention to nature in these works has hithertobeen overlooked. Reading these novels through a phenomenological lens,Rosenhan argues that nature emerges in them as an ‘affiliation of identity, land-scape and ethics’ (pp. 285–6).One of a number of articles to map networks and relationships against recep-

tion and canon formation, Stuart Christie’s ‘E.M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, and theAmerican Turn, 1942–1953’ (WenRLC 11:ii[2018] 1–26) uncovers the ways inwhich Lionel Trilling succeeded in moulding Forster’s reception in the UnitedStates. Continuing with the question of how individual critics might wield greatinfluence in terms of a writer’s reception, Charles Campbell’s ‘Edward Said andModernist Misreadings of A Passage to India’ (Interactions 27:i[2018] 23–37)works through what he perceives to be Said’s misunderstandings of Forster.Campbell argues that ‘he himself follows a tradition of critical analysis ofForster’s A Passage to India which distorts the novel in the service of certainpreconceptions, refusals and misreading’, which he groups in six categories (p.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



203). In these ‘misreadings’, Campbell writes, ‘he joins a school of readers of APassage to India which I will call the modernist anti-mystical critics’ (p. 204).

Elsewhere, Terry W. Thompson offers a gloss of Forster’s ‘one science fictionstory’ in ‘Political Geographies in E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”’ (ANQ21:i[2018] 32–6), while Masayuki Iwasaki approaches Forster and cinema in‘“What, Then, Must Be Done?”: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and theHeritage Film Institute’ (SELit 59[2018] 21–38).

Contributions to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, edited by GerriKimber, Todd Martin, and Christine Froula, explore the intriguing friendship be-tween the two writers from fresh angles, covering their shared terrains and keyinterlocuters. This volume is the annual publication of the Katherine MansfieldSociety published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. Christine Froula’sintroduction, ‘Thinking Sideways through One’s Sisters’ (pp. 1–8), considershow Mansfield’s and Woolf’s ‘asymmetrical lifespans shape their bodies ofwork’, introducing their ‘relationship of mutual admiration and fascination . . .wariness, rivalry’ (p. 1). Maud Ellmann’s ‘Powers of Disgust: KatherineMansfield and Virginia Woolf’ (pp. 11–28) notes both writers’ association withlyricism, but argues through attentive readings that disgust runs as a powerfulundercurrent through, respectively, In a German Pension, ‘Je ne parle pasfrancais’, ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’, and The Years. Maria DiBattista’s‘Together and Apart’ (pp. 29–41) offers a biography of the pair’s friendship,drawing on diary entries, letters, and reviews, alongside comparative readingswhich reveal affinities between the writers’ works through careful close readings.

Turning to reception history, Sydney Janet Kaplan’s ‘Seated Between“Geniuses”: Conrad Aiken’s Imaginative and Critical Responses to KatherineMansfield and Virginia Woolf’ (pp. 42–54) pieces together Aiken’s encounterswith both writers. Kaplan argues that Aiken’s reviews shaped the reception his-tory of both writers (particularly through his glowing review of Mansfield’sJournal) and that his own fiction was marked by his encounters with bothwomen, as in his thinly veiled portrait of Mansfield and John Middleton Murryin ‘Your Obituary, Well Written’. Froula’s second contribution, ‘Katherine’sSecrets’ (pp. 55–74), sketches out similarities between Mansfield’s and Woolf’saesthetic projects, attacking the ‘new post-war aesthetics’ (p. 55). Noting thecompetitive, even fractious, nature of their friendship, Froula highlightsMansfield’s unsigned review of Night and Day, her allegiance with JohnMiddleton Murry against Bloomsbury, and the posthumous publication of Doves’Nest and Journal, which ‘flows’, Froula writes, into her ‘nascent thinking to-wards The Waves’ (p. 69).

Karina Jakubowicz’s ‘A Conversation Set to Flowers: Beyond the Origins ofKew Gardens’ (pp. 75–86) takes up a long-running debate in Mansfield studies:whether Mansfield was ‘responsible for the creation of Woolf’s Kew Gardens’(p. 75), through a letter sent to Ottoline Morrell in 1917. The article situatesMansfield within her Bloomsbury milieu and investigates directions of influencebetween Woolf, Mansfield, and Morrell regarding ‘the literary possibilities of gar-dens’ (p. 78). Jakubowicz ultimately concludes that it is ‘impossible’ to arguethat Kew Gardens was inspired by one event, and instead suggests that it is theproduct of a shared ‘great interest’ in the subject (p. 85). Like Mansfield andMorrell, Jakubowicz writes, ‘Woolf presents the garden as a dynamic, surprising


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



landscape that departs from conventionality’. Each writer, she argues, ‘saw thepotential of this traditional setting for the expression of bold, even radical ideas’(p. 85). It is worth noting, too, that Richard Vytniorgu’s ‘Ottoline Morrell:Personalist Thinker’ considers this same set (MLR 113:i[2018] 57–79).In ‘“Roses Blooming Under Glass; Lips Cut with a Knife”: Hermeneutics of

the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield’ (pp. 87–101), Halyna Chumakargues that, for Woolf, the face is a site ‘that spurs “contradictory” interpretationsof “character”’ (p. 87), while Mansfield’s fiction ‘displays an overt fascinationwith the modern female visage’ (p. 87). Chumak discusses Mansfield’s andWoolf’s relationship to physiognomy, noting how the Victorian body became ‘asemiotic system’. Both writers, Chumak argues, ‘experiment with facial inscrut-ability as a mode of female resistance’, with images ‘refracted through anothercharacter’s perspective’ (p. 100). While Woolf ‘uses the modern woman to dem-onstrate that character reading requires invention’, Chumak writes, Mansfield‘produces images of womanhood that compel extradiegetic readers to recalibratetheir own hermeneutic approaches’ (p. 99).From roses and gardens to worms: in ‘The Fly and the Displaced Self:

Affective Potential in the Epiphanic Moments of Mansfield, Woolf andLawrence’ (pp. 102–16), Cheryl Hindrichs adopts an intriguing animal studiesapproach, noting Mansfield’s curious fly analogies. These both relate to her ownwriting and are used to interrogate gendered subjectivity and class dichotomiesin her work. This article compares Mansfield’s, Woolf’s, and Lawrence’s batheticuse of this trope, where the metaphor of the fly is used to puncture affective cli-maxes, passing over epiphany or catharsis for ‘existential impasse’ (p. 116).Brian Richardson’s ‘Dangerous Reading in Mansfield’s Stories and Woolf’s

“The Fisherman and his Wife”’ (pp. 117–28) explores characters in the act ofreading. Richardson argues that reading is presented as often ‘dubious’ or ‘dan-gerous’ in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Marriage a laMode’, and ‘The Little Governess’ and ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ scene inTo the Lighthouse. Attention to Mansfield’s view of reading as a mode of resist-ance, Richard claims, can shed light on Woolf’s ironic use of allusion.Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf also contains: a review essay by

Claire Drewery on recent scholarship; a critical miscellany by J. LawrenceMitchell, which documents Mansfield’s relationship with her brother, LeslieHeron Beauchamp; and creative critical responses to Mansfield. The latter sectioncontains: a transcript of an excellent lecture given by Ali Smith at the NationalPortrait Gallery in 2014 (pp. 131–54); Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation ofVirginia Woolf’s ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’ (pp. 155–72); and poetry from Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith (pp. 173–6).In ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Lyricism and Jacques Ranciere’s Politics of

Aesthetics’ (Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 729–47), Elsa Hogberg reads Mansfield in dia-logue with Ranciere’s idea of the ‘redistribution’ of the sensible. This compellingarticle proposes that the lyrical dimension of Mansfield’s work is fundamentallyunsafe, a pioneer of an alternative lyrical tradition. ‘Through their defamiliarizingvocal and visual qualities’ Mansfield’s stories, Hogberg argues, ‘redraw the af-fective and sensory boundaries that continue to sustain inequitable class and gen-der hierarchies’ (p. 742).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Giles Whiteley details Mansfield’s interest in the fin de siecle in ‘KatherineMansfield, Arthur Symons, Gabriele D’Annunzio and The Virgins of the Rocks’(N&Q 65[2018] 402–5), correcting a misattributed quotation in the recently pub-lished Diaries, while neatly explicating Mansfield’s decadent lineage.

Reflecting a broader trend in the work of 2018, Derek Ryan’s ‘KatherineMansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’ (MFS 64:i[2018] 27–51) argues that Mansfield’s‘attentiveness to how animals feature in literary creation’ in the works of othersis ‘central to her development of her own modernist practice’ (p. 31).Mansfield’s ‘careful observations of animals and creative encounters with them’,Ryan writes, ‘suggest that literature, rooted in linguistic structures that have trad-itionally been seen to divide humans from other species, may actually bring usinto closer contact with animality’ (p. 46).

Returning to the popular theme of Mansfield’s gardens, Tracy Miao’s article‘Converging the Artificial and the Natural: Katherine Mansfield’s Actual andImagined Botanical Gardens’ (JNZL 36:i[2018] 118–22) explores ‘how these twoopposing forces’ of naturalness and containment ‘contend, negotiate and settle’in Mansfield’s writing (p. 118). Miao argues that Mansfield ‘rejects natural bor-ders and lines’ (p. 119), which, by way of Mansfield’s reading of Baudelaire,Miao links to both her interest in ‘garden designing’ and prose. Finally,‘Empathy and Literary Style: A Theoretical and Methodological Exploration’(OrbisLit 73:vi[2018] 471–86) by Anne Mangen, Anne Charlotte Begnum,Anezka Kuzmicova, Skans Kersti Nilsson, Mette Steenberg, and HildegunnStøle, presents data on readers’ responses to Mansfield, building on publicationsin 2017

In ‘The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British RuralFiction’ (in Bluemel and McCluskey, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain, pp. 135–48) Stella Deen explores the role of the English spinster un the rural and urbanspaces of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman,E.H. Young’s Miss Mole, and Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. Deen argues thatthese novels show a development from a ‘libertarian to a communal’ notion ofcivilization (p. 12). There is much to commend in this collection from EdinburghUniversity Press, which offers a genuinely refreshing view of rural literature ofthe period, split into three sections considering rural networks, landscapes, andcommunities.

‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Letters to Genevieve Taggard’ (PMLA 133:i[2018]205–20), introduced by Laurel Harris, saw the first publication of Warner’s lettersto the critically neglected US poet, Genevieve Taggard. The letters describe war-time life in an English village, with details of Warner’s work with the Women’sVoluntary Service, interactions with American servicemen, and Warner’s politicalviews, alongside details of everyday life. As Harris writes, these letters ‘reveal atransatlantic connection between two leftist women writers that intertwines thepolitical, literary, and personal’ (p. 206). Similarly, the Virginia Woolf Miscellanycontained some brief discussion of Warner in its special issue, Essays in Honourof Jane Marcus. This includes by Robin Hackett’s ‘Jane Marcus, an OngoingLegacy’ (VWM 93[2018] 36–7) and J. Ashley Foster, Cori L. Gabbard, andConor Tomas Reed’s ‘Jane Marcus Feminist University: The DocumentaryRecord’ (VWM 93[2018] 29–50).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Unfortunately, Philosophy and Literary Modernism, which contains work onE.M. Forster, and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group did not arrive in timefor this review.

(b) Fiction 1930–1945

Marina MacKay’s book, Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic, looks atthe critical output of this canonical theorist of the novel as a response to hisexperiences as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. This importantand original study takes into account unpublished archival correspondence tobuild a case for looking at Watt as a mid-century thinker. MacKay’s chapterstake up Watt’s approach to institutionalism, as well as to the writers about whomhe wrote: Defoe, Richardson, Conrad. MacKay’s book considers Watt’s preoccu-pations in light of mid-century questions about the nature of language and em-piricism alongside contemporaries such as George Orwell, Albert Camus, andRebecca West, and Primo Levi, Leo Amery, and Arthur Koestler.Also bringing to light a less well-known archive, the latest instalment in a

much longer project, the publication of volume 26 of The Complete Works ofEvelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922–1934 and edited by DonatGallagher was published by Oxford University Press last year. The volumebrings together previously unpublished material written in the years immediatelyfollowing his graduation and his travels in South America.Judith Woolf’s ‘Wrecked as Homeward She Did Come: “Transposed

Autobiography” in Elizabeth Bowen’s Late Novel, The Little Girls’ (LW15:ii[2018] 227–41) re-reads Bowen’s penultimate novel, The Little Girls [1963]as an example of transposed autobiography, centring on Bowen’s own traumaticexperience as a result of the loss of her mother at a young age. In this novel, thearticle argues, Bowen departs from her usual mode of narration and instead rep-resents characters from an exterior perspective so that the reader discovers thecontinued reach of past experience on characters’ present lives decades later.Woolf also situates the novel in relation to other events in Bowen’s life, includ-ing the Cuban missile crisis, as well as to the loss of her family home, Bowen’sCourt.Edward King’s article, ‘“What Muck & Filth Is Normally Flowing through the

Air”: The Cultural Politics of Atmosphere in the Work of George Orwell’ (JML41:ii[2018] 60–76), centres on the evolution of Orwell’s thinking about radio.King draws on John Durham Peters’s theory of elemental media in TheMarvellous Clouds [2015] to argue that Orwell’s ideas about the place of radioin everyday life should be thought about in relation to his theory of media. Thisarticle proposes that Orwell’s view of the radio be integrated into the environ-ment, and that, if it is seen in this way, we can better understand his more opti-mistic hope for the possibilities of radio.In ‘“I Find My Mind Meeting Yours”: Rebecca West’s Telepathic Modernism’

(SNNTS 50:iv[2018] 543–62), Jennifer Spitzer proposes a new reading ofRebecca West’s Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy [1929], placing the novel inconversation with modernist ideas about spiritualism. Spitzer roots the novel’sinterest in telepathy in nineteenth-century theories of consciousness and in thecontext of the development of communication technologies. According to


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Spitzer, West’s novel bridges spiritualism and the modernist interest in telepathy.West’s representation of Harriet Hume’s telepathic ability is ethically motivated,however, and is connected to West’s larger ‘utopian vision of consciousness’ (p.544) which is linked to her socialist feminism.

In ‘Regicide on Repeat: The Pensive Spectator of Rebecca West’s Black Lamband Grey Falcon’ (Criticism 60:i[2018] 43–73), Jonah Corne offers a new read-ing of West’s multi-generic travel memoir by emphasizing its many references toWest’s viewing of film reels. While recovering from illness in the first chapter ofthe book, West hears about the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia in 1934.Later, she watches news reels of the assassination, which brings up echoes of the1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Corne’s analysis of West’sreferences to observation, viewing, and perceiving in Black Lamb and GreyFalcon is connected to Bellour’s theory about the differences between how pho-tography and film affect viewers. The article breaks new ground in theorizingwhat Corne terms West’s ‘spectatorial process’ (p. 48).

Laurel Harris’s ‘From “The Worst Horror of All” to “I Love You”: Genderand Voice in the Cinematic Soundscapes of Brighton Rock’ (LFQ 46:i[2018] 1)discusses the 1947 cinematic adaptation of Greene’s 1938 novel. Focusing on thecharacter of Pinkie and drawing on Kaja Silverman’s theory of the status of thevoice in modernist cinema, Harris’s article argues that voice in this film fulfilsthis character’s desire for discursive control despite his ambivalence about hetero-sexual romance.

(c) James Joyce

In At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University, one of the highlightsof 2018, Sebastian D.G. Knowles differentiates his approach from other work onerror and mistakes by stating ‘The beauty of Joyce is that through reading himwe learn to make mistakes, and through them we learn to forgive ourselves’ (p.4). An opening chapter warmly asserts ‘the necessity of an institutional appreci-ation of error’ (p. 21), and is followed by entertaining chapters on differentJoycean texts and readings that Knowles occasionally describes as ‘the hunt’ (p.23), ranging from finding each song in ‘Sirens’ to a link between FinnegansWake’s Issy and, of all things, baseball. Knowles’s approach is generous andplayful; he describes his book as one ‘that celebrates openness and engagement,and is everywhere concerned with Joyce’s comic principles of empathy and de-light’ (p. 23). ‘The major point of At Fault’, he states, ‘is that Joyce is to beenjoyed, that all Joycean readings are properly flights from the center, that com-edy lies at the heart of all that Joyce does, and that if a text is truly atelic then atrue reading of that work must take it out of its own bounds’ (p. 25).Emphasizing this, Knowles ends At Fault with twelve forewords written in hisrole as series editor of the Florida James Joyce series, arguing finally that ‘thereis no limit to Joycean study’ (p. 219).

Proof of this abounded in 2018, with important new work on topics includingecocriticism, music, translation, and non-fiction. As in literary studies morebroadly, ecocritical approaches to Joyce continue in popularity. Yi-Peng Lai’sEcoUlysses: Nature, Nation, Consumption is a prime example of such work.Effectively arranged into chapters themed respectively around gardens, waste,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



trees, and the pastoral, Lai’s study thus examines nature first as it relates to landand consumption, and then in terms of the nation and the ecosystem. Throughher reading of ecopolitics in Joyce, Lai develops her own approach to ecocriti-cism that combines ‘natural history, cultural politics, historiography, colonial dis-course, genetic studies, and even architectural history’ (p. 21). Bloom’s‘Flowerville’, the pollution of Sandymount Strand, and, notably, the cataloguesof tree wedding and marketplace in ‘Cyclops’ are treated with care and in detail.EcoUlysses succeeds in exhibiting ‘the possibility’, Lai suggests, ‘of reading theenvironment alongside history, politics, social languages, and genetic criticism’,productively situating ‘the interpretation of eco-politics in a Joycean context thatis historically and socio-politically relevant’ (p. 172). Ultimately, Lai argues that‘the imagination of nature in Ulysses is in fact inseparable from that of the emer-gent nation of fin-de-siecle Ireland’ (p. 172).While predominantly concerned with Joyce’s texts, Vincent J. Cheng’s far-

reaching study Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joycealso examines literary texts by Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, WalkerPercy, and Milan Kundera. This rigorous but sensitive discussion of how forget-ting and amnesia function in the formation of national identities and historiesfocuses on Ireland and the American South. In his fifth chapter, Cheng furtherconsiders the relationship between these histories. ‘Joyce, Ireland, and theAmerican South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes’ covers broad ground,moving, for example, from a reading of Irishness in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936novel Gone with the Wind and its 1939 film adaptation to a focus on referencesto the Ku Klux Klan in the Wake, in order to argue for the ‘blending/doubling ofa performative, imagined Irish/Southern identity’ (p. 108). Responding not onlyto current concerns in literary and historical scholarship but to very recent upset-ting events in the American South, Cheng’s study explores urgent issues of race,narrative, and the relationships between literature and history. Careful, as heexplains in his Afterword, to avoid ‘any overarching or reductive argument’ (p.149), Cheng maintains the importance of preserving nuance, difficulties, and de-tail as a challenge to the ‘wilful creation of very dangerous fictions’ seen in ourpost-Trump world (p. 150).Michelle Witen’s James Joyce and Absolute Music takes an intensely detailed,

archivally informed approach to analysing Joyce’s engagement with music.Witen’s thorough knowledge and understanding of the history, terminology, andconnotations of absolute music is apparent throughout, in explorations which re-volve around (yet extend beyond) the question of the fuga per canonem in‘Sirens’. The book opens with a substantial chapter her central focus ‘absolutemusic’, ‘or pure, non-referential instrumental music (music that does not refer toanything outside of itself), wherein the structure and the content are inseparable’(pp. 2–3). After this discussion of the roots of the term, what it denotes, andhow the concept reached modernist writers, chapter 2 covers Joyce’s early en-gagement with music in Chamber Music, Exiles, Dubliners, and Portrait.Chapters 3 and 4 form a ‘diptych’ on ‘Sirens’ (p. 9) and reach forward to thefifth chapter on ‘Circe’. Witen turns finally to the Wake in chapter 6, thus provid-ing insight across Joyce’s major works. Linking ‘the rationale informing the fugalformat of “Sirens”’ and Joyce’s later claim of having written Finnegans Wake as“pure music”’, Witen proposes a convincing ‘trajectory’: ‘in the emphasis on


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



instrumentation in the early works; in his use of the fugue in “Sirens”; in his recy-cling of the fugal elements of “Sirens” in “Circe”; and in his emphasis on thefusion of sound and sense, the visible and the audible in Finnegans Wake’ (p. 3).

Witen’s chapters on ‘Sirens’ consider Joyce’s fuga per canonem in terms offirst structure, then effect, significantly reassessing and deepening understandingsof the episode. The longer of the two chapters, ‘A Case of Structure’, beginswith a history of the fugue, showing the issues inherent in critical tendencies torefer to late twentieth-century interpretations of fugal structure. Detailing thepopularity of the fugue in the music of Bach and Handel, Witen then outlineshow interest waned before becoming reinvigorated by the ‘ascension of absolutemusic in the nineteenth century’ (pp. 117–18). This chapter then directlyaddresses previous critical readings of the fugue in ‘Sirens’, forming a geneticallyinformed argument for Joyce’s ‘fugal intentions’ (p. 126). Witen relies on twoitems from the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce papers acquired in 2002: anearly draft of ‘Sirens’ in a notebook (MS 36,639/7 A) and a handwritten copy-book of the episode which includes a list of eight parts under the heading ‘Fugaper Canonem’ (MS 36,639/9). Calling the latter ‘a genetic turning point’ (p.126), Witen systematically works through the terms of the list to show the impli-cation of a double fugue structure in ‘Sirens’, before turning to the earlier draftof the episode to determine intentionality (p. 157). This rich work is then fol-lowed by a shorter chapter considering the effects of such innovations, which isvital to Witen’s wider argument that Joyce shows ‘an understanding of absolutemusic that reveals the inseparability of its content from its form, its structurefrom its effect’ (p. 114). Joyce and Absolute Music will be essential to thoseworking on ‘Sirens’ or Joyce and music, and also of real importance to futurework on the relationships of influence, representation, and experimentation be-tween modern literature and music more generally.

Elsewhere, four further pieces of work on Joyce and music rely similarly onmusical expertise. In Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature:Musical Modernism, edited by Katherine O’Callaghan, O’Callaghan’s essay‘“That’s the Music of the Future”: Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old IrishTonality”’ (pp. 32–47) suggests ‘that Joyce saw a kinship between traditionalIrish music and the radical developments he encountered in the European musicalworld’ (p. 32). O’Callaghan examines what she calls a ‘juxtaposition of modern-ity and returning past’ by looking at ‘The Dead’, ‘Sirens’, and ‘Circe’ (p. 32). Inthe same volume, Jamie McGregor’s chapter ‘The Ring, The Waves, and theWake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce’ (pp. 48–61) looks atwhat McGregor describes as ‘a surprising omission’ in previous criticism onWagner’s influence on the literature of Woolf and Joyce: the ‘cyclical structure’of both The Waves and the Wake in relation to Wagner’s Ring Cycle (p. 48).‘For all three artists’, he furthermore concludes, ‘final transcendence is achievedthrough a heroic Liebestod’ (p. 59). Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s edited volumeMusic Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honourof Harry White contains two essays which respond to Harry White’s own interestin Joycean musical links. In ‘Moore, Wagner, Joyce: Evelyn Innes and the IrishWagnerian Novel’, Gerry Smyth discusses George Moore’s influence on Joyce(pp. 335–49), while John O’Flynn’s ‘Alex North, James Joyce, and John


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Huston’s The Dead (1987)’ focuses on the score Alex North composed forHuston’s The Dead (pp. 351–71).Philip Sicker’s study Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture argues that Ulysses is

Joyce’s ‘ultimate act of capturing and preserving the eye’s encounter with reality,a transaction conducted via the gazes of Stephen and Bloom and through a multi-tude of refractory narrative lenses’ (p. 2). Linking his focus thus to Joyce’s biog-raphy, Sicker’s readings of perception and spectacle in Ulysses cover a widevariety of topics, from silent films and photography to the flaneur, Futurism, andthe philosophy of Locke and Berkeley. Three 2018 journal articles also focus onJoyce and the visual. Unlike Sicker’s study, however, each of these is informedby disability studies. In ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled inJames Joyce’s Ulysses’ (JLCDS 12:i[2018] 53–69), Paul Marchbanks queriesreadings of Bloom’s sympathy and pity for others and argues that Joyce’s cri-tique of bigotry towards those with disabilities extends beyond the societydepicted in Ulysses. Robert Volpicelli’s ‘Modernist Low Vision: VisualImpairment and Weak Narrative in Conrad and Joyce’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 60–78)considers Stephen Dedalus’s weak vision in Portrait as it links to an emphasison sensation and movement away from a narrative of progression. MatthewRubery’s ‘Ulysses, Blindness, and Accessible Modernism’ (NLH 49:i[2018] 47–70) discusses the concept of modernist difficulty in terms of accessible alternativeformats, particularly sound recordings of various kinds. This article provides anin-depth account of the American Foundation for the Blind’s efforts to recordUlysses and offers a reading of what was retained and gained in that recording.From the visual back to the aural, Daniel Ryan Morse’s article, ‘Sounding

Dismodernism in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (JLCDS 12:iv[2018] 459–75) focuseson Joyce’s methods of reading and writing (particularly dictation in the writingof Ulysses). It addresses and challenges a perceived binary between the audiencesand cultural connotations of audiobooks and printed texts. Moving away fromdisability studies, Angela Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: AuditoryTechnology and the Novel explores ‘how modernists represent the act of listen-ing, describe the soundscape, and formally make their narratives auditory’ (p. 4).Frattarola’s fourth chapter, ‘Turning Up the Volume of Inner Speech:Headphones and James Joyce’s Interior Monologue’ (pp. 94–113), looks broadlyat the technology of headphones as a historical context for Joyce’s works. Thischapter examines in particular the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, its characters’ ‘fic-tional soundscapes’ (p. 95) and ‘bodily sounds’ (p. 107), the episode’s ‘auditorycosmopolitanism’ (p. 97), and the ways in which ‘just as headphones broughtsounds from remote places into one’s headspace, Joyce’s representation ofstream of consciousness reflects an interior space that is filled with voices,noise, texts, advertisements, and music that do not necessarily originate withinthe self’ (p. 98).While Grace Eckley’s close readings of the Wake and of what Joyce himself

read bestow journalist and public figure W.T. Stead with great importance in hermonograph, The Encryption of Finnegans Wake Resolved: W.T. Stead, SeanSeeger’s study Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott: History RepeatingItself with a Difference builds a judicious comparative reading of Joyce andWalcott through four chapters addressing Ulysses, Omeros, Finnegans Wake, andTiepolo’s Hound. In the first full, dedicated study of Joyce and Walcott, Seeger


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



reads these authors’ explorations of nonlinear temporality both within the textsand at a metatextual level. Elsewhere, Patrick O’Neill’s Trilingual Joyce: TheAnna Livia Variations provides an in-depth consideration of Joyce’s involvementin the experimental French and Italian translations of Anna Livia Plurabelle(ALP), the standalone text of 1928 which would eventually form the eighth chap-ter of the Wake. Joyce’s involvement is well known, but this is the first detailedcomparison of the English, French, and Italian texts, variations ‘equally informedby Joyce’s personal authority’ (p. 3). O’Neill also fruitfully brings in the lessusual (in terms of status) work of Samuel Beckett and Alfred Peron in French,Ettore Settanni in Italian, and C.K. Ogden in Basic English. As O’Neill qualifies,‘Grand narratives and overarching interpretive schemes are . . . unapologeticallyavoided in what follows’; the result is ten chapters of around fifty ‘comparativemicroanalyses’, reading short sections of ALP in three languages (p. 39). The ‘tri-ple iterations’ of ALP, O’Neill argues, are ‘at once three separate and authoriallyvalidated individual texts and in combination one single Annalivian macrotext’(p. 38). In practice, then, these discrete yet conjoined ALPs are read together inrich detail, each chapter breaking down a few lines and ending with a section of‘comments and contexts’. While these discussions are microscopic, they not onlygive just enough information for a reader less familiar with the Wake, they alsoconsistently communicate the enjoyment there is to be had in the Wake and(even) in Wakean criticism. This book could be indispensable to anyone workingon the Wake, or chapter 8 more specifically (in any language). It is also a valu-able case study for those researching literary translation beyond Joyce.

Though the roster of well-known and well-respected contributors helps, it israther its significance as an endeavour that should grant Katherine Ebury andJames Alexander Fraser’s edited volume Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: ‘OutsideHis Jurisfiction’ lasting importance in the field of Joyce studies. As a collectivestudy of how we categorize Joyce’s writings (if the editors will excuse the un-qualified use of that ‘inflated gerund’ (p. 7)), Joyce’s Non-Fiction asks complexquestions regarding the reception of authorship and addresses issues of intent,biography, and canon. A strong, eloquent introduction provides context and posesquestions. With one eye trained on the accessibility issues concomitant with dis-cussion of Joyce’s non-fiction and another on the effects of separately publishingan author’s collected fiction and non-fiction, Ebury and Fraser make useful com-parisons with the anthologizing and assembling of Collected Works of writerssuch as Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and VirginiaWoolf. Outlining ‘the broad position of the volume’, the editors argue that ‘whiledesignations of fiction and non-fiction have some indisputable connections tospecific formal and textual features of these works, they are at least as much aproduction of meta-textual issues that, though they are connected to these texts,are not at all intrinsic to them’ (p. 6). Their introduction takes Joyce’s journalism,a topic treated by several of the contributors, as a case study, and further includesa useful history of interest in or publishing of Joyce’s non-fiction, contextualizingthis within broader movements in literary criticism, from early attention to thearchive but not politics, to the later boom of historical and political scholarshipin the field. The editors stake the position of this collection of essays, however,as one which ‘remains open to politicised and, where appropriate, depoliticisedreadings of Joyce’s non-fiction writings’ (p. 15). Collectively, the essays of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Joyce’s Non-Fiction posit that ‘the traditional rubric of fiction and non-fiction hasdetermined the way Joyce’s (and other’s) texts have been read as much as read-ings of those texts have determined those designations’ (p. 18).Michael Groden’s essay, ‘“Please, Mr. Postman”: Joyce’s Expanding Epistolary

Novel’, discusses Joyce’s 3,800 letters, and Groden’s current project (withWilliam Brockman, Kevin Dettmar, and Robert Spoo) to publish new Joyceanletters. Groden considers this particular body of writing as both an ‘epistolarynovel’ and as autobiography: as fiction and non-fiction (p. 31). In ‘“HeChronicled with Patience”: Early Joycean Progressions between Non-Fiction andFiction’, Hans Walter Gabler reads Stephen Hero as non-fiction; while in‘Tracing the Curve of an Emotion: Joyce’s Early “Portrait” Essay’ TerenceKilleen then effectively places the essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ alongside mani-festos, in order to address it not as an avant-text of Portrait but as ‘a more rad-ical, more modernist work than what we have of Stephen Hero’ (p. 78). KevinBarry, Kevin Chekov Feeney, Gavin Mendel-Gleason, and Bojan Bo�zi�c’s ‘Is ItJoyce We Are Reading? Non-Fiction, Authorship, and Digital Humanities’,focuses particularly on the essay ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’—the authorship ofwhich has been disputed—in order to ‘answer some questions of attribution usingnew methods of computer-based natural language analysis’ (p. 94). Three essayson journalism follow. Emer Nolan, in ‘James Joyce as Cultural Critic’, arguesthat ‘Joyce’s early criticism suggests that if he had become a literary critic, hemight have been a kind of postcolonial thinker or theorist of world literature’ (p.121), while John McCourt addresses Joyce’s Italian journalism in ‘Into the West:Joyce on Aran’. James Fraser reads the specific context of production of Joyce’sTrieste journalism in ‘Writing Journalism, Writing Betrayal: The Formation of aJournalistic Voice’, after a discussion of how Joyce distinguishes between literarywriting and journalism in his own fiction. Arguing that Joyce’s own distinctionfalters, Fraser furthermore proposes ‘that Joyce intentionally sought a hyperbolic,almost counterfactual style that was rooted in the narratives of betrayal he hadbeen exploring in his fiction’ (p. 145).Two essays close this volume, linked by their use of literary theory. Ebury’s

‘Becoming-Animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction’and J.T. Welsch’s ‘“. . . For Frankness’ Sake”: Confessional Structures inGiacomo Joyce’ implement Deleuzian and Foucauldian approaches respectively.Ebury offers ‘a detailed reading of a single aspect of the epiphanies, the role of aDeleuzian concept of becoming-animal within their drama, with particular refer-ence to tensions between the autobiographical and the counterbiographical’, andrelates her avoidance (in keeping with the efforts of literary animal studies) ofreading the animals in these texts as ‘straightforward symbols or emblems’ to herefforts to resist transforming the epiphanies into finished texts (p. 176). Eburyworks towards a delineation of ‘Joyce’s thinking about genre and the distinctionbetween fiction and non-fiction’ (p. 180) by focusing particularly (though by nomeans exclusively) on three epiphanies ‘based on real dreams and nightmares’(p. 182), before turning finally to Joyce’s later works in a broader discussion ofhow ‘becoming-animal’ relates to Joyce’s ‘creative anxiety’ (p. 191). An ap-proach usually reserved for Joyce’s completed fiction, Ebury’s ‘creative reading’relies on her affirmation that it is ‘the unfinished, evolving, and liminal status ofthe epiphanies, rather than their more stable position in an archive of Joyce’s


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



writings, that gives them most power’ (p. 180). Welsch’s own creative reading,closing this essential volume, suggests that both Catholic confession and confes-sional literature (particularly, and provocatively, confessionalist poetry) offer apotential framework for addressing the non-fictional elements of Giacomo Joyce.‘The extent’, Welsch observes, ‘to which we can ascribe not just autobiographicaltruth but any empirical correspondence to a text is bound up in the generic con-ventions that allow prose but not poetry to be identified as either fiction or non-fiction, although the distinction has nothing ostensibly to do with form’ (p. 208).

Four further edited collections dedicated to Joyce appeared in 2018. CognitiveJoyce was one of the last projects of the late Andre Topia, and the editorsSylvain Belluc and Valerie Benejam dedicate the volume to his memory. As theystate, ‘in plain English’ in their introduction, ‘what we know and how we knowit is the focus of Joyce’s literary know-how’ (p. 1). After Belluc and Benejamdetail the ways in which Joyce’s work has figured in the development of literarycognitive studies, chapters progress through historicist and contemporaryapproaches to cognitive science and discuss minds within Joyce’s texts as well ashow minds encounter Joyce’s texts. First, Fran O’Rourke addresses cognition inclassical philosophy in ‘Knowledge and Identity in Joyce’, while Jean-BaptisteFournier looks instead at phenomenology in ‘Intentionality and Epiphany:Husserl, Joyce, and the Problem of Access’. Following these philosophical chap-ters, Dirk Van Hulle discusses Joyce’s composition in ‘Authors’ Libraries and theExtended Mind: The Case of Joyce’s Books’, Belluc examines the functions ofetymology in ‘Characters’ Lapses and Language’s Past: Etymology as CognitiveTool in Joyce’s Fiction’, and Thomas Jackson Rice explores the visual imagin-ings of half-sleep in ‘Joyce and Hypnagogia’. The remaining chapters look atspecific works. Dubliners is the focus of Caroline Morillot’s ‘SpatializedThought: Waiting as Cognitive State in Dubliners’ and Benoıt Tadie’s ‘TheInvention of Dublin as “Naissance de la Clinique”: Cognition and Pathology inDubliners’, before Topia’s ‘Cognition as Drama: Stephen Dedalus’s MentalWorkshop in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and Pierre-Louis Patoine’s‘Joycean Text/Empathic Reader: A Modest Contribution to LiteraryNeuroaesthetics’ take very different approaches to the Portrait. While Topia’s art-icle reaches back to O’Rourke’s discussion of Aristotle, Patoine draws rather onrecent and contemporary work in the cognitive sciences in order to argue for theimportance of the responses of the reading body. Lizzy Welby, in ‘ConfiguringCognitive Architecture: Mind Reading and Meta-Representations’, and TeresaPrudente, in ‘Hallucination and the Text: “Circe” between Narrative,Epistemology, and Neurosciences’, consider Ulysses, in chapters grounded inevolutionary biology and neuroscience respectively. Annalisa Volpone closes thevolume with her chapter ‘“[The] Buzz in His Braintree, the Tic of HisConscience”: Consciousness, Language and the Brain in Finnegans Wake’, whichcontextualizes stuttering in the Wake with ‘medico-cultural discourse’ contempor-ary to Joyce (p. 231).

James Joyce’s Silences, edited by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti,tasks an impressive (if predictable) cast of contributors to interrogate multivalentnotions of silence and silences in Joyce’s works. Building on the significantwork of Hugh Kenner regarding the gaps and unsaids in Joycean narratives, fif-teen essays of varying lengths explore ‘rhetorical, linguistic, translatorial,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of “silence”’ (p. 3). Following Wawrzycka andZanotti’s short introduction, four essays focus on silence and language: FritzSenn’s ‘Active Silences’, Laura Pelaschiar’s ‘Joyce’s Art of Silence in Dublinersand A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelliand Ira Torresi’s ‘What Happens When “The Silence Speaks the Scene” (FW13.3)?’, and Laurent Milesi’s ‘In the Beginning Was the Nil: The “eloquence ofsilences” in Finnegans Wake’. Senn and Pelaschiar each discuss articulations ofthe unsaid or unsounded, while Bollettieri and Torresi consider silence as itrelates to Joyce’s treatment of death, exploring silence as concealment, a distrac-tion, and even a weapon. Milesi ends this section by looking at language andgender construction. In the following section, John McCourt’s ‘“Fragments ofShapes, Hewn. In White Silence: Appealing”: Silence and the Emergence of aStyle from Giacomo Joyce to Ulysses’, Teresa Caneda’s ‘Joyce and theAesthetics of Silence: Absence and Loss in “The Dead”’, Sam Slote’s‘“Affirmations and Negations Invalidated as Uttered” in Ulysses and How It Is’,and Morris Beja’s ‘“Shut Up He Explained”: Joyce and “Scornful Silence”’ allfocus on stylistics and aesthetics. A third section comprises William Brockman’s‘The Silent Author of James Joyce’s Dictated Letters’, Sara Sullam’s ‘“Secrets,Silent . . . Sit” in the Archives of Our Publishers: Untold Episodes from Joyce’sItalian Odyssey’, and Tim Conley’s ‘The Silence of the Looms: “Penelope” asTranslation’. Held together by looser links than the essays in the sections thatprecede and follow, these three chapters examine Joyce via the archive, publish-ing, and (tangentially) Homer respectively. Conley’s chapter views Ulysses as ‘akind of translation of Homer’, which, though not a particularly unusual figurationin classical reception studies more broadly, provides a link forward to the finalsection of essays on translation. Zanotti’s ‘Silent Translation in Joyce’,Wawrzycka’s ‘“Mute Chime and Mute Peal”: Translating Chamber Music’, andErika Mihalycsa’s ‘“Music Hath Jaws”: Translating Music and Silence inUlysses’ explore Joyce’s uses of translated texts, poetic silences in translation,and translating sensations. This volume ends with a coda on modernism and si-lence by Franca Ruggieri, ‘Forms of Silence in Literary Writing: James Joyceand Modernism’, which contextualizes Joyce’s silences with the work of severalother modernist writers, from Kafka to Conrad.As the editors of the twenty-sixth volume of Brill’s series European Joyce

Studies point out, the many links between Joyce and the industries of advertise-ment, printing, and publishing are widely known, but ‘serious interest’ in suchtopics has developed only in the last twenty years or so (p. 1). In Publishing inJoyce’s Ulysses: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing, William S. Brockman,Tekla Mecsnober, and Sabrina Alonso narrow their scope to Ulysses. As a result,this volume will be of particular use to those working on the ‘Aeolus’ episode,which is discussed by several contributors. In ‘George Newnes’s MostEntertaining Publication’, Judith Harrington focuses on Joyce’s awareness ofthree entrepreneurial newspaper publishers: George Newnes, Arthur Pearson, andAlfred Harmsworth. Elisabetta d’Erme looks at the two Victorian weeklies thatfeature in Ulysses in her essay ‘Bloom, the Dandy, the Nymph and the Old Hag:Tit-Bits and Photo Bits, Reflections of the Victorian Press in James Joyce’sUlysses’. Rounding off this cluster of essays on newspapers, ‘Types of NewsEvents’ by Fritz Senn examines specific news stories in Ulysses, while Jolanta


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Wawrzycka analyses notions of code and coding in ‘Newspapers, Print,Language: Steganography in Joyce’. David Spurr discusses code too in‘Classified Advertising in Joyce’. His chapter moves from the coded erotics ofclassified advertisements referenced or imagined in Ulysses, to Bloom’s use ofthe newspaper in ‘Sirens’ to hide his illicit letter writing, and to the further funhad in Finnegans Wake. In ‘“But Who Was Gerty?”: Intertextuality and theAdvertising Language of “Nausicaa”’, Matthew Hayward proposes that‘Nausicaa’ is pitched at advertising language rather than those who consume it.Continuing this focus on advertising, Sabrina Alonso takes a genetic approach in‘Advertising in Ulysses’. The final group of essays in this volume address print-ing: Harald Beck reconstructs the offices of the Freeman’s Journal in‘“Aeolus”—A Sightseeing Tour’, and Tamara Radak explores tensions betweenthe cyclical and the linear in ‘“Aeolus”, Interrupted: Heady Headlines andJoycean Negotiations of Closure’. This is a particularly strong essay, as isSangam MacDuff’s ‘The Self-Reflexive Text of “Aeolus”’. Taken together,Radak’s and MacDuff’s contributions offer significant developments of how self-reflexivity functions in ‘Aeolus’. In ‘“Clio’s Clippings”: From Newspaper toPress Cutting’ Brockman examines how Joyce removes clippings from their con-text in Dubliners and Ulysses, as well as how Joyce used clippings to communi-cate with Harriet Weaver, Ezra Pound, and others. Finally, Mecsnober provides awelcome shift in perspective, viewing Ulysses as a printed object in ‘TheIneluctable Modernity of the Visible: The Typographic Odyssey of Ulysses inInterwar Print Culture’. Different typefaces used in different early editions, sheargues, enact important shifts in how—and with what connotations—the bookwas promoted.

Volume 28 of European Joyce Studies, James Joyce and Genetic Criticism:Genesic Fields, is the third of this series to focus on genetic criticism. A fewnewer voices join the expected set of contributors: the editor, Genevieve Sartor’s‘What Genetics Can Do: Linking II.2 and IV of Finnegans Wake’ argues thatchapter II.2 and Book IV are ‘compositionally connected’ via Lucia Joyce andIssy (p. 69), and that furthermore ‘Genetic work is the only way these sectionscould be understood as fundamentally connected’ (p. 80); ShinjiniChattopadhyay’s ‘Giacomonic Oxen: Avant-Texte or Intertext?’ proposes theterm ‘anterior intratext’ for Giacomo Joyce’s relationship to Ulysses (p. 93); andSangam MacDuff’s ‘Joyce’s Revelation: “The Apocalypse of Saint John” atCornell’ examines one of the earliest manuscripts attributed to Joyce in order toinfer Joyce’s interest in Revelation, which MacDuff then tracks in the genesis ofcertain passages in Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. The rest of the vol-ume comprises further recent efforts in genetic criticism by more familiar names.Tim Conley’s ‘Revision Revisited’ offers ‘some cautionary notes’ on how to ana-lyse and discuss revision (p. 14); Robbert-Jan Henkes’s ‘The at Wickerworks andthe Case of Mute Authorisation’ studies the determination of errors and intentfrom an editorial perspective; and Dirk Van Hulle focuses on the ‘Guiltless’copybook and the phrase ‘genesic field’ in the Wake chapter I.5 in his article‘Editing the Wake’s Genesis: Digital Genetic Criticism’. In the detailed article‘Correcting Joyce: Trial and Error in the Composition of Ulysses’, Sam Slotetakes a different approach from Henkes to the incorporation of errors; LucaCrispi continues his work on the genesis of Ulysses in ‘The Genesis of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



“Penelope” in Manuscript’; and Fritz Senn, though not a genetic critic himself,looks at the work of genetic scholars in ‘Opsigenetic Touches in Ulysses: IthacanCorrelatives’. Sartor’s introduction lucidly argues for the ongoing relevance ofgenetic criticism’s innovations, highlighting the combined foci of these essays onrevision, cross-reference, and re-reflection.Work on Joyce formed part of several broader studies in 2018. Joycean defini-

tions of epiphany are briefly brought into a discussion of ‘moments of being’ (p.71) in the fourth chapter, ‘Epiphanies, Ontologies and Epistemologies’, of WilmaFraser’s Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning: An AutoethnographicInquiry, a study of the marginalization of wisdom in education practice and pol-icy (pp. 67–88). Two chapters of Gerard L. Bruns’s Interruptions: TheFragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature focus on Joyce: ‘On the Words ofthe Wake (and What To Do with Them)’ (pp. 117–32) and ‘What’s in a Mirror?James Joyce’s Phenomenology of Misperception’ (pp. 133–50). Fragments andfragmentation, first of the individual word in Finnegans Wake and then of mir-rors, encounters, and interruptions in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, are con-sidered here by Bruns alongside chapters on Maurice Blanchot and SamuelBeckett, J.H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, Charles Bernstein, and Gertrude Stein.Stephen G. Butler’s Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882–1964 looksat the reception of a group of male Irish writers who have become cultural com-modities in the USA. His chapter on Joyce, ‘Through a Bowl of Bitter Tears,Darkly: James Joyce and the Amerirish, 1917–1962’, highlights how Joyce’sIrishness and Catholic upbringing were emphasized in early reviews of his worksin American journals (pp. 121–46). In Modern Political Aesthetics fromRomantic to Modernist Literature: Choreographies of Social Performance, TudorBalinisteanu reads Wordsworth, Conrad, Yeats, and Joyce with Bruno Latour’sWe Have Never Been Modern, using concepts of dance, practical politics, and thenonhuman. The seventh chapter, ‘Joyce’s Choreographies of Gesture’ (pp. 140–57), forms part of Balinsteanu’s effort to ‘explore the relations between aestheticcreation and capitalist forces of materialist production’, and ‘the political valueof performative aspects of literary texts’ (p. 17). Richard Kopley also dedicates achapter to Joyce in The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe tothe Present. Alongside discussion of authors including Poe, NathanialHawthorne, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and ZadieSmith (among several others), the chapter ‘Table as Text in James Joyce’s “TheDead”’ (pp. 69–74) contributes to Kopley’s interpretation of the design and effectof the framed centre in works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-firstcenturies.A small flurry of work on Joyce and Beckett was published in 2018. In

Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism Alan WarrenFriedman revisits and reclaims the importance of Joyce and surrealism as con-texts for Beckett’s work. These two near-contemporaneous influences, asFriedman claims, have been often discounted as having little positive or enduringeffect on Beckett. After a chapter outlining the origins and evolution of surreal-ism, Friedman dedicates a chapter to Beckett and Joyce: through a detailed com-parative reading of their works and an overview of existing scholarship on theirliterary relationship, Friedman argues that ‘Beckett’s Joycean connections, whilethey did not determine or control his uniquely eccentric path, remained extensive,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



life-long, and profound’ (p. 57). In the following chapters and amid a wealth oflinks and relationships, Friedman identifies and discusses a potential surrealistroot for a prevailing concept in Beckett’s works: ‘of carrying on despite the ab-sence of resources for doing so’ (p. 115). Chapters on ‘Beckett and Visual Art’,‘Dreams, Birth, and Beyond’, and ‘Voice, Narrative, and Identity’ are followedby detailed appendices offering a chronology of Beckett and surrealism and anaccount of Beckett’s influence on visual artists. Elsewhere, Olga Beloborodova,Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst’s edited volume Beckett and Modernismincludes three essays on Beckett and Joyce. Sam Slote compares equivocatingaffirmations in ‘Penelope’ and Beckett’s How It Is in ‘Beckett and Joyce: TwoNattering Nabobs of Negativity’ (pp. 69–80), a stylishly complex essay; JoseFrancisco Fernandez’s ‘Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair toMiddling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses’ (pp. 81–94) placesWyndham Lewis between Joyce and Beckett; and Andy Wimbush analyses a re-jection of Joyce in ‘Omniscience and Omnipotence: Molloy and the End of“Joyceology”’ (pp. 95–109).

Essays on Joyce appear in several further collections. Barbara M. Hoffmann’sessay ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Madman’ (in Keating, ed., Patrick McCabe’sIreland: ‘The Butcher Boy’, ‘Breakfast on Pluto’, and ‘Winterwood’, pp. 45–64)compares Stephen Dedalus and Francie Brady, protagonist of McCabe’s TheButcher Boy [1992]. Hoffmann proposes that ‘competing hegemonic forces inIreland’ form an artist of Stephen and a killer of Francie (p. 46). An interviewwith McCabe by Keating, ‘“Sinking the Pail into the Self-Conscious,” BubbleGum Ballads and Other Conversational Circles: Patrick McCabe, London 2015’(pp. 164–81) includes brief discussion of Joyce’s influence on his work. GeertLernout’s essay ‘Nabokov on Joyce and Ulysses’ (in Dhooge and Pieters, eds.,Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader andTeacher, pp. 101–20) discusses the lectures Nabokov delivered on Joyce in the1950s. Irrationally idealizing the ‘more innocent time’ in which Nabokov and hisstudents worked, before the first publications of Joyce’s letters and Ellmann’sbiography (p. 105), Lernout’s tangible envy contributes to his depressing view ofliterary criticism: ‘When today someone claims to have found something new inUlysses, it usually means that they have failed to consult all of the necessary sec-ondary literature’ (p. 108). Another chapter by Lernout, on ‘James Joyce and theStudy of the Bible’ (in Anderson and Kearney, eds., Ireland and the Receptionof the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives, pp. 365–84), discusses ‘free-thought’ and draws from Lernout’s extensive previous work on Joyce and theBible.

Teresa Casal’s chapter, ‘A Century Apart: Intimacy, Love and Desire fromJames Joyce to Emma Donaghue’ (in Villeneuva Romero, Amador-Moreno, andSanchez Garcıa, eds., Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context, pp. 235–63),offers a comparative reading of ‘The Dead’ alongside O’Donaghue’s short story‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her collection Touchy Subjects [2011]. LouisArmand’s ‘The Obscene Object of Post/Humanism’ (in Matviyenko and Roof,eds., Lacan and the Posthuman, pp. 15–26) focuses on Lacan’s 1954 series oncybernetics and 1976 series on Joyce’s work. In Hip Sublime: Beat Writers andthe Classical Tradition, edited by Sheila Murnaghan and Ralph M. Rosen, Joycefigures as one of the ‘assorted intermediaries’ between the Beats and the Classics


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



(p. 9). In his article ‘“Thalatta! Thalatta!”: Xenophon, Joyce, and Kerouac’ (pp.38–54), Christopher Gair discusses the exclamation of ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ (‘TheSea! The Sea!’) taken from Xenophon’s Anabasis and quoted both in Kerouac’sDoctor Sax and, of course, by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, tracing a ‘circuitousroad to Xenophon’ via Joyce (p. 41). Arguing that this faint link back ‘is signifi-cant as a kind of classical unconscious’ (p. 42), Gair details several textual linksfrom across Kerouac’s oeuvre to suggest Joyce as ‘a mediating presence’ inKerouac’s development of the sea as an essential trope (p. 45).Sylvain Belluc’s essay ‘“Language Never Errs”: A Saussurean Study of Some

Mistakes in James Joyce’s Works’ (in Poree and Alfandary, eds., Literature andError: A Literary Take on Mistakes and Errors, pp. 195–211) ties mistakes inJoyce to work in language studies contemporary to the writing of Ulysses. Bellucfurthermore argues that Joyce’s ‘celebration of mistakes’ goes beyond such re-search and writing to demonstrate that ‘language, in a very real sense, is indeednever wrong’ (p. 209). In his chapter ‘Evental Time and the Untime inFinnegans Wake’ (in Flynn and O’Brien, eds., Representations of Loss in IrishLiterature, pp. 53–73), Shahriyar Mansouri ‘explores the emergence, loss and atonce re-creation of time as a self-referential and authoritative agent’, referring toAlain Badiou’s concept of ‘Evental Time’ (p. 54). And three strong essays inIrish Urban Fictions rethink Joyce’s Dublin, as do the volume’s editors MariaBeville and Deirdre Flynn in their introduction (pp. 1–20). Each of the threeparts of Irish Urban Fictions opens with an essay on Joyce, establishing thefocus of each section, from ‘the city as experience, to the city as imaginary, andfinally to city as amorphous and plural’, and thus treating Joyce’s Dublin as ‘thatmost iconic version of Irish urban identity’ (p. 7). Eva Roa White’s chapter,‘Whose Dublin Is It Anyway? Joyce, Doyle, and the City’ (pp. 23–44), looks atDubliners alongside Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees and Bullfighting, consideringthe limitations of Joyce’s legacy in Dublin and the work of contemporary writersto show the city’s ‘present multicultural identity and offer an alternative to view-ing Ireland solely through the Joycean lens’ (p. 24). Quyen Nguyen’s ‘“NeitherThis Nor That”: The Decentred Textual City in Ulysses’ (pp. 109–27) reads the‘neglected underlying cityscape’ of Ulysses, considering its multiple Dublins asopposed to the ‘real’ Dublin and focusing on Bloom as ‘a practical Dublin user’in ‘Lestrygonians’ (p. 109). Finally, in his chapter ‘The Haunted Dublin ofUlysses: Two Modes of Time in the Second City of the Empire’ (pp. 185–201),Nikhil Gupta argues that ‘Wandering Rocks’ ‘opens up a larger picture of a com-munity in motion; the separate members of that group may not recognise thelarger collective experience in which they participate, but the narrative techniqueof the episode performs that imaginative work for them’ (p. 188).Two collections of essays by pre-eminent Joyce critics were published in

2018, each including several pieces on Joyce. Of four Joycean essays in HansWalter Gabler’s Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays, two arenew: ‘James Joyce Intrepreneur’ (pp. 65–79) and ‘Structures of Memory andOrientation: Steering a Course through Wandering Rocks’ (pp. 81–110). The firstconsiders Joyce’s articulations of his Irishness in European cultures and politics,while the second argues that, in its construction, ‘Wandering Rocks’ is mappedon Jason and the Argonauts’ journey through the symplegades. David Pierce’scollection The Joyce Country: Literary Scholarship and Irish Culture,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



meanwhile, is a curious hybrid: the first half consists of six essays on Joyce andother Irish writers, while the second comprises over twenty reviews of Joyceancriticism. This collection of Pierce’s work does not exactly cohere as having anidentifiable or unifying approach, but nor does it need to: it is a useful record ofresponses to Joyce, an eminently usable and thus valuable work on receptionfrom the 1980s onward. The reviews of Joyce criticism are grouped into six sec-tions, on European cities, Yeats and Ireland, modernism, Ulysses, edited collec-tions, and studies of correspondence and autobiography.

Three issues of the James Joyce Quarterly were published in 2018. In ‘ConanDoyle, James Joyce, and the Completion of Ulysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 203–34), Thomas Jackson Rice tracks Joyce’s work on ‘Penelope’ in autumn 1921 asit relates to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s history The Great Boer War and Joyce’sdevelopment of Lieutenant Stanley Gardner. Brandon Walsh’s article, ‘TheJoycean Record: Listening Patterns and Sound Coteries’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018]235–50) discusses record-collecting and group consumption of audio togetherwith the text and recordings of Ulysses, to identify the titular ‘sound coteries’ oflistening and recording. In her article ‘Music, Intermediality, and Shock inUlysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 251–68), Judith Paltin considers intermedial com-positional practice in Ulysses not in terms of structure or attempts to map musicalstructure in the novel, but rather in terms of affect. In ‘Irish-Israelism:Reconsidering the Politics of Race and Belonging in “Cyclops”’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 269–85), Bryan Yazell proposes to challenge connections between theCitizen’s Irish nationalism and the discourse of Jewish nationalism in the earlytwentieth century. John Pedro Schwartz examines the Dublin Museum andBloom’s museum-going in his article, ‘The Politics and Poetics of the Museumin Ulysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 287–306), addressing Victorian notions of edu-cation and modernist divisions between mass culture and high art, while CrispianNeill’s article on olfaction and the affective, ‘The Afflatus of Flatus: James Joyceand the Writing of Odor’, closes an issue of robust work on Ulysses (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 307–26).

Patrick Morris’s short article, ‘The Curse of a Title: bloominauschwitz (or,What’s Leopold Bloom Got To Do With It?)’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 7–12) drawsthe attention of Joyceans to the provocatively titled drama by Richard Fredmanperformed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe during 2018 by the theatre companyof which Morris is artistic co-director. In ‘Hunter Gatherers: On the Trail of theDubliners “Ulysses” and Its Mysterious Hero’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 13–31), MarcA. Mamigonian sifts through the information we have on Joyce’s intention towrite a short story titled ‘Ulysses’ featuring a character named ‘Mr Hunter’, inan attempt to establish what is and is not reliable fact. In yet more work onBeckett and Joyce, Ray Leonard positions Charles Stewart Parnell as Godot inhis article ‘A Committee Room. A Table. Evening: Using Beckett’s Waiting forGodot to Read Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018]33–44), and, in ‘“Noticeably Longsighted from Green Youth”: Ocular Proof ofJames Joyce’s True Refractive Error’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 45–65), Jan van Velzeadds to work on Joyce and the visual in a rereading the pandybat episode ofPortrait in the light of new information regarding Joyce’s vision: that he was notmyopic, but hyperopic. Katie Logan examines an under-explored intertext in‘The Thousand and One Nights of Ulysses: Joyce’s Empathetic Intertextuality’


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



(JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 67–85), proposing a relationship in Ulysses between the colo-nial history of Britain and Ireland and the imperial history of Persian and Arabiccultures. In ‘Mourning Becomes Dedalus: Ethics, Prosopopoeia, and ImpossibleMourning in Ulysses’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 87–103), Christopher DeVault discussesStephen’s mourning of his mother with Derrida’s The Work of Mourning. In ‘The“Cornish Tokens” of Finnegans Wake: A Journey through the CelticArchipelago’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 105–18), Stephanie Boland reminds Joyceans ofCornwall’s position as a Celtic nation. Focusing on the Tristan and Iseult mythin the Wake, the importance of the Cornish region in that myth, and genetic evi-dence of the myth as inspiration for Joyce, Boland reveals multiple references toCornwall (particularly in chapter II.4) and proposes that Joyce’s use of suchreferences complicates the presentation of Celtic identity in the Wake. JohnScholar engages with Heidegger and Barthes in his reading of ‘Ithaca’ as materi-alist, in his article ‘Joyce, Heidegger, and the Material World of Ulysses:“Ithaca” as Inventory’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 119–47).In her article ‘Forgotten Remembrances: The 6 January “Women’s Christmas”

(Nollaig na mBan) and the 6 January 1839 “Night of the Big Wind” (Oıche naGaoithe Moire) in “The Dead”’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 241–74), Mary Burke con-siders the feast of ‘The Dead’ in terms of two associations for its date: ‘Women’sChristmas’, a day on which women were excused from daily chores to eat to-gether, and ‘Night of the Big Wind’, the meteorological event of 1839 seen bysome as heralding the Great Famine. Michelle Rada’s close readings of the ‘nar-rative pull’ of ‘feminized sartorial detail’ in her article ‘Flirting with Function:Femininity and the Sartorial Detail from Freud to Joyce’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018]275–302) effectively and stylishly analyses how, ‘With the detail of a sparklingsplinter or frayed stitch, particular formal arrays and disarrays emerge, redirectingthe text’s field of vision to its very own contradictory processes and dysfunction-al meaning-making technologies’ (pp. 275–6). Where Rada looks to TheodorAdorno, Emily Apter, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Loos, Naomi Schor, and GeorgSimmel, Frankie Thomas turns to Lacan in ‘Unspeakable “Circe”: SexualPerversion and the Lacanian Detour in Ulysses’, discussing the critical (lack of)reception of the Bella/Bello scene (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 303–13). Sandra Troppfinds heresy in Joyce’s early essay, ‘The Study of Languages’, and Stephen’sessay for Mr Tate in Portrait, detailed in her article ‘Mathematics and Heresy inA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 315–34), while in‘Ulysses’s Martha Clifford: The Foreigner Hypothesis’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 335–52), Andrew G. Christensen bases his theory ‘that Martha is a foreigner inDublin whose native language is not English’ on the ‘errors’ in her letter (p.335). Paul Magee argues against common claims that Joyce’s last text must beread aloud: in ‘How Do We Read Finnegans Wake in Silence?’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 353–72) he ‘turns to the science of silent reading to show that theWake’s variously alliterative, metrical, and homophonic properties are of the sortsthat have been shown to elicit subvocalization in silent reading’ (p. 353). Thisissue of the JJQ ends with Olga Fernandez Vicente’s interview with XabierOlarra, the translator of Ulysses into the Basque language (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018]373–82).The 2017 issue of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (unavailable for review last

year) opens with Frank McGuinness’s article, ‘Parnell and James Joyce’s


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Dubliners: Strategies of Failure’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 1–8), which focuses particularlyon ‘A Painful Case’, rather than ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, in terms ofa male ‘timidity’ that ‘has cursed the Irish heterosexual since the fall of CharlesStewart Parnell through his liaison with Mrs Katherine O’Shea’ (p. 2). FrankCallanan also examines Joyce and Parnell in his article, ‘The Origins of Joyce’sParnellite Nationalism’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 86–102), which looks at the Christmasdinner scene in Portrait. Translator Akram Pedramnia discusses the difficultiesof translating Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Isthe Night in her article, ‘“Pleasure or Pain, Is It?”: Translating Ulysses intoPersian’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 9–21). These include the difficulties of censorship with-in Iran. In ‘“Who Is My Neighbour?”: Leopold Bloom and the Parable of theGood Samaritan’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 22–43), Richard Rankin Russell writes ofUlysses as a text that can generate care from its readers. Anne Marie D’Arcy’s‘“haggiography in duotrigesumy”: Saints, Sages, and the Thirty-FirstInternational Eucharistic Congress, 21–6 June 1932’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 44–64) pla-ces the iconography of the Wake in the context of the International EucharisticCongress in Dublin, 1932, and its final public mass in the Phoenix Park. In herarticle ‘James Joyce, Minimalist’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 65–85), Maria-Daniella Dickrecasts Joyce as a minimalist writer. Analysing Joyce’s later texts and Ulysseancriticism by Declan Kiberd and Leo Bersani, Dick challenges readings of Joyceand Beckett as maximalist and minimalist respectively, seeking to instead place‘their projects on a continuum rather than situating them as epochal exemplar’(p. 82). In his entertaining article, ‘“And that’s another reason that I left OldSkibbereen”, or The Eye of the Eagles, the Thrill of the Fight’ (DJJJ 10[2017]103–12), Sam Slote delves deep into the myth of the local newspaper theSkibbereen Eagle and its claim to have its eye on the tsar of Russia, referencedin ‘Aeolus’. Helen Saunders also follows up a detail here from ‘Nausicaa’: theDublin poet and schoolteacher William Wilkins. Her short article, ‘WilliamWilkins and Ulysses: A Family Story’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 113–18), emphasizes theimportance of archival research in work on Joyce. A note by Luca Crispi on‘Paul, Lucie, and Alexis Leon’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 119–28) follows and concludesthe essays of the 2018 issue.

The 2018 issue of the Joyce Studies Annual opens with Hans Walter Gabler’smusings on the 1984 Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, looking back atthe processes and difficult response to his work, and forward to the forthcomingdigital edition. Though his article, ‘Seeing James Joyce’s Ulysses into the DigitalAge: Forty Years of Steering an Edition through Turbulences of Scholarship andReception’ (JoyceSA [2017] 3–36), is not where one might find an unbiased ac-count of the ‘Joyce wars’, it does of course detail important slices of editorialhistory. Further retrospection colours Robert J. Seidman’s article, ‘A LifelongOdyssey, Ulysses and Me: The Gifford and Seidman Annotation’ (JoyceSA[2017] 37–50), which follows. Julieann Veronica Ulin provides a detailed andaffecting reading of stamp collection in ‘Philatelic Ulysses’ (JoyceSA [2017] 51–85); the novel is also discussed in Jeffrey Simons’s ‘Leopold Bloom on Death’(JoyceSA [2017] 86–107) and Casey Lawrence’s ‘“The Link between Nationsand Generations”: Cissy Caffrey as Racialized and Sexualized Other in JamesJoyce’s Ulysses’ (JoyceSA [2017] 108–21). Lawrence’s careful discussion ofCissy as a figure who resists categorization and straddles boundaries reveals ‘the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



disruptive potential she gains by being the racial and sexual Other’ (p. 108).Three articles on Finnegans Wake take a comparative approach. After GabrielRenggli’s consideration of ethical usefulness in ‘Building Metonymic Meaningwith Joyce, Deleuze, and Guattari’ (JoyceSA [2017] 122–46), MichelleMcSwiggan Kelly reads the Wake in Paterson. Her article, ‘“One Man Like aCity”’: Masculinity and History in Finnegans Wake and William CarlosWilliams’s Paterson’ (JoyceSA [2017] 147–60), finds different approaches to his-tory in each text. Katie Mishler’s examination of Sheridan Le Fanu as precursorto Joyce in ‘“A phantom city, phaked of philim pholk”: Spectral Topographiesand Re-awakenings in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Sheridan Le Fanu’sThe House by the Churchyard’ (JoyceSA [2017] 161–94) unpicks the presence ofThe House by the Churchyard in the Wake, reading, with Derrida, ‘a haunted nar-rative’ (p. 162). Revealing multiple connections between the Wake’s geographyand Le Fanu’s Churchyard, Mishler refutes critical readings which have down-played the importance of Le Fanu’s novel in Joyce’s text. Through a complex ar-gument in ‘Spies in Joyce’s “The Sisters”: Allegorical Histories, the IrishRebellion, and The Count of Monte Cristo’ (JoyceSA [2017] 195–233), BonnieRoos identifies a ‘critique of Ireland’s misleading historiography’ in ‘TheSisters’, and furthermore suggests that ‘Joyce scaffolds Dubliners with the criticalimperative for his readers to learn their history’ (p. 196). The issue closes with ashort note also on Dubliners, Richard R. Gerber’s ‘The Horses of “Araby”’(JoyceSA [2017] 245–9). It furthermore includes Peter O’Brien’s illustrations ofFinnegans Wake and his own short commentary ‘Drawing on Finnegans Wake:“the one the pictor of the other”’ (JoyceSA [2017] 237–42).The 2018 issue of Genetic Joyce Studies opens with Dirk Van Hulle’s editorial

(GJS 18[2018] 1–3), looking forward to the twenty-sixth International JamesJoyce Symposium held in Antwerp in June 2018. The symposium theme of ‘TheArt of James Joyce’ encouraged a focus on genetic approaches to Joyce, and onthe work of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp—which publishes Genetic Joyce Studies. This issue comprises six articles. RonanCrowley’s ‘Earmarking “Oxen of the Sun”: On the Dates of the CopybookDrafts’ (GJS 18[2018] 20pp.) argues for a shorter timeframe than previouslyunderstood for Joyce’s drafting of ‘Oxen’. His article is followed by two fromViviana Mirela Braslasu and Robbert-Jan Henkes: ‘Irish Literary and MusicalStudies in Notebooks VI.B.2 and VI.B.11’ (GJS 18[2018] 47 pp.) and ‘Order/Disorder in Finnegans Wake Notebooks VI.B.2 Nativities and VI.B.11Assistance’ (GJS 18[2018] 15 pp.). Braslasu contributes two further articles, withIan MacArthur, on Notebook VI.B.45: ‘Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington inVI.B.45’ (GJS 18[2018] 7 pp.) and ‘The Vikings in Notebook VI.B.45’ (GJS18[2018] 11 pp.). MacArthur and Geert Lernout’s article on ‘Joyce’s use of“Digger Dialects”’ (GJS 18[2018] 18 pp.) in the late stages of composition ofFinnegans Wake’ closes the 2018 issue, with an analysis of Joyce’s use ofAustralian soldier slang words.Beyond these Joyce-specific journals, several further articles discussed Joyce’s

texts. In her article, ‘“The Hand That Rules . . . ”: Palmistry and Reading theHand in the “Circe” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 295–306), Julia Yates discusses the pseudo-scientific practice of cheiromancy, orpalmistry, as it relates to gendered power in ‘Circe’. Matthew Schultz’s article,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



‘Molly Bloom’s Nostalgic Reverie: A Phenomenology of Modernist Longing’(ISR 26:iv[2018] 427–87), on Homer’s Penelope, modernist nostalgia and (post)-colonialism, was one of three to appear in the Irish Studies Review, along withTony Murray’s ‘Joyce, Dubliners and Diaspora’ (ISR 26:i[2018] 98–110).Murray’s contribution focuses on ‘Eveline’ and ‘A Little Cloud’ and characterswho choose to stay in Ireland rather than leave. Ellen McWilliams’s article,‘Maeve Brennan and James Joyce’ (ISR 26:i[2018] 111–23), discusses Brennan’sessays in the New Yorker and her negotiation of the influence of Joyce. In‘James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual Liberators of Language’ (GR93:i[2018] 39–47), Maria Kager analyses the work of Joyce and Mauthner interms of the multilingual environments in which both authors were raised. Twoarticles on Joyce appeared in Essays in Criticism: John Gordon’s ‘LeopoldBloom Behaving Badly’ (EiC 68:iv[2018] 428–40) and Hunter Dukes’s ‘Heaney,Joyce: Namings and Nation’ (EiC 68:ii[2018] 234–58). A further pair of articleswas published by the Journal of Modern Literature, providing illuminating com-parative readings of Joyce and, respectively, Percy Bysshe Shelley and JorgeLuis Borges: Tess McNulty’s ‘Joyce Adapting Shelley: The Social Function ofLyric Form’ (JML 41:ii[2018] 23–41), and Gabriel Renggli’s ‘Specters ofTotality: Reading and Uncertainty in Joyce’s Ulysses and Borges’s Fictions’(JML 41:ii[2018] 42–59). Elsewhere, Teresa Prudente’s article, ‘Livid Time:Time, Tenses, and Temporal Deixis in Ulysses’ (JNT 48:i[2018] 1–28), analysesthe ‘potential alternatives’ or ‘disnarrated’ in Ulysses, and how that relates to theWake (p. 1). Concluding 2018’s work on Joyce, Michael Gleason and Anne C.Macmaster consider ‘Nausicaa’ and Portrait in ‘From Bird Girls to Bat Souls:Joycean Transformations of a Homeric Trope’ (Mosaic 51:ii[2018] 189–204).

(d) D.H. Lawrence

Not only is D.H. Lawrence in Context a highlight of 2018 D.H. Lawrence re-search, but it is one of those rare books that’s really essential for Lawrentians.Most of the biggest names in contemporary Lawrence scholarship contributed toAndrew Harrison’s edited collection, which was published by CambridgeUniversity Press. The book is something like a broadly conceived CambridgeCompanion, with much shorter chapters of around ten pages. In fact, Harrisonpacks thirty-three chapters into roughly 350 pages. The inspiration for D.H.Lawrence in Context has its roots in another large Cambridge University Pressproject: the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s work, which began in 1979 withthe first volume of Lawrence’s letters, which was edited by James T. Boulton,and culminated more than forty books later in 2018 with volume 3 ofLawrence’s Poems, which was edited by Christopher Pollnitz. ‘The CambridgeEdition’, Harrison writes, ‘has greatly extended and added detail to our under-standing of Lawrence’s life, thought, and writing practices; D.H. Lawrence inContext draws closely on it to present a new, clearer, and nuanced image of theauthor’ (pp. xv–xvi). As with the Companions, Harrison’s volume is suitable forboth novices and sages. It offers a good starting point to familiarize oneself withLawrence but also to expand understanding of the great range of scholarship andtheoretical approaches to the author.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



In ‘Travel Writing and Writing about Place’, Neil Roberts briefly examines themajority of Lawrence’s travel writings, including his nonfictional travel booksand his novels and short stories. Roberts states that Lawrence first turned totravel writing for a very practical reason: to provide much-needed income (p.142). While ‘writing the final draft of Sons and Lovers’, Lawrence composed hisfirst travel book, Twilight in Italy [1916], based upon his experiences living onLake Garda in northern Italy (p. 142). Roberts notes that Twilight in Italy wasthe only travel book Lawrence penned that was not planned before his journey.Referring to Sea and Sardinia, ‘The observation of (often disadvantaged) foreign-ers, which is one of the most important characteristics of travel writing, constant-ly runs the risk of simply replaying the voyeuristic and objectifying “gaze”.Lawrence counters this by being acutely aware of how he appears to the other’(p. 145). At the height of his travels, Roberts writes, Lawrence was eventuallydriven to leave both England and Europe because, in his view, people were ‘suc-cumbing to mechanistic materialism’ (p. 141).In ‘Religion’, Luke Ferretter details Lawrence’s upbringing in the

Congregational Church and his evolving thoughts on Christianity throughout hiscareer. At college, Lawrence expressed religious scepticism in correspondencewith his pastor back in Eastwood, Robert Reid (p. 184). Lawrence’s ‘objectionsto Christianity’, Ferretter writes, ‘were more a matter of his emotional life than aresult of his reading in modern science’ (p. 184). In 1913, the same year Sonsand Lovers was published, Lawrence articulated a ‘belief in the blood, theflesh, as being wiser than the intellect’ (p. 184). Ferretter explains Lawrence’sview ‘that it is in physically being, being alive to oneself, to another, and tothe universe, that a person truly lives, and not in any kind of socially accept-able relationship which can be articulated in ordinary words and thoughts’(p. 184). Ferretter traces representations of religion in some of his major nov-els, including The Rainbow, The Escaped Cock, Kangaroo, and The PlumedSerpent. Ferretter also discusses several of Lawrence’s essays. After referringto The Last Poems Notebook, Ferretter concludes that ‘Lawrence had in realitybeen a religious writer from the beginning to the end of his work. He believesthat the universe is living, and that in its living mystery lives and absolutelyunknown God’ (p. 191).Despite Lawrence’s resistance to being labelled, Holly Laird’s ‘Modernisms’

argues that ‘Lawrence must count retrospectively among modernism’s most emi-nent makers’ (p. 91). Laird provides a useful list of major modernist groups andLawrence’s relationship to them. ‘Modernism is itself a network of contexts,comprised of aesthetic and philosophic precursors, little magazines and their edi-tors, the cosmopolitan city, “movement” alliances, world war, the other arts, andcontemporary politics’, Laird says. ‘All of these informed Lawrence’s modern-ism’ (p. 91). Laird traces Lawrence’s development as a writer from his earliestworks resembling their Victorian influences to later developing his own distinct-ive styles over the genres he mastered, including novels, short stories, plays,poetry, and painting. Towards the end of his life, Laird writes, ‘Lawrence becomeengrossed with male power struggles, ceremonial sacrifice, and civilizationalend-games. Yet Lawrence remained an outsider, and unlike those other modern-ists he never joined a church, a faction, or a propaganda unit. Instead he becameincreasingly critical of those options’ (p. 99).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Christopher Pollnitz writes about Lawrence’s ‘Verse Forms’, noting that in‘Verse Free and Unfree’, his introduction to New Poems [1919], Lawrence philo-sophically laid the groundwork for the ideal form, which he had not yet mastered(p. 121). Pollnitz meticulously chronicles Lawrence’s experiments as a poet fromhis early poems in 1909 to his death in 1930. 1909 ‘was a year’, Pollnitz writes,‘in which he also experimented with triolets and a rondeau redouble, intricatestanzaic forms at the opposite end of the formal spectrum to Whitman’s freeverse. In his experiments Lawrence would allow some variant or mistake, as if toauthenticate the poem as more than a technical etude’ (p. 123). By Pansies[1929], Lawrence had developed a new style, which is perfectly illustrated in theuncollected ‘Middle-Class Children’, which was in the Pansies notebook andappears in the third volume of the newly released Cambridge Edition of Poems,which Pollnitz edited. Pollnitz writes that this ‘new style was based on Englishspeech rhythms and idioms, and line-to-line shifts in tone’ (p. 126).

In a chapter that deals with Lawrence’s legacy, David Ellis’s ‘F.R. Leavis’ (pp.285–93) notes that Leavis was ‘the critic who played the most significant role inestablishing Lawrence as the major English prose writer of the early twentiethcentury’ (p. 285). The period of Leavis’s work began the same year Lawrencedied, 1930, and continued to the mid-1970s. In his 1930 essay, while complimen-tary, Leavis describes such books as Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Womenin Love as difficult, but characterizes The Lost Girl as Lawrence’s best novel (p.287). He is also laudatory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in that essay. Yet in his1955 book D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, Leavis classifies Lady Chatterley’s Lover as‘a bad novel’ (p. 291). Ellis writes that ‘One way in which Mellors is able toconvey his dislike of the upper classes is by dropping in and out of dialect.Leavis finds this “hateful”, as he does the role dialect plays in the use of thefour-letter words and the talks Mellors has with Connie about sex’ (p. 291).

Harrison’s collection includes numerous other short essays, including‘Biographies’ by Michael Squires; ‘The Letters’ by Keith Cushman; ‘The Life inthe Writing’ by John Worthen; ‘Book Publishers’ by Joyce Wexler; ‘Journals,Magazines, Newspapers’ by Annalise Grice; ‘Private Publications’ by Harrison;‘Lawrence and His Contemporaries’ by Suzanne Hobson; ‘Literary Realism’ bySusan Reid; ‘The Short Story’ by Dominic Head; ‘Novellas’ by Bethan Jones;‘Theatre’ by James Moran; ‘Philosophy’ by Michael Bell; ‘Paintings’ by JackStewart; ‘Class’ by Ronald Granofsky; ‘Edwardian Feminisms and Suffragism’by Elizabeth Fox; ‘Sex, Sexuality, Sexology’ by Howard Booth; ‘The Great War’by Helen Wussow; ‘Psychoanalysis’ by John Turner; ‘Science and Technology’by Jeff Wallace; ‘Race and Cultural Difference’ by Judith Ruderman; ‘Ecology’by Carrie Rohman; ‘Censorship’ by Nancy Paxton; ‘Lawrence and FemaleAuthors/Memorialists’ by Carol Siegel; ‘Feminism’ by Marianna Torgovnick;‘The Cambridge Edition’ by Paul Eggert; ‘Lawrence and Theory’ by GarryWatson; ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Later Writers’ by Lee Jenkins; and ‘FilmAdaptations’ by Louis Greiff.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lawrentian scholarship in 2018 was theappearance of two books making connections between Lawrence, Einstein, andthe theory of relativity. D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativityis based on Kumiko Hoshi’s dissertation at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University,which she completed in 2009. For much of the 1920s, Hoshi writes, Lawrence


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



engaged directly with Einstein and his theory, including such works as Fantasiaof the Unconscious, Kangaroo, and Pansies. Hoshi, however, points to a 1921letter that Lawrence wrote to S.S. Koteliansky, showing Lawrence to be bothimpressed with and critical of Einstein’s theory, at least on a ‘“metaphysical”level’ (p. 1). Reacting to Lawrence’s musings in Fantasia of the Unconscious,Hoshi writes that ‘Lawrence thinks it natural that men . . . should “live and see”according to a “metaphysic,” which is “unfolded” into “life and art,” althoughthey are “quite unconscious” of this process of their own thinking. It turns outthat the “metaphysic” that “governed” Lawrence’s thinking just before his en-counter with Einstein’s theory was the “metaphysic” of relativity’ (p. 4). In fact,Hoshi says, this pre-Einsteinian conception of relativity is represented throughoutLawrence’s works.Hoshi also states that relativity was a concept many Victorian scientists

grappled with, including Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer (p.6). Their conception of the term, of course, was different from that of Einstein.Defining the term, Hoshi writes, ‘Firstly, “relativity” is primarily based on theidea of a mutual relationship between the observer and the observed object.Secondly, “relativity” is the state of being judged when the observer looks at theobject. Thirdly, both the observer and the object are moving relative to eachother’ (p. 6). Among the works that impacted Lawrence were Darwin’s On theOrigin of Species, Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, and Spencer’s FirstPrinciples. With Darwin and Huxley, Hoshi writes, Lawrence came to see the‘vision of an interconnected natural world’ (p. 7). However, with Spencer,Lawrence was exposed to a concept of ‘relative motion’ in which objects movein relation to each other (p. 7). When those objects are ‘“counter-balanced byopposed motions’”, a state of equilibrium is realized (p. 7). This concept of equi-librium was adapted by Lawrence in terms of an ideal in relationships betweenmen and women, Hoshi writes.D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity is split up into five

chapters. These include ‘Women in Love: Representing Relativity through Lightand Darkness’; ‘The Lost Girl: Representing the Relative Self’; ‘Aaron’s Rod:Representing Relativity through Motion’; ‘The Fox: Representing RelativeSexuality in the Two Versions’; and ‘After the Encounter with Einstein:Kangaroo and Hannah Hoch’s Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife’. Hoshi writesthat ‘Women in Love [1920] is D.H. Lawrence’s first attempt to present his ownconcept of relativity before his encounter with Einstein’s theory’ (p. 21). In thechapter, she discusses the novel in relationship to the ideas of Ernst Haeckel andthe Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. The approach, however, is heavily influ-enced by Rembrandt. Hoshi writes, ‘For Lawrence, the universe came to havesignificance only in relation to humans. In order to present “human relativity” inWomen in Love, it seems that Lawrence employed the chiaroscuro technique ofRembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’ (pp. 25–6). The technique concerns a balancebetween light and dark. ‘As in Rembrandt’s pictures’, Hoshi writes, ‘the over-whelming darkness of the novel functions as a contrastive device to emphasisethe brightness of light’ (p. 26).The other book covering similar ground as Hoshi’s is Rachel Crossland’s

Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of VirginiaWoolf and D.H. Lawrence. This, too, was the result of a dissertation, this one at


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the University of Oxford. The book is split into three parts: the first two chaptersare dedicated to Virginia Woolf, the second two to Lawrence, and two final chap-ters offer a broader discussion of Woolf and Lawrence in relation to other mod-ernist authors and Einstein. Crossland writes, ‘Unlike other studies of modernistliterature in relation to Einstein . . . Modernist Physics seeks to combine an ap-proach which is not limited to a focus on 1919 and the years follow it with onewhich will enable a detailed analysis of the similarities between ideas whichwere appearing in literature and science . . . in the early years of the twentiethcentury’ (pp. 3–4). Too much emphasis, Crossland says, has been put on theyear 1919, when Einstein’s ideas become more universally accepted; 1905, sheargues, is really the date when Einstein’s major thoughts on relativity began toappear.

In the book’s third chapter, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s “Theory of Human Relativity”’,Crossland uses Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious to set the groundworkfor the critique of his writings. For Lawrence, Crossland says, Einstein ‘had setthe universe free’ (p. 73). Yet Lawrence still needed something more. After quot-ing a section of Fantasia of the Unconscious in which Lawrence discusses theneed for ‘a theory of human relativity’, Crossland writes that this idea ‘resonatesthroughout Lawrence’s works, including those that pre-date Fantasia, asLawrence struggles to express and resolve the difficulties of contemporary humanrelationships’ (p. 74). She provides examples from The White Peacock, Sons andLovers, Trespasser, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Like Hoshi, Crosslandhighlights the importance of equilibrium in Women in Love. The relationship be-tween Birkin and Ursula represents that balance, Crossland writes, but Lawrenceprovides another example of a relationship in the text: ‘the destructive, and ultim-ately fatal, relationship between Gerald and Gudrun provides an extreme contrastwith the equilibrium which Birkin and Ursula move towards’ (p. 97).

Crossland’s next chapter is ‘D.H. Lawrence and “Living Relativity”’, whichincludes a discussion of how Einstein’s ideas may have influenced Lawrence. Hewas influenced on relativity, Crossland believes, by William James’s Pragmatismas much as Einstein’s works (p. 109). ‘James’s focus in Pragmatism’, she writes,‘is on the relative nature of human views of actual reality’ (p. 110). There is alsoa long section on Lawrence’s Kangaroo [1923], where, aside from Fantasia,‘Lawrence’s most prolonged, and perhaps most confusing explorations of the na-ture of relatives and absolutes appear’ (p. 102). Crossland also discusses relation-ships in Aaron’s Rod and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Einstein’s theories, sheclaims, ‘suggested to Lawrence the pressing necessity for a theory of human rela-tivity to match them, a theory which would encourage us to develop our own ab-solute individuality, as well as to learn how to be “together and apart at the sametime”, like Lilly and Tanny; together with each other, like Connie and Mellors’(p. 125).

The year also included two issues of journals dedicated to Lawrence.Although it has a publication date of 2017, volume 42 of the D.H. LawrenceReview (a double issue) did not appear in the United States until 2018. AlexWermer-Colan’s ‘The Accursed Share: Primitivism, Misogyny, and DecadentSacrifice in D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and “The Woman Who RodeAway”’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 165–87), has many useful insights, but makes sev-eral comments without attribution or context. For instance, in the introductory


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



paragraph, Wermer-Colan suggests that The Plumed Serpent [1926] ‘may haveensured Lawrence’s posthumous canonization by such esteemed New Critics asF.R. Leavis’ (p. 165), which suggests Leavis approved of the novel. But Leaviswas outright dismissive of it in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist [1956], describing it as‘a bad book’ and ‘a regrettable performance’, which can hardly be considered apush towards canonization. Wermer-Colan also writes, ‘His early affinity for theeugenics movement, evident in his fantasies of mass extermination during WorldWar I, transmutes during the interwar years into a mournful acceptance of the in-evitable vanishing of indigenous peoples’ (p. 168). Elsewhere, Wermer-Colanidentifies The Plumed Serpent as ‘central to Lawrence’s reputation as a racist anda fascist sympathizer’ (p. 168). These broad, sweeping comments distract fromthe otherwise excellent insights offered into ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.Wermer-Colan points out that the main character expects a certain treatment fromthe native populations because, like the tribe, she identifies, as a woman, as partof a repressed group, yet to the tribe she is still white and a member of the op-pressor class (pp. 177–8).Other articles in the issue include Nick Bennett’s ‘Apocalyptic Ambiguities:

D.H. Lawrence, Mythology, and the Meaning of the Great War’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 6–28); David Game’s ‘D.H. Lawrence and Zane Grey: The Idea ofNorth-West Western Australia (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 29–51); Tara Hembrough’s‘Forging a Shared Heroic Identity: Jack Fergusson’s and Mabel Pervin’s Quest inD.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 52–71);Tom Ribitzky’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: D.H. Lawrence’sTristan Legend for the Twentieth Century’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 72–100); JosephShafer’s ‘The Haunted Literalization of D.H. Lawrence: “The Daimon, Demon,and Ghost”’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 101–23); Deborah Spillman’s ‘Miming MadeModern: D.H. Lawrence, Jane Harrison, and the Novel’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017]124–46); and Theresa Mae Thompson’s ‘The Mystic Text: Living Space in D.H.Lawrence’s Sketches of Etruscan Places’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 147–64).While the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s works was supposedly completed

with the third volume of Poems in 2018, new material and a new edition ofLawrence’s work continues to appear in the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies.This includes ‘Further Letters of D.H. Lawrence’ by John Worthen and AndrewHarrison (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 7–10) and ‘A New Edition of D.H. Lawrence’s“[Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)]”’ by Hiroshi Muto (JDHLS5:i[2018] 11–58). In her introduction to the volume, the journal’s editor, SueReid, calls Muto’s edition ‘a new, more accurate version of Lawrence’s“[Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)]” . . . which should replace theCambridge Edition in Late Essays and Articles as the authoritative text’ (p. 5).In ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Georgic’ (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 105–24), Nanette Norris dis-cusses Lawrence’s relationship with the georgic and the Georgian Renaissance inthe twentieth century. Norris writes that ‘Lawrence wrote in the georgic mode inboth poetry and prose . . . and employed it in order to render an otherwise in-articulate space—the lived experience of the discordance between an imaginedideal and an historically-bound reality’ (p. 105). Other articles include ‘D.H.Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It’s Ridiculous!’ by Judith Ruderman(JDHLS 5:i[2018] 59–82); ‘Shifting the Axis: Regional Modernism inKangaroo—A Foreground to Australian Literary Modernism’ by David Game


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



(JDHLS 5:i[2018] 83–104); ‘The “Moony” Chapter of Women in Love Revisited’by Terry Gifford (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 125–42); ‘Lawrence, Dostoevsky and theLast Temptation by Christ’ by Catherine Brown (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 143–62); ‘TheFlute in Aaron’s Rod’ by Ian Thomson (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 163–78); ‘Lawrence inthe Limonaia [Lemon Garden]’ by Colm Kerrigan (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 179–96);and ‘Literary Cure: D.H. Lawrence in Post-Fascist Italy’ by Fredrik Tydal(JDHLS 5:i[2018] 197–208).

(e) Virginia Woolf

This year saw the publication of a number of innovative works of scholarshipthat promise to advance the field. Cambridge University Press published land-mark new editions of Night and Day [1919], edited by Michael Whitworth, andOrlando: A Biography [1928], edited by Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth. The intro-duction to Orlando meticulously recounts the composition history of the novel,tracking the spoor of Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West not justthrough Orlando but across Woolf’s contemporaneous letters, diary entries, andessays, as well as in Sackville-West’s novels and other writing, before moving todiscuss the ‘fairly substantial’ (p. lii) changes that Woolf made when redraftingOrlando. A separate section of the introduction exhaustively details the novel’spublication history, although it is unclear given Woolf’s working methods wherecomposition history ends and publication history begins: Blyth and Raitt’s obser-vations about corrections and edits that Woolf made to page proofs undercut thisneat binary. Night and Day was the final novel that Woolf published underGerald Duckworth’s imprint and has very few surviving sources. Given the pau-city of source material, Michael Whitworth would have been forgiven for provid-ing a less detailed composition history than Blyth and Raitt do for Orlando.However, Whitworth does an admirable job of reconstructing the chronology ofNight and Day’s composition from sparse documentary evidence, including let-ters of Woolf’s that reference writing, the few extant sources for the novel, andcontemporaneous essays by Woolf which constitute ‘points of contact’ (p. xxxix)for the novel. A separate section on publication history details the process bywhich Duckworth published the novel. A section on ‘Editing Night and Day’laments the ‘thin and intermittent trail of evidence’ (p. lxxx) which the novelleaves in its wake, which ‘make[s] for a simpler collation, but make[s] decisionsabout textual cruxes harder to reach with any certainty’ (p. lxxxi). This sectionlargely details the documents and states of the text which Whitworth used tomake this edition, while a section on ‘Annotating Night and Day’ offers a briefdiscussion of annotation as a ‘kind of historical anthropology’ (p. xci). As wellas constituting major works of scholarship in their own right, these new editionswill serve as the touchstone for much more future scholarship.

A cluster of biographical and historical works offered productive readings ofWoolf’s own life and her presentation of other lives. Barbara Lounsberry’s TheWar Without, the War Within is the final work in a trilogy which carefully docu-ments Woolf’s diary-writing, as well as her reading of other writers’ diaries.Lounsberry’s monograph examines twelve diary books written by Woolf between1929 and her death in 1941. Lounsberry reads her novels and diaries of thisperiod as part of ‘one huge, multiform, battle against the advancing war’ (p. 3)


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



and organizes Woolf’s diaries chronologically, providing narrative accounts andclose readings of her source material, tracing the flight of Woolf’s mind outwardsand her rising alarm at the growth of European fascism and the start of the war.These accounts are imbricated with accounts of the diaries that Woolf read whilewriting her own: we learn, for instance, that while writing her June 1929 toSeptember 1930 diary, Woolf read Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, finding a‘kindred soul’ in her (p. 17), or that, in 1937, Woolf read the diaries of Leo andthe Countess Tolstoy. One cannot fault Lounsberry’s ambition, neither in this vol-ume nor in her project at large, but the structure of this volume makes it an un-gainly read: it feels more like a collection of vignettes or miniatures than thenarrative that the work’s form implies. Readers wishing to delve into it as a ref-erence work, however, might not find this is to its detriment. Lounsberry pro-vides an invaluable and meticulous portrait of Woolf at the end of her life, andan analysis of her final diary entry, ‘L. is doing the rhododendrons..’ (p. 323)proves a haunting and lyrical terminus ad quem for such an ambitious and ex-haustive project.Rosalind Brackenbury’s brief but breezy Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship avoids

the easy answer to the question implied by its subtitle, How Virginia StephenBecame Virginia Woolf (that she took Leonard’s name) in order to explore theyoung Virginia Stephen’s intellectual development in Leslie Stephen’s household.There is not much here that significantly expands on the standard works of biog-raphy by Bell, Lee, and Briggs, but Brackenbury nonetheless provides a stylishand readable distillation of Woolf’s literary prehistory.Claire Battershill’s Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard

and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press offers a valuable attempt to read the HogarthPress’s output of biography and autobiography, drawing extensively on thepress’s archives. The first chapter offers a quantitative (and to a lesser extentqualitative) overview of the life-writing published by the press from its inceptionto its sale in 1946. The following chapters use the press’s publications as casestudies to theorize life-writing more broadly, examining books on Tolstoy, differ-ent marketing strategies for Woolf’s own biographical works, the Hogarth PressBiography series, and ‘autobiografictions’ (p. 148) by Henry Green andChristopher Isherwood.The Hogarth Press was the subject of Virginia Woolf and the World of Books,

edited by Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill the proceedings of a conferencecelebrating the centenary of the Hogarth Press in 2017. ‘Getting a Hold onHaddock: Virginia Woolf’s Inks’, the keynote address delivered by EdwardBishop, attended to the writing technologies with which Woolf would have beenfamiliar as a writer and publisher, and included a demonstration wherein theaudience made their own oak-gall ink. The thirty-seven papers in the collectionare divided up into eleven groups. The section titled ‘Craftsmanship’ attends tothe valences of craft throughout Woolf’s work and life. The section titled ‘TheHogarth Press’ contains four papers which discuss, variously, Hope Mirrlees’sParis: A Poem [1919], figurations of community and group consciousness in TheWaves and Leonard Woolf’s After the Deluge, and the press’s World-Makers andWorld-Shakers series. Papers by Tom Breckin and Anne Reus ask how librariesare coded in Woolf’s writing. In the next section, ‘The Art of the Book’, ClaudiaTobin and Maggie Humm investigate the influence of French Impressionist


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



painters and theorists on Woolf, Roger Fry, and Vanessa Bell. Adam Hammond’sessay in ‘The Art of Narrative’ is one of the high points of the collection. Hereads Woolf’s ‘Ode to Cutbush’ in light of the recent post-critical turn. Woolf’spoem is an example of a ‘complex system’, he suggests, and its poetics are notjust ‘a way of writing but a way of reading and seeing’ the ‘wealth’ of another’slife (p. 147). In the same section, Elisa Kay Sparks tracks cows through ‘AnUnwritten Novel’ to read the story as a burlesque on Aristotelian theories of nar-rative. The next section, ‘Making New Books: Creative Approaches’, containspoems by Jane Goldman, Colin Herd, and Calum Gardner. Two papers in thesection, titled ‘The Book in the World: Woolf’s Global Reception’, traceWoolfian resonances in seemingly unlikely places: Adriana Varga reads her re-ception in Ceausescu’s Romania, while Maria Oliveria discusses Brazil’s Woolf,asking how a trans-Atlantic, but not necessarily Anglo-American, Woolf is fig-ured. Meanwhile, Riley Wilson’s essay traces the roots of the Riot Grrrl move-ment from the aesthetics of modernist women’s writing. A section on ‘Editingand Teaching Woolf’ contains dispatches from the Modernist ArchivesPublishing Project, as well as a roundtable on ‘Editing Woolf’. A section titled‘Intertextuality’ reads Woolf alongside authors including Walt Whitman, OscarWilde, Lady Murasaki, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, while the final section,‘Lives in Writing’, contains an essay on Woolf and the Well of Loneliness trial,and a paper by Julie Vandivere which reads Woolf’s change in human character(on or about December 1910) alongside a sudden rise in anti-abortion rhetoric inBritain. The final essay in the collection returns to reading the inky trails of thepen in Woolf’s works, and the collection comes full circle.

Jane de Gay’s Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture turns to Woolf’s biog-raphy in order to make the case that Woolf’s ‘debates with Christianity form amore powerful undercurrent in her work than had been acknowledged’ and thatWoolf had a ‘detailed knowledge and understanding of the faith’ (p. 2). DeGay’s first two chapters provide historical context, examining both Woolf’sChristian family background and her Christian contemporaries. In readingWoolf’s correspondence with contemporary writers, de Gay makes much ofWoolf ‘refer[ring] to God as an entity’ and ‘capitalis[ing] his name’ (p. 66) inher correspondence: however, one can use a proper noun to refer to a character(say, Mrs Ramsay, or Frodo Baggins) without a concomitant belief in that charac-ter’s existence. De Gay then moves to investigate the figuration of the clergy inher third chapter, before discussing sacred spaces in chapters 4 and 5, focusingon Woolf’s 1906 description of the Hagia Sophia in the former chapter, and thefiguration of the ‘Angel in the House’ in ‘Professions for Women’ (although,curiously, not in A Room of One’s Own) in the latter chapter. Chapter 6 tracesimages of the Madonna throughout Woolf, with particular reference to the open-ing and closing scenes of To the Lighthouse, while the final chapter, ‘HowShould One Read the Bible?’ posits Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and TheWaves as Woolf’s ‘Passion Trilogy’. This is not unproblematic, given the Christanalogue de Gay identifies in Mrs Dalloway, Septimus, is gravely ill, and deGay’s reading of Percival as ‘the story of Christ in a human figure’ (p. 212)seems to be premised on Percival’s early death, ignoring his ambivalent presencein the novel and his critical afterlives. De Gay’s thesis that Woolf had a detailed


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



knowledge of Christianity which shows throughout her work is sound enough,but there is plenty here that stretches to affirm the consequent.Suzana Zink’s Virginia Woolf and the Spaces of Modernity provides an inter-

esting excursion into Woolf’s figuration of space, and especially those spacesbound by walls. It is strongest where it focuses on Woolf’s under-theorized ear-lier work, with chapters on The Voyage Out and Night and Day providing newand theoretically rigorous readings of these novels. The first chapter figures thecuriously English rooms in The Voyage Out’s Santa Marina as a ‘heterotopic’space, a Foucauldian ‘counter-site’ (p. 66). Meanwhile the second chapter tracksthe Hilbery household in Night and Day as a site of ‘ancestor worship’ (p. 91)and memorialization. Zink’s third chapter explores a somewhat neglected contextof Jacob’s Room: the fight for women’s education at Cambridge. Zink’s historicalwork recovering this context will prove valuable to future scholars. ‘TheWoman’s Room: A Room of One’s Own and Its Contemporary Readers’ analysesfigurations of space in the letters sent to Woolf following the publication of her1929 essay. Zink then skips ahead almost a decade to discuss The Years [1937].This chapter is strongest when it discusses the ‘complex subterranean network’of plumbing beneath the seemingly monadic Victorian houses (p. 171) withwhich the novel is populated. The final chapter discusses ‘A Sketch of the Past’alongside Freud’s analogy of the mind in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ toprovide a theoretically sophisticated framework for quite a simple idea, thatWoolf’s memory is a memory of places. Zink’s monograph provides valuableinsights into the valences of the room in Woolf, It is, however, hampered some-what by its form since the way that each chapter covers a single work doesn’tallow for cross-currents to be developed more fully.Routledge reissued five works of classic Woolf criticism in 2018: Dorothy

Brewster’s Virginia Woolf [1962], Thomas Jackson Rice’s Guide to Research[1984], Mary Anne Caws’s Women of Bloomsbury [1990], Daniel Ferrer’sVirginia Woolf and the Madness of Language [1990] and Stella McNichol’sVirginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction [1990]. These are facsimiles of the ori-ginal editions in modern binding, with no new material.Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays is a collection of

essays by noted textual scholar Hans Walter Gabler. It includes three essays onediting Woolf. ‘A Tale of Two Texts’ (pp. 221–56) begins by discussing the dif-ferences between the UK and US editions of To the Lighthouse. Gabler collatesvariants between these two editions and reads them closely in order to theorizehow these seemingly minute but hermeneutically freighted variations complicatereadings of the novel. Gabler asks what an edition of To the Lighthouse thatshows these variants might look like, proposing a number of solutions. The nextessay, ‘Auto-Palimpsests: Virginia Woolf’s Late Drafting of Her Early Life’ (pp.257–86), examines the ‘Sketch of the Past’ drafts, contending that reading thesefragments helps us to understand how Woolf came to conceive of herself as awriting subject, an ‘autobiographical I’ (p. 258). The third and final essay onWoolf in this collection is the weakest: ‘From Memory to Fiction: An Essay inGenetic Criticism’ (pp. 287–300) tracks autobiographical impulses through thedrafts of To the Lighthouse and explores how these impulses came to be imbri-cated in the novel’s form. In tracking a ‘double experience’ (p. 292) within Tothe Lighthouse that plots a course between autobiography and fiction, Gabler


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



falls back on a curious argument which sees Woolf ‘writing from the body’ (p.294). This couches Woolf’s novel and Gabler’s reading of it in a biological es-sentialism which makes for uncomfortable reading.

Rebecca Colesworthy’s Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought ofExchange contains a significant chapter on Woolf which offers a theoretically in-novative and deftly argued thesis to the effect that ‘the question of the gift’ (p.2), following Marcel Maus’s The Gift [1925], is central to the aesthetic project ofa number of modernist women writers. The second chapter of the book, ‘VirginiaWoolf and the Limits of Feminine Hospitality’ (pp. 63–105), argues that Woolf’sinterwar thoughts on epistemology and ethics ‘resonate with Mauss’s call for a“new morality” under the banner of sociology’ (p. 63). Colesworthy argues thatthe novel itself becomes a ‘form of hospitality—one that works to make us moreimaginative, more cooperative, and more hospitable’ (p. 64). The chapter endswith a discussion of Clarissa Dalloway’s differing reaction to Septimus’s deathacross variant texts of Mrs Dalloway which can productively be read alongsidethe work by Hans Walter Gabler discussed above.

Another work which delves into textual analysis is Jonathan Foltz’s The Novelafter Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Foltz’s second chapter,‘Out of Character: Virginia Woolf and the Lightness of the Novel’ (pp. 65–102),contains a sensitive and innovative discussion of the drafts of The Waves as awork which partakes in ‘the mind’s cinematographic dimension, consciousness’s“picture-making power”’ (p. 97). This discussion is premised on Foltz’s earlierinvocation of two Woolf essays on the cinema, ‘Pictures’ [1925] and ‘TheCinema’ [1926], as media theory avant la lettre.

Two chapters in Rachel Crossland’s monograph Modernist Physics are devotedto Woolf, and a further two discuss her in passing. These first two chapters tracethe force-field of Einsteinian physics through Woolf, attending closely to the textof Einstein’s revolutionary 1905 papers rather than just tracing his cultural status.Crossland’s first chapter, ‘The Obligation to Choose: Dualistic Woolf’ (pp. 19–44), tracks the debate before 1926 over the status of light as wave or particlethrough Woolf’s earlier novels, reading these novels’ objects and selves as cap-able of becoming fluid and amorphous. The next chapter, ‘Orlando the Man andOrlando the Woman: Complementary Woolf’ (pp. 45–71), reads Niels Bohr’s1927 principle of complementarity, necessary to conceive of light as at once aparticle and a wave, alongside Orlando [1928]. This collocation gives rise to a‘complementary model of the self’ (p. 48). Crossland carefully reads the play ofmasculine and feminine pronouns in the novel as pointing towards a transcenden-tal ‘Orlando the Man and Orlando the Woman’ who ‘is ultimately more represen-tative of the new quantum world than the radical, but unsustainable “their”’ (p.51). The final two chapters of Modernist Physics discuss Brownian motion andcrowd psychology, invoking Woolf’s crowd scenes, although they do not tarrywith Woolf overly long.

A lengthy chapter in Kathrin Tordasi’s Women by the Waterfront: Modernist(Re)visions of Gender, Self, and Littoral Space offers innovative spins on well-worn tropes of To the Lighthouse criticism. Tordasi’s chapter is most convincingwhen it focuses on the littoral, such as its sensitive reading of ‘those momentswhen the beach seems to infiltrate conventionally stable spaces such as theRamsay’s summer house’ (p. 90), or its focus on a liminal moment where Mrs


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Ramsay is figured as ‘a core of darkness’ and her ‘mind takes on beach-likequalities and turns into a threshold’ (p. 111). Erin K. Johns Speese also focuseson To the Lighthouse in a chapter of her Gender and the Intersubjective Sublimein Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf (pp. 118–45). Speese attempts to readSlavoj �Zi�zek’s ideological ‘sublime object’ in a number of modernist worksincluding Woolf’s novel, but her account of To the Lighthouse in the chapterdevoted to the novel seems more focused on traditional Romanticism-inflectedaccounts of the sublime than its �Zi�zekian revival. The premise of Petar Penda’sAesthetics and Ideology of D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf seemsto imply that the reader is in store for a dose of �Zi�zek, but this is not delivered.Instead, over the course of three poorly edited chapters, Penda reads MrsDalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando in support of the self-evident conclu-sion that the form of these three texts instantiates their ideologies.A chapter in Natasha Periyan’s monograph The Politics of 1930s British

Literature: Education, Class, Gender discusses Woolf’s interaction with theLabour Party and its late 1930s programme for educational reform (pp. 153–84).Periyan reads The Years, Three Guineas, and ‘The Leaning Tower’ to examinethe valences of Britain’s class-fissured education system. This covers similar ter-ritory to Periyan’s article, ‘“Altering the Structure of Society”: An InstitutionalFocus on Virginia Woolf and Working-Class Education in the 1930s’ (TPr32:viii[2018] 1301–23).The eight critical essays in Christine Froula, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin’s

edited collection Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf trace cross-currents be-tween the two authors’ works and lives. The first essay, ‘Powers of Disgust’ byMaud Ellmann, tracks the valences of the disgusting and the disgusted through-out the two authors’ novels and correspondence, cataloguing those moments thatmake one say ‘Yuck’ (p. 14) with a lively glee. Maria DiBattista’s essay,‘Together and Apart’, tracks the literary friendship between the two authors inlight of Woolf’s theorizing of character in ‘Modern Fiction’ and her essay onMansfield. Sydney Janet Caplan focuses on Conrad Aiken’s responses to Woolfand Mansfield. Christine Froula’s essay, ‘Katherine’s Secrets’, focuses less on thecross-currents between the two authors, and more on private correspondence byone author about the other, as well as on stories by Mansfield that were not pub-lished within her lifetime. Karina Jakubowicz’s ‘A Conversation Set to Flowers’turns to the correspondence between the two authors which bloomed intoWoolf’s short story Kew Gardens, problematizing the traditional reading of thestory’s origins. Halyna Chumak’s ‘Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face’asks why these two authors return to discussions of the face at the same time asWoolf deconstructed the notion of easily legible character. Cheryl Hindrich offersattentive close readings of flies in Woolf’s fiction, focusing on her story ‘TheNew Dress’ [1927], but her essay feels rushed because it tries to cover Woolf,Mansfield, and Lawrence. Brian Richardson’s essay, ‘Dangerous Reading’, offersa great many citations for other critics’ discussions of Woolf’s scenes of readingbefore asking why the ‘misogynistic fairy tale’ (p. 123) ‘The Fisherman and HisWife’ makes its way into To the Lighthouse. Ali Smith’s lecture ‘GettingVirginia Woolf’s Goat’ traces the comic, tragic, and tragicomic figurations ofgoats throughout Woolf’s work, riffing on the ‘But’ that opens A Room of One’sOwn: after all, goats ‘butt’. Smith then goes on to discuss Woolf’s affinities with


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Mansfield before concluding that Mansfield ‘didn’t just get Woolf’s goat. Shegot the goat in Woolf, the graceful precipice-balancer’ (p. 153). The collectionalso contains drama, poetry, and a review essay by Claire Drewery.

Elsa Hogberg and Amy Bromley’s edited collection, Sentencing Orlando:Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence wins plaudits forbeing perhaps the most fun new scholarship published on Woolf in 2018.Sentencing Orlando reads the novel ‘on the level of the sentence’ (p. 2): eachessay takes a single sentence from Orlando and uses it as the basis for discus-sion, often with innovative, deftly argued, and lively results. The collection’s em-phasis is on play, pleasure, and jouissance, and the essays in this volume largelylive up to that. A cluster of essays discuss the erotics of Orlando: the first ofthese is Jane Goldman’s ‘“The Queen Had Come”: Orgasm and Arrival’, whichreads the four-word sentence ‘The Queen had come’ as an ‘orgasmic feministSapphic coup’ (p. 15), in light of other coded (and not-so-coded) expressions oflesbian sexual pleasure throughout literary history and in Woolf’s work. In thenext essay, Anna Frøsig examines the moment when Orlando becomes a woman,invoking Merleau-Ponty to discuss ‘“chiasm” or intertwining of flesh and world’(p. 35). Frøsig asks how Orlando’s changed body affects his/her existence as asubject in the world, gesturing towards an ‘erotic structure of perception’ (p. 39)based upon a body which comes to contain its own other. Amy Bromley’s essayuses Roland Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse to show how Orlando (and Orlando’slanguage) interpellates the lover as subject. Bromley contends that Orlando cre-ates amorousness and is itself amorous.

Another cluster of essays contend with Orlando’s writing and rewriting of his-tory. Jane de Gay’s considered and sensitive contribution invokes Helene Cixousand Luce Irigaray in discussing a sentence whose form forces its readers to scanback and forth. De Gay uses this sentence as the basis for a discussion ofWoolf’s creative anachronism, which is given form in Orlando’s poem ‘The OakTree’. Angeliki Spiropoulou’s essay uses the novel’s figuration of ‘Glawr’ andOrlando’s own anonymity to consider the place of obscurity within the mock-biographical framework of Orlando, gesturing towards the novel as a ‘spoofKunstlerroman’ (p. 109). Bryony Randall’s ‘The Day of Orlando’ asks howOrlando interacts with, and complicates, the ‘very notion of history’ (p. 128) byreading Orlando as occurring on the single Present Day with which the novelends and reaching backwards. Randall tracks historical echoes across this day’sprehistory to ask how Orlando complicates the ‘now-ness’ (p. 135) of the presentday.

Essays by Sanja Bahun, Suzanne Bellamy, and Benjamin Hagen all deal withOrlando’s intertexts. Bahun’s discusses her chosen sentence as an intertext withT.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, offering a very close and sen-sitive reading of the two texts, and indexing this reading to Julia Kristeva’s figur-ation of intertextuality. Bahun’s essay asks how Orlando reads and rewrites thenascent modernist canon in a bid to escape the masculine-dominated literarypast. Bellamy reads her chosen sentence as richly intertextual, not with othermodernist works, but with Woolf’s own writing. She suggests that the form ofher chosen sentence invites the reader to act as a co-creator of meaning alongsideWoolf. Benjamin Hagen’s essay describes Woolf’s mode of reading as an ‘autoc-ritical and reparative work of engaging with the living and the dead’ (p. 175).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



He reads Orlando’s baroque syntax alongside that of Sir Thomas Browne andalongside Woolf’s earlier writings on Browne. His essay contends that bothWoolf’s and Browne’s sentences force readers to read slowly and deliberately, todoubt and question. Essays by Alice Stavely, Vasiliki Kolocotroni, and JudithAllen invoke figurations of writing. Stavely writes about the dual births of ‘TheOak Tree’ and Orlando’s child, rescuing metaphors of ‘birthing’ from a discoursethat is often uncomfortably essentialist, reading these literary births as an expres-sion of freedom. Kolocotroni’s essay ‘Orlando, Greece, and the ImpossibleLandscape’ reads Orlando’s jaunt to Mount Athos in the wake of Woolf’s classi-cism, and asks how Orlando’s presence on the male-only holy mountain as botha woman and a pastoral poet allows Woolf to rewrite a landscape she would nothave been able to visit on her own trips to Greece. Allen’s essay, ‘Orlando andthe Politics of (In)Conclusiveness’, largely recapitulates tropes from her mono-graph, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language [2010], invoking discussionthere of ‘wildness’ and asking how the ‘wild’ language of Orlando collides withthe rigid constraints of the Victorian period and its literature.Todd Avery’s essay for Sentencing Orlando can be productively read alongside

Jane de Gay’s Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Avery connects Orlando notto literary modernism but to the works of Pericles Lewis and ‘theologicalModernism’ (p. 169), reading the plethora of religious loci and artefacts inOrlando as ‘trac[ing] a spiritual quest of sorts, while commenting on spirituality’(p. 163). Randi Koppen traces the reverberations of Bishop Berkeley’s idealismthrough Orlando. Steven Putzel’s essay works as a fitting summary for the wholecollection: he reads a chaotic, jostling sentence after Roman Ingarden’s satz-denken, or the ‘flow of thinking the sentence’ (p. 140). Putzel posits that thismode of reading creates a community of ‘active’ readers of Woolf (p. 140). Thecollection finishes with Rachel Bowlby’s ‘Aftersentence’, a creative response tothe essay collection as a whole.The annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture in 2018 was delivered by Stephen

Barkaway: ‘This Sheet Is a Pane of Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman of Lettersmakes the case for taking Woolf seriously as a writer of letters. Her letters are,for Barkaway, the work of an ‘author practising her art unguarded, and for anaudience of only one’ (p. 5).This year also saw the publication of a number of innovative journal articles

dealing with Woolf. A number of essays, most notably by philosopher JacquesRanciere, seek to use Woolf to offer novel answers to the question ‘How shouldone read a book?’. Ranciere’s essay ‘The Politics of Fiction’ (QP 27:ii[2018]269–89) is a wide-ranging article which engages with Auerbach’s reading of Tothe Lighthouse to draw out a ‘poetics of the random moment’ (p. 278) which is‘not only the random atom of a time of coexistence’ but also ‘the experience ofthe precarious balance between the “nothing” and the “something”’ (p. 278).Alexander Howard’s ‘Solid Objects and Modern Tonics’ (Angelaki 23:i[2018]32–47) uses Woolf’s story, ‘Solid Objects’ to posit a ‘fresh and solid object ofcritical study: camp modernism’ (p. 45), which delights in self-consciousness,duality, and theatricality. These tropes may not be new to modernist studies, butHoward’s figuration ‘camp modernism’ is likely to prove valuable. Mark DavidKaufman’s ‘True Lies’ (TCL 64:iii[2018] 317–46) provides a lengthy and un-focused, but genuinely fun excursion into the trope of spying throughout Woolf’s


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



work, and, intriguingly, two spy novels that feature Woolf as a protagonist. Partof Modernism /Modernity’s special cluster on ‘weak theory’, Melanie Micir andAarthi Vadde’s ‘Obliterature: Toward an Amateur Criticism’ (Mo/Mo 25:iii[2018]517–49) argues that Woolf was fascinated by the divide between professionaland amateur, tracing this distinction from ‘The Mark on the Wall’ through ARoom of One’s Own and Three Guineas. They read Woolf alongside KateZambreno’s Heroines [2012] to theorize ‘obliterature’, an ‘amateur riposte to themodernist memory project’ which ‘holds itself open to the possibility that errorand even failure . . . can be intellectually and aesthetically enabling’ (p. 520).

This year’s Woolf Studies Annual was a special issue, with four essays payingtribute to the late Jane Marcus. The first essay, ‘Flirting with the HRC’ (WstA24[2018] 5–10), is a newly uncovered essay by Marcus herself. It takes the formof a love letter of sorts and provides an interesting, if brief, account of her femin-ist archival research in the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of TexasAustin. Matthew Cheney’s ‘The Reader Awakes: Pedagogical Form and UtopianImpulse in The Years’ (WstA 24[2018] 55–74) reads amongst Woolf, Marcus,and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, tracing utopian impulses in the form of TheYears. Cheney contends that The Years does not offer its readers a conventionalutopian imaginary, but rather the form of the novel asks its readers to cultivate a‘critical pedagogy’ teaching its readers to read and become ‘activists of the im-agination’ (p. 61). Margaret Kotler’s essay, ‘After Anger’ (WstA 24[2018] 35–54), traces Marcus’s figurations of anger throughout Three Guineas and askswhat might ‘come after anger’ (p. 35) for feminist critics, turning to contempor-ary affect theory. Paulina Pajak’s ‘“Echo Texts”: Woolf, Krzywicka, and TheWell of Loneliness’ (WstA 24[2018] 11–34) follows Marcus’s work, showing thatA Room of One’s Own responded to the censorship prevalent at the time. Shedoes so by tracing the dual (and rather exciting) histories of Radclyffe Hall’s TheWell of Loneliness first in Poland and then in England, including Woolf’s re-sponse to Hall’s novel and its censorship in A Room of One’s Own.

Woolf Studies Annual prints four more essays. Robin Adair and Ann Martin’s‘A Driving Bloomsbury’ (WstA 24[2018] 75–99) traces the valences of the motorcar throughout Woolf’s work and social circle, providing an interesting and attimes drily funny glimpse into the material culture of Bloomsbury. BrettRutherford’s ‘Virginia Woolf’s Egyptomania’ (WstA 24[2018] 135–64) reads Tothe Lighthouse [1927] as partaking in the Egyptomania of the late 1920s:Rutherford reads Woolf’s novel as engaging directly with Egyptian mythology.He does so through onomastic gymnastics, which can feel a stretch too far. Hisdiscussion of ‘a matrilineal, feminist Egypt’ (p. 157) is tantalizingly brief. DarinGraber’s ‘H.M.S. Orlando’ (WstA 24[2018] 165–84) reads the ways in whichpeople are written about as ships, and vice versa, throughout Woolf’s work to‘posit, then, that Woolf creates the character of Orlando as a multiply-signifyingvessel’ (p. 171). Sian White’s ‘The Dramatic Modern Novel’ (WstA 24[2018]101–34) suggests that Woolf had reconceptualized the Aristotelian unities in MrsDalloway, creating a written space ‘that protects the autonomy of the reader’s im-agination’ (p. 103).

A double edition of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany also contains tributes toJane Marcus, in the form of a section titled ‘Jane Marcus Feminist University’, aconference held to celebrate her life and works. The other half of the VWM is


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



devoted to Woolf and biofiction, with perceptive essays by Bethany Layne andMichael Schrimper among others.A number of scholars published journal articles about style and craft this year.

Adele Cassigneul’s article ‘Betwixt and Between: Virginia Woolf and the Art ofCraftsmanship’ (EBC 55[2018] 35 paras.) reads the deliberately amateurish la-bour of producing books for the Hogarth Press as a ‘primary original poetic ges-ture’ (para. 22), which created a ‘modernist bricolage’ (para. 24). PhilipArrington’s ‘A Most Copious Digression’ (CollL 45:iii[2018] 543–66) readsJacob’s Room alongside Erasmus’s De Copia, attempting to show that Erasmus’smethod of reading and analysing the ‘Protean’ flows of language described in DeCopia is a productive way of figuring language. Arrington’s reading of Woolf ismicroscopically detailed and exhaustive, but some of Erasmus’s tropes do notseem particularly innovative now. Daniel Hartley’s ‘Style in the Novel: Toward aCritical Poetics’ (PoT 39:i[2018] 159–81) offers innovative close readings of Tothe Lighthouse as the exemplum for a ‘narratological and relational’ definition ofstyle (p. 161), reading it alongside Raymond Williams in order to figure ‘style asa linguistic mode of social relation immanent to the more general relations of agiven social formation’ (p. 162). Fang Li and David Kellogg read Woolf’s cri-tique of Middlemarch alongside Eliot’s novel in their article, ‘Mountains inLabor: Eliot’s “Atrocities” and Woolf’s Alternatives’ (L&L 27:iv[2018] 258–70),deploying a complex systemic-functional linguistic analysis whose jargon anddiagrams are somewhat impenetrable to a reader not versed in such linguistics.All this is offered in support of a less than radical conclusion, that Woolf wrotedifferently to her Victorian forebears.A cluster of essays discuss Woolf’s response to war. Anne Fernald’s article,

‘Resisting a Culture of War: Rukeyser and Woolf’ (TPr 32:vii[2018] 1165–79),compares Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry to Three Guineas, on the basisthat both texts critique ‘not only battles, but everything that contributes to warand violence and detracts from working for peace and justice’ (p. 1165). Fernaldpays close attention to the form of these two texts and their respective historicalcontexts: Rukeyser was American, and her arguments instantiate a different his-tory from Woolf’s. Marie Laniel’s ‘“A tear formed, a tear fell”: Virginia Woolf’sElegiac Landscapes’ (EBC 55[2018] 26 paras.) traces the footfalls of three clas-sical elegies in Woolf’s work in the aftermath of the Great War. Laniel offers aninnovative reading that tracks the ‘stray airs’ (para. 8) of the classical elegythrough the ‘Time Passes’ chapter of To the Lighthouse, asking how the postwarelegy reconfigures the traditional scene of pastoral mourning. Barbara Will’s‘Into the Silence: Hemingway, Woolf, and Beckett in the Wake of War’ (SCRev35:ii[2018] 90–102) posits that ‘war serves as a kind of limit case for the ques-tion “Why write?”’ (p. 90), asking what role language has to play in the after-math of war.Several more essays offered readings of Woolf alongside other authors. Justin

Keena’s ‘David Hume in To the Lighthouse’ (P&L 42:ii[2018] 376–93) tracesDavid Hume’s footfall in To the Lighthouse, as a specifically Scottish atheist andsceptic. Keena argues that Hume’s epistemology is instantiated in To theLighthouse’s narrative and stylistic innovations. Nicolas Pierre Boileau andRebecca Welshman’s ‘Walled-in’: The Psychology of the English Garden in


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Rachel Cusk’s The Country Life’ (EBC55[2018] 22 paras.) traces the figurations of rose gardens in Woolf and Cusk,while Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka’s ‘Kate O’Brien and Virginia Woolf:Common Ground’ (IUR 48:i[2018] 127–42) traces connections and intertexts be-tween Kate O’Brien and Virginia Woolf. Katye Stokoe reads Woolf alongsideMonique Wittig in her essay ‘Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text’ (Paragraph41:iii[2018] 301–16). She contends that both of the texts she examines ‘can beperceived as proto-queer’ (p. 302), indexing Orlando to Judith Butler’s analysisof drag to illustrate what the article calls ‘textual drag’ (p. 303). In a sensitiveand theoretically innovative essay, Elizabeth Abel reads Woolf between RolandBarthes and Sigmund Freud in ‘Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning, Mania’ (CritI45:i[2018] 1–28). Abel places Woolf’s evocations of elegiac light alongsideBarthes’s mourning work in an attempt to reimagine the Freudian binary betweenmourning and melancholia, introducing ‘mania’ as a third term. Much of Abel’sessay only touches on Woolf, but it is nonetheless an inventive and movingpiece.

Two essays in Modernist Cultures discuss Woolf’s interactions with and recep-tions in other cultures. Daniel Goske’s ‘Virginia Woolf in German’ (ModCult13:i[2018] 55–76) discusses how Hogarth ‘quickly began to operate in a globalprint culture’ (p. 56). Goske reads closely the early German translations ofWoolf’s novels published by the Insel Verlag, analysing them side by side withtheir English counterparts, before turning to the history of their translations. IraNadel’s ‘The Russian Woolf’ (ModCult 13:iv[2018] 546–67) discusses cross-currents between the Russian avant-garde and Bloomsbury, taking a broadly his-torical approach to this task, and giving plenty of space for the Russians withwhom Woolf interacted, rather than simply viewing them as objects for Woolfishconsumption.

Nels Pearson’s sensitive and innovative article ‘Recovering Islands’ (ModCult13:iv[2018] 546–67) posits that To the Lighthouse ‘profoundly evokes the archi-pelagic nature of the Anglo-Celtic Isles’ (p. 348), asking how the novel ‘bothinterrogates and participates in problematic cultural and geographical constructsof Britishness’ (p. 348). Somaye Mostafaei and Nooshin Elahipanah’s article,‘Dialogic Multivoicedness in To the Lighthouse’ (Neoh 45[2018] 807–19) alsodiscusses To the Lighthouse, recapitulating old narratological tropes without add-ing much that is new.

Katerina Koutsantoni and Madeleine Oakley offer a foray into the medicalhumanities with their article ‘Laura Makepeace Stephen: What Was Wrong withWoolf’s Half-Sister?’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 280–94), diagnosing her with ‘autism witha co-morbid intermittent psychotic condition’ (p. 292). They do so through re-course to Woolf’s father’s diaries and case notes from the institution where shespent much of her life, as well as through a little light phrenology, using photo-graphs of Makepeace Stephen as a baby to diagnose her. They do so withoutquestioning the diagnostic validity of these sources, or the historical situatednessof current medical and diagnostic categories and whether or not they can beapplied to historical figures, or indeed, whether or not it is appropriate to implythat a person diagnosed with autism (spurious or not) has something ‘wrong’with them.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



3. Fiction Post-1945

(a) Fiction 1945–2000

Some of the most notable work in the field published in 2018 was to be foundin two special issues offered by the journal Textual Practice. Early in the year itdedicated a volume to Christine Brooke-Rose, and followed this by marking thecentenary of Muriel Spark’s birth in its penultimate issue of 2018. This followedGlasgow University’s centenary conference on Spark, held in February. Thedepth and breadth of the work presented in these two issues warrant detailedsummary.‘The Prime of Muriel Spark: A Centenary Retrospect’ is composed of ten

essays and four creative responses to Spark’s work. Allan Hepburn’s article,‘Memento Mori and Gerontography’ (TPr 32[2018] 1495–1511) argues that ‘nar-ratives about old people present an anti-novelistic proposition; time being againstthem, dottering characters learn nothing from experience, then they die. Theyhave no growth and no Bildung’ (p. 1495). Firstly, the essay establishes thesociological and literary context for Spark’s 1959 novel, taking in essays andbooks on ageing by Colin MacInnes, John Cowper Powys, and Simone deBeauvoir, as well as offering a brief discussion of the lengthening of life expect-ancy between 1851 and 1951 and the post-war Labour government’s establish-ment of the welfare state. In the essay’s second section, Hepburn uses researchconducted in Spark’s archive at the University of Tulsa to show how her ‘object-ive, even clinical’ (p. 1496) style ‘elaborates a novelistic “gerontography”, name-ly a technique for writing about old age that takes into account decliningphysical abilities and spiritual disposition to death’ (p. 1495).Michael Gardiner’s ‘Spark versus Homo economicus’ (TPr 32[2018] 1513–28)

considers a wide range of Spark’s fiction from the late 1950s and early 1960s:Robinson [1958], Memento Mori [1959], The Ballad of Peckham Rye [1960],The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1961], and a number of short stories. As inHepburn’s article, Gardiner is concerned with reading Spark’s work through asocio-economic and political lens, placing this fiction in both an immediate post-war context and a broader Enlightenment context. For Gardiner, both The Balladof Peckham Rye and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie stage disruptions or cri-tiques of ideologies of productive efficiency epitomized in time-and-motion stud-ies, making both novels part of a ‘moment’ that included ‘a wave of late ’50screative and political output with similar criticisms . . . taking in Situationism,anti-psychiatry, decolonization, critiques of logical positivism/language philoso-phy, “kitchen sink” fiction and film, CND membership, and legal debates on par-liamentary sovereignty’ (p. 1516).Martin Stannard’s essay, ‘The Crooked Ghost: The Ballad of Peckham Rye

and the Idea of the “Lyrical”’ (TPr 32[2018] 1529–43), offers a close reading ofSpark’s novel in order to examine the relationship in her work between the lyric-al and what Spark herself called ‘the nevertheless principle’, which Stannarddefines as the fact that ‘Things can be two (or more) things simultaneously’ (p.1530). He suggests that the protagonist of Ballad, Dougal Douglas, is a ‘“lyrical”presence’ (p. 1536) in the novel through his role as a ‘pre-eminent liar and fic-tion-maker’ and an ‘image of the artist’ (p. 1534). Bringing together ‘fundamen-tally opposed approaches’ (p. 1537), the narrative propulsion of the ballad and


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the anti-realist nouveau roman, Spark’s novel represents for Stannard ‘the never-theless principle in action: opposed conceptions of the “real” operating symbiot-ically in tandem, no one set of assumptions gaining intellectual victory over theothers’ (p. 1537).

Vassiliki Kolocotroni’s ‘The Driver’s Seat: Undoing Character, BecomingLegend’ (TPr 32[2018] 1545–62) reads Spark’s novel as her creme de la cremeand as her most confounding. The essay astutely traces the way The Driver’sSeat remains elusive to critics, placing its protagonist Lise in a variety of literaryand theoretical contexts to show the complications of her construction: is she orisn’t she a feminist and in what ways can she be said to be enacting or not enact-ing a kind of feminist vengeance? Does her apparent drive for death owe some-thing to Spark’s fascination with Emily Bronte, and her own death? In whatways does the novel indulge in and resist the pleasures of plotting?

Marina Mackay takes on the subject of ‘Muriel Spark and Self-Help’ (TPr32[2018] 1563–76) in her very funny essay, reading Spark’s work alongside best-selling works of self-help literature from the middle of the twentieth century inorder to ask what wisdom Spark thinks the novel form can hold about life.

Adam Piette’s fascinating ‘Muriel Spark and Fake News’ (TPr 32[2018]1577–91) offers a pre-history of the twenty-first-century phenomenon and showshow Spark’s wartime experiences in intelligence operations bleed into her work,primarily in The Hothouse by the East River [1973] and The Only Problem[1984]. The latter, Piette argues, is ‘a novel that stages the construction of fakenews stories as psychological and political manipulation of the public sphere’ (p.1578). Offering a close reading of this novel, Piette examines the way its centralcouple are subject to the kind of fake news encouraged and enabled by the soci-ety of the spectacle theorized by the Situationists. ‘The subjection to the slander-ous procedures of the society of the spectacle stimulates Harvey’s love andnostalgia for Effie’ (p. 1588), he argues, suggesting that criminal guilt and mari-tal love ‘come together into a single image conjoining erotic fantasy and state ap-paratus data projection’ (p. 1588).

Marilyn Reizbaum’s ‘Waiting for Godot at The Mandelbaum Gate’ (TPr32[2018] 1593–1613) proposes that Spark’s Middle East novel develops a ‘liter-ary Zionism . . . a narrative movement dictated by an ideal which by its naturecannot be realised’ (p. 1594). For Reizbaum, this can be read either ‘positivelyin terms of a modernist sensibility of narrative open-endedness or alternatively(or at once) as driven by’ the ‘cruel optimism’ (p. 1607) of Lauren Berlant. Thisis ‘cruel’ because ‘the objective/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actuallymakes it impossible to obtain the expansive transformation for which a person orpeople risks striving’ (p. 1594). Drawing connections between the tensions ofIsrael and narrative form, Reizbaum characterizes The Mandelbaum Gate as anovel of ‘knots, loose ends and competing narratives’ (p. 1608). Finding such lit-erary Zionism in Spark’s juxtaposition of the Eichmann trial and Beckett’sGodot, Reizbaum argues that the ‘Eichmann trial might stand as a metonymy forthe Mandelbaum Gate, a crucible of passage, that “goes nowhere for nothing”, if“nothing” is “what is to be borne”, rather than an elusive ideal’ (p. 1608).

Carla Sassi’s lucid article examines ‘Muriel Spark’s Italian Palimpsests’ (TPr32[2018] 1615–32) and attempts to reveal what she calls the ‘overlooked’ (p.1616) importance of ‘Italy and Italianness’ (p. 1615) in Spark’s work. Focusing


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Public Image [1968], The Takeover[1976], and Territorial Rights [1979], Sassi reads widely across Spark’s career,‘taking the palimpsest as a trope of transformation and construction that impliesbordercrossing and transit’ (p. 1615). Within The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,Sassi sees Spark ‘collapsing the borders of heterogeneous discourses of Italy’ (p.1619) in the form of Jean Brodie’s collages on her classroom wall, which take infashion, Renaissance art, and newspaper reportage of fascists. ‘Fascism’, arguesSassi, is thus ‘treated as one of the multiple, half-obscured but co-existing layersthat constitute Italianness’ (p. 1619). Sassi teases out the intertextual relationshipsto Pirandello and Leopardi, and the filmmakers Federico Fellini andMichelangelo Antonioni in The Public Image. These, she says, help readersunderstand ‘how Italian culture represented for Spark a rich source of inspirationfor her own investigation of the elusive border separating reality from fiction’, aworld in which ‘truth and aesthetic form stand equal to one another and are in-deed interchangeable’ (p. 1621). Sassi calls The Takeover ‘Spark’s most Italiannovel’ (p. 1624), in which the country is ‘repeatedly represented as an intrinsical-ly conservative culture, in touch with the most ancient layers of its past history’(p. 1624). Sassi suggests that in this conservatism Spark shows the way ‘Italyresists globalisation’ (p. 1625), something depicted in the novel by its close at-tention to contemporary politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, Sassiturns her attention to Territorial Rights, which, she argues, is a novel of ‘struc-tural instability’ (p. 1628), in which artistic styles as diverse as Italian neo-realism, the Gothic, and ‘dark, chaotic comedy’ (p. 1628) are thrown together.What holds this together, says Sassi, is the city of Venice itself, which is the nov-el’s true protagonist.In ‘Muriel Spark’s ‘Informed Air’: The Auditory Imagination and the Voices

of Fiction’ (TPr 32[2018] 1633–58), Patricia Waugh examines how Spark‘refashioned’ (p. 1634) T.S. Eliot’s concept of the auditory imagination. Shereads Spark’s biography and her novels alongside one another, comparing herdescriptions of inner voices, methods of composition, and formal decisions. AsWaugh puts it: ‘the conversion and the breakdown together provided the meansof recognising others’ voices as parts of and yet singularly other than her own. . . Together they gave her the opportunity to find her own “voice” as a novelistand a self as a plurality of “voices”—and to exploit the resources of that mostdialogic of genres in her remodelling of it’ (p. 1636). Waugh astutely connectsthis dialogism of the novel to a novelistic ethics that, she argues, Sparkembodies: the ability to ‘to think in and hear the voice of the other in one’sown’ (p. 1636). This Waugh finds across her work, and her article is noteworthyfor its range of reference, taking in Spark’s early writings, short stories, andaround ten of her novels.The collection’s final essay, Brian Cheyette’s ‘Spark, Trauma, and the Novel’

(TPr 32[2018] 1659–76), takes as its focus Spark’s ‘abiding sense of the realistnovel as nothing more than an all too human form of deception’ (p. 1660). Itbegins with a discussion of Spark’s early life and her formation as a novelist,describing the ‘distinctions between aesthetic conversion—turning life into art ornarrative—and religious conversion’ (p. 1662). It then uses Spark’s African sto-ries (her early work and Aiding and Abetting [2000]) to develop its main argu-ment that the reason the realist novel is deceptive is because it gives false


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



promises of ‘clarity and order’ (p. 1662). Spark was particularly interested this inbecause she was concerned with making ‘peripheral’ certain ‘traumatic aspects’of her life (p. 1663) through transfiguring them into fiction. It was for this rea-son, argues Cheyette, that Spark advocated absurdity and satire.

In addition to these essays, the special issue also includes some creativeresponses to Spark’s work which may be of interest to scholars of the period.Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Willy Maley talk (TPr 32[2018] 1677–80) to the play-wright David Greig about Spark’s play Doctors of Philosophy [1963]; ZoeStrachan considers Spark’s advice for writers (TPr 32[2018] 1689–93); the novel-ist Louise Welsh examines Spark’s craft (TPr 32[2018] 1695–1700); and thewriter Leila Aboulela describes ‘Muriel Spark’s Religious Vision of the World’(TPr 32[2018] 1681–7).

The special issue of Textual Practice on the work of Christine Brooke-Rose,‘Christine Brooke-Rose: Remade’, begins with two introductions by NatalieFerris (TPr 32:ii[2018] 191–2) and by Jean-Michel Rabate (TPr 32:ii[2018] 193–9). The latter recounts his encounters with Brooke-Rose at Paris VII Universityin the early 1970s and offers a moving account of their friendship afterwards.These are followed by eight essays.

‘Christine Brooke-Rose: An Algorithmic Appreciation’ by Joanna Walsh (TPr32:ii[2018] 201–3), who is herself an experimental writer, offers an ‘algorithmicappreciation’ (p. 201) of Brooke-Rose in a piece that blends academic criticismand creative writing. The second essay, Joseph Darlington’s ‘Truth, Death andMemory in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Autobiographical Writings’ (TPr 32:ii[2018]205–23), uses Brooke-Rose’s archive to examine her various attempts to ‘tran-scrib[e] life’ (p. 205). In ‘“I Think I Preferred It Abstract”: Christine Brooke-Rose and Visuality in the New Novel’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 225–44), Natalie Ferrisexamines Brooke-Rose in the context of the nouveau roman, especially its em-phasis on the visual apprehension of reality.

In her article, ‘The “Difficult” Relationship: Christine Brooke-Rose,Catholicism and Muriel Spark’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 245–63), Stephanie Jones readsBrooke-Rose biographically, particularly her friendship with Spark, and arguesthat her personal relationship to Catholicism has been under-explored by scholarsthus far. ‘Indeterminate Brooke-Rose’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 265–81), by Julia Jordan,examines the relationship between ‘scientific discourse about uncertainty and in-determinacy’ (p. 266) and the notion of experimental writing in Brooke-Rose’swork. Offering a reading of her novel Such [1966], Jordan argues that Brooke-Rose’s writing is not itself ‘indeterminate’ (p. 265) but that Such nonetheless rep-resents ‘a critique of any system of knowledge that impinges upon the indeter-minate, the uncertain, and the latent’ (p. 278). For Jordan, this does not justsignal Brooke-Rose’s affinities with poststructuralism, but establishes an ethicsthat recognizes the absolute difficulty ‘of gaining epistemic purchase’ (p. 278).

In her lucid and fascinating article, ‘Selling Difficulty: The Case of ChristineBrooke-Rose’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 283–99), Rebecca Pohl also makes use of arch-ival materials. Investigating what she calls ‘the complex relationship between dif-ficulty, pleasure and sales’ (p. 284), Pohl reads Brooke-Rose’s novel,Textermination [1991] alongside her letters to friends and publishers, as well assurveying reviews and obituaries. Across these she examines the forms and polit-ics of the notion of difficulty, carefully showing how it is variously conceived


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



but also how ‘ reviewers, journalists and academics describing Brooke-Rose as“difficult” are all contributing to the formation and securing of a commonplacethrough a process of repetition. Difficulty becomes the dominant quality ofBrooke-Rose’s oeuvre’ (p. 285). Pohl shows how this dominant quality alsoentails a ‘grammatical slippage’ (p. 286) and, borrowing the term from SarahAhmed, helps to construct Brooke-Rose herself as a ‘feminist killjoy’ (p. 286),the ‘difficult woman, the non-conformist, unmanageable troublemaker whose stri-dency ruins everybody else’s pleasure’ (p. 286). Pohl uses this as a springboardto argue for Brooke-Rose’s work to be understood as pleasurable in a Barthesiansense, as encouraging the working through of apparent difficulty as itself a pleas-urable activity. At the heart of this is the question of recognition, the matter ofwhether a text is familiar or confronts the reader with the unfamiliar. InTextermination, argues Pohl, that tension is central.In ‘“Groping Inside Language”: Translation, Humour and Experiment in

Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Brigid Brophy’s In Transit’ (TPr32:ii[2018] 301–16), Carole Sweeney reads these two novels (from 1968 and1969 respectively) together in order to show how they ‘reveal the power of lan-guage systems to shape the social order and, far more treacherously, its suscepti-bility to ideological abuse and ability to whitewash itself with its own slymanoeuvres’ (p. 302). Both books, says Sweeney, work against these orders, in-stead showing how language can be used to destabilize and liberate. In theissue’s final essay, ‘Christine Brooke-Rose: Motes, Beams and the Horse’sMouth’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 317–36), Glyn White draws on personal correspondencewith Brooke-Rose to examine her ‘relationship to academic criticism as a criticand novelist’ (p. 317).The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James

Riley, and Melanie Seddon, is an excellent addition to the indispensable Decadesseries from Bloomsbury. It manages to shuttle between a commanding overviewof the decade’s key genres and themes, its aesthetic and political concerns, andits wider cultural milieu, forging space for excellent, insightful close readings ofkey texts. This kind of scalar reading is seen across the collection, beginning inSeddon’s chapter, which focuses on youth, followed by Joseph Darlington’schapter on ‘The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novelsof the 1960s’. Chapters by Tracy Hargreaves on women’s fiction, YvonneSalmon on gay fiction, and Graham K. Riach on black writing register the oftendialectical relationship between literature and society. The remaining chaptersfocus on particular writers or genres: Michelle Phillips Buchberger writes on‘The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles’; Philip Tew offers close readingsof Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and MurielSpark in order to elaborate their position as hinges between modernism and post-modernism; James Reich’s ‘Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and theCults of Catastrophe’ focuses on science-fiction writing of the 1960s and featuresreadings of Anthony Burgess, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, andArthur C. Clarke; while the final chapter, by James Riley, continues the focus onscience fiction, reassessing characterizations of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition[1970] and Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme [1969] as marking theend of the 1960s and arguing that such a narrative obscures their particular text-ual characteristics.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Contemporary literary studies in 2018 demonstrated its alertness to culturaland literary trends (autofiction, dystopian fiction) and to urgent political concerns(animal studies, ecocriticism). Hywel Dix’s edited volume of essays Autofictionin English is part of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series, edited by ClareBrant and Max Saunders. It distinguishes anglophone autofiction from its Frenchpredecessors, staking out the key characteristics of the English version of theform. While many of the essays deal with American authors and works oftwenty-first-century British fiction, scholars of British literature before 2000 willbe interested in Lorna Martens’s chapter, entitled ‘Autofiction in the ThirdPerson, with a Reading of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake’ (pp. 49–64).Martens begins her essay with a general consideration of third-person autobiogra-phies before offering a reading of Brooke-Rose’s novel as a piece of autofiction.Martens examines Remake as ‘conceptually of a piece with the post-structuralisttheory that dominated the intellectual scene in the 1970s and 1980s’ (p. 59) andargues that on the one hand, through her use of ‘alter-egos, Brooke-Rose artfullyundermines our everyday understanding of the concept of identity by signallingthat she is not self-identical but multifarious and intersubjective’ (p. 62). On theother hand, says Martens, the book’s language implies ‘a unity that is reinforcedby the emergence of a conclusive, seemingly authorial voice’ (p. 62). Martensconcludes by suggesting that Brooke-Rose’s intent, as an author, is to ‘undermine. . . her attempt at undermining identity’ (p. 62).

Hilary Thompson’s Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millenniumconsiders a range of anglophone novels, contrasting the treatment of the relation-ship between humans and animals in pre-2000 novels and post-9/11 fiction.Scholars of British literature 1945–2000 will take particular note of Thompson’ssecond chapter, which considers Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus [1984] (pp.57–87), and her third chapter (pp. 88–119), which reads Michel Faber’s Underthe Skin [2000] alongside Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go [2006].

Thomas Horan’s Desire and Empathy in Twentieth Century Dystopian Fictioncovers British, American, Canadian, and Russian dystopian fiction from acrossthe twentieth century and offers a reading of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1948] that argues that the novel ‘illustrates [his] faith in sexual desire as asource of social responsibility’ (p. 147). Horan understands Winston and Julia’saffair in terms of its ability to foster an ‘empathetic sense of shared humanity’(p. 147). Nineteen Eighty-Four was also the subject of Askın Celikkol’s ‘“In thePlace Where There Is No Darkness”: Sexuality, Ideology and Space in GeorgeOrwell’s 1984’ (Expl 76:iv[2018] 198–203), which seeks to reassess notions ofsurveillance in the novel through the prism of privacy and private spaces.

Edited by Patrick Gill and Florian Klager, Constructing Coherence in theBritish Short Story Cycle is a collection of essays that offer a thorough overviewof the genre. Scholars of post-war British fiction will be particularly interested inthe chapters on A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye [1994] by LouisaHadley (pp. 142–58), and on Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel [1996], by JanineHauthal (pp. 159–80). Hadley places Byatt’s work in the context of other femin-ist rewritings of fairy-tales, most notably Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamberand Other Stories [1979]. Hauthal uses Barnes’s depictions of Anglo-Frenchencounters as exemplary texts for exploring the short-story cycle’s ability to rep-resent collectivities.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



The work of J.G. Ballard continues to be a touchstone for scholars of theperiod. Repeater Books published K-Punk: The Collected and UnpublishedWritings of Mark Fisher, edited by Darren Ambrose, in which Ballard’s depic-tions of late capitalist society feature prominently, while Louise Nuttall dedicatesa chapter of Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview inSpeculative Fiction to Ballard’s figurative style in The Drowned World (pp. 153–76). In 2018 the two stand-out essays on Ballard were dedicated to exploring hiswork from an ecocritical perspective. Thomas S. Davis’s excellent ‘Fossils ofTomorrow: Len Lye, J.G. Ballard, and Planetary Futures’ (MFS 64:iv[2018] 659–79) compares The Drowned World [1962] with Len Lye’s film The Birth of theRobot [1936], made for Shell. Applying contemporary ecocriticism and theoriesof the Anthropocene to these mid-twentieth-century texts, Davis reflects on theeffect the concept of the Anthropocene has had on literary studies, before offer-ing readings of two texts that remain important for ecological futures despitetheir relative lack of scientific knowledge. Davis argues that Lye’s film drama-tizes the rise of ‘a new posthuman figure who has surpassed human limits of lifeand death’ thanks to their harnessing of the benefits of oil (p. 669), whileBallard’s novel ‘urges us’ to ‘see human beings not merely as resilient psycho-logical and biological beings but as complex forms of life that will evolve andend like other species’ (p. 675). What links these two works, for Davis, is thatthey register ‘the return of the geologic as a shaping force in human life’ (p.675). Andrew Hageman’s ‘“The Key to This Immense Metallized Landscape”:Reading J.G. Ballard’s Crash as an Ecological Structure of Feeling’(Extrapolation 59:i[2018] 47–69) places Ballard’s 1973 novel in its eco-historicalcontext, reading the novel as emblematic of the way the 1970s represented ‘aperiod of radical shifts in ecological consciousness—in the relations not onlyamongst human beings but amongst human beings and the myriad non-humanelements with which we co-exist, including those we build and those we don’t’(p. 48). Meanwhile, Robert S. Lehman’s ‘Back to the Future: Late Modernism inJG Ballard’s The Drowned World’ (JML 41:iv[2018] 161–78) reads Ballard’snovel as a piece of late modernism that directs modernist ‘ground clearing’ (p.161) at modernism itself.Postcolonial and diasporic literatures continue be a major focus for scholars of

the period. Books like Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts,Territories, Globalizations, by Baidik Bhattacharya, and The Global South andLiterature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov as part of the Cambridge CriticalConcepts series, will surely prove important theoretical overviews in future years.Salman Rushdie’s work features in both of these books, and was the most prom-inent area of literary study, along with that of Caryl Phillips. Three articles wereparticularly notable for bringing refreshing critical perspectives and methodolo-gies to Rushdie’s work. Sayan Chattopadhyay’s ‘From Indianness to Englishness:The Foreign Selves of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, andSalman Rushdie’s Salahuddin Chamchawala’ (JCL 53:iii[2018] 412–29) setsRushdie’s The Satanic Verses [1988] against the background of two centuries ofIndian travel to England. In ‘Secularism and the Death and Return of the Author:Rereading the Rushdie Affair after Joseph Anton’ (JCL 53:ii[2018] 316–31),Stephen Morton examines the reception history of The Satanic Verses, readingthis alongside Rushdie’s own characterizations of it in his memoir Joseph Anton


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



[2012]. For Morton, this poses new implications for ‘the relationship between theideology of secularism and postmodern theories of reading’ (p. 316). SamGoodman’s ‘“Ain’t It a Ripping Night”: Alcoholism and the Legacies of Empirein Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 307–24) considers themedicalization of empire and, bringing literary criticism together with discourseson alcoholism and drunkenness, argues that ‘Rushdie’s decision to employ alco-hol and alcoholism so prominently is a means through which to undermine thegeneral contemporary belief in the widespread benefits that British colonialismbrought to India [and] reveals the British presence as having had a debilitatingeffect on the physical, psychological and social health of newly independentIndian individuals and the wider nation alike’ (p. 309). Meanwhile, VijayMishra’s book, Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial, uses arch-ival materials and literary analysis to do valuable work revealing the influencesand sources underlying Rushdie’s work.

Vanessa Guignery’s ‘Pastiche, Collage, and Bricolage: Caryl Phillips’ HybridJournal and Letters of a Slave Trader in Crossing the River’ (ArielE 49:ii–iii[2018] 119–48) argues that Phillips’s use of pastiche and collage techniques isin service of an attempt to balance two seemingly opposed impetuses. Phillipsaims, she argues, to properly speak of the horror of slaves’ experience while sim-ultaneously showing how historical accounts are constructed and unstable.Elisabeth Bekers’s ‘Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in BlackBritish Neo-Slave Narratives’ (LW 15:i[2018] 23–42) begins with an overview ofthe political and aesthetic concerns found in slave narratives, before comparingPhillips’s novel Cambridge [1991] with Jackie Kay’s play The Lamplighter[2008] and Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song [2010]. Like Guignery, Bekerssees Phillips as attempting to reorient historical narratives towards those whohave been previously silenced. This impetus in Phillips’s work that Guignery andBekers pick up on is described by Benedicte Ledent in ‘Radio Drama and ItsAvatars in the Work of Caryl Phillips’ (JPW 54:i[2018] 32–42) as a ‘demytholo-gising practice’ (p. 40), using a phrase by Charlotte Croft. Ledent argues thatPhillips’s radio plays between 1984 and 2016 are part of this practice thatextends to his novels, and suggests that these hitherto neglected works should beread as important intertexts and as pieces that help Phillips explore more poly-phonic histories. Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge, acollection of essays edited by Benedicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and DariaTunca, featured ‘Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Inthe Falling Snow’ (pp. 63–80) by Su Ping, which connects mental health disor-ders like schizophrenia and mania to the diasporic experience in Phillips’s worksfrom 2003 and 2000, respectively. In The Falling Snow was also the subject ofPietro Deandrea’s chapter in the collection New Directions in Diaspora Studies:Cultural and Literary Approaches, edited by Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendesand Lucinda Newns, entitled ‘British New Slaveries in Chris Cleave’s The OtherHand and Caryl Phillips’ In The Falling Snow: Diachronic and SynchronicReflections’ (pp. 115–30).

Pamela Osborn’s ‘“Stop. That’s Wicked”: Sexual Freedom in Brigid Brophy’sThe Burglar and Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head’ (CWW 12:ii[2018] 222–32)compares two novels that will be of interest to scholars of the period. ReadingBrophy’s 1968 play and Murdoch’s 1961 novel as iterations of an ‘ongoing


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



dialogue between the two writers’ (p. 222), along with letters they exchangedand other Murdoch archival papers, Osborn examines the way both writersgrappled with notions of sexuality and liberation in the 1960s. Scholars ofBrophy’s work will also be interested in Robert McKay’s ‘Brigid Brophy’s Pro-Animal Forms’ (CWW 12:ii[2018] 152–70), which uses archive material to casther as a ‘pro-animal writer’ (p. 152). Offering a reading of The Adventures ofGod in His Search for the Black Girl [1973], McKay seeks to ‘recognizeBrophy’s significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that chal-lenges anthropocentric attitudes towards animals’ (p. 152).While Ian McEwan received comparatively little attention in 2018, his position

in the literary landscape was fascinatingly examined in Chris Clarke’s excellentarticle ‘“Unconsciously Influenced”: Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the LastingLegacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction’ (MFS 64:i[2018] 104–28).Clarke interrogates the economies of prestige surrounding Alan Burns, who wasa member of a group of experimental writers in the 1960s that also included AnnQuin, B.S. Johnson, and McEwan, who was Burns’s first student on the creativewriting course at the University of East Anglia. Contrasting their careers, andreading a number of Burns’s 1960s texts alongside McEwan’s ‘refracted auto-biography’ (p. 104) Sweet Tooth [2012], Clarke’s article will be interesting toscholars of British fiction published between 1945 and 2000 for its wide-ranginginvestigation of the ‘lasting imprint of postwar British experimental writing oncontemporary fiction’ (p. 105).

(b) Fiction Post-2000

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, which is now the official jour-nal of the British Association for Contemporary Literature, released three excel-lent issues in 2018. The first, ‘The Literature of the Anthropocene’, evolvedfrom an e-mail roundtable in which the Contemporary Studies Networkresponded to the 2016 Guardian article by Robert Macfarlane, ‘GenerationAnthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet Forever’ (C21 6:i[2018]1.26–44). Rachel Dini’s ‘“The Problem of This Trash Society”: AnthropogenicWaste and the Neoliberal City in Super-Cannes, Millennium People andKingdom Come’ (C21 6:i[2018] 4.1–26) analyses the role that waste objects playin J.G. Ballard’s post-2000 novels. She argues that these novels taper the generalcritique of the Capitalocene that characterizes Ballard’s oeuvre into a specific cri-tique of neoliberalism. Dini focuses on ‘the myriad forms of waste that threatento obstruct the flow of capital and goods, and to pollute what are otherwisefriction-free environments’ (p. 3). This includes not only manufactured waste butalso ‘refugees, economic migrants, and the unemployed, all of whom are bothproducts of capitalist modernity and necessary to its functioning’ (p. 3). Thearticle’s methodology employs a blend of historical materialist, new materialist,and structural anthropological approaches. This might sound dizzying, and Dininotes that these approaches perhaps seem incompatible (p. 5), but it works verywell. It facilitates a reading of Ballard’s writing, and particularly his later fiction,as a striating corrective to the (theoretically) smooth space of neoliberalism.Alla Ivanchikova’s ‘Geomediations in the Anthropocene: Fictions of the

Geologic Turn’ (C21 6:i[2018] 3.1-24) analyses the geologically infused


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



aesthetics of A.S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ [2003] alongside Margaret Atwood’s‘Stone Mattress’ [2013]. Ivanchikova argues that these stories ‘allow us to im-agine and capture the immense depths of geologic time’ (p. 20). This is a bigclaim to make of two short stories, especially because the difficulty of imaginingdeep time is something that many Anthropocene thinkers grapple with.Nonetheless, Ivanchikova’s close readings, especially of the way that trauma ismediated via geological rather than linguistic means in Byatt’s story (p. 16), doconvincingly decentre the Anthropos and gesture to alternative relations with thegeos that go beyond extraction and destruction.

The second issue of C21 in 2018 contains a single article dealing with Britishfiction, Sara Helen Binney’s ‘How “the Old Stories Persist”: Folklore inLiterature after Postmodernism’ (C21 6:ii[2018] 5.1-20). Binney analyses the leg-acy of postmodern fairy-tale reworkings in twenty-first-century fiction by way ofJohn Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning [2011]. She makes a strong argumentthat Burnside’s novel, as well as a number of other twenty-first-century retellingsof fairy tales, have ‘learned the lessons of postmodernism’ and ‘exhibit the aes-thetics and preoccupations which critics are beginning to delineate as specific tonow’ (p. 3). The article ties this argument up neatly by explaining ‘the fantasticas a particularly contemporary literary mode’ (p. 17) produced by the tension be-tween contemporary literature’s realist turn and the magical aspects of postmod-ernism’s legacy.

The third and final C21 of 2018 is a special issue on the works of DavidMitchell that resulted from the International David Mitchell Conference in 2017and contains a foreword by the author himself. Martin Paul Eve’s ‘The HistoricalImaginary of Nineteenth-Century Style in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas’ (C216:iii[2018] 3.1-22) employs computational analysis to ascertain the extent towhich Part I of the Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing accurately imitates the lin-guistic style of the period from 1850 to 1910 in which it is set. The articleexplains that this section is ‘a very good attempt at linguistic mimesis within awork of purported historical fiction’ (p. 8). Eve then argues that the outlyingmetaleptic slippages are not only metafictional devices that gesture to the editingof Adam Ewing’s journal, but an authorial strategy to produce a faux-nineteenth-century style that would gesture to colonial discourses and racism while remain-ing accessible to readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Jo Alyson Parker’s ‘Mind the Gap(s): Holly Sykes’s Life, the “Invisible” War,and the History of the Future in The Bone Clocks’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 4.1-21) sit-uates The Bone Clocks [2014] as an Anthropocene text. Parker argues thatMitchell writes a history of the future to give ‘figurative shape to those formless,dispersed threats’ (p. 17) of climate change. Thus, the novel encourages readersto consider the causal destructive forces of this future that are already at workin our present. Kristian Shaw takes his analysis of The Bone Clocks in anotherdirection with ‘“Some Magic Is Normality”: Fantastical Cosmopolitanism inDavid Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 5.1-19). Like Parker,Shaw argues that The Bone Clocks provides ways of thinking about threats fac-ing the twenty-first century. He then goes on to situate Mitchell’s novel incosmopolitan theory, and makes a compelling case for the ways that its super-natural register ‘becomes an aperture through which to explore individual andcommunal ethical agency’ (p. 16).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Eva-Maria Schmitz’s ‘“No Man Is an Island”: Tracing Functions of InsularLandscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 6.1-25) uses Yi-FuTuan and Michel de Certeau’s conception of space as relational, to analyse therecurring motif of islands in Ghostwritten [1999], Cloud Atlas, The ThousandAutumns of Jacob de Zoet [2010], and The Bone Clocks. Scott A. Dimovitz con-tends that Mitchell’s recent works have established a ‘retroactive Mitchellverse’(p. 1) as a critique of contemporary apoliticism, in ‘Schrodinger’s Cat:Metalepsis and the Political Unwriting of the Postmodern Apocalypse in DavidMitchell’s Recent Works’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 7.1-23). In ‘Spirits in the MaterialWorld: Spectral Worlding in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas’(C21 6:iii[2018] 8.1-26), Ryan Trimm brilliantly examines the novels’ productionof an interconnected, complex, and dynamic global space that acts as both inver-sion and critique of a capitalist globalization whose distant perspective tends toflatten the world.In ‘The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas’ (C21

6:iii[2018] 9.1-26), Gautama Polanki takes an analysis of the comet birthmark inCloud Atlas as a meta-figure for the novel’s form and content and resituates it inthe contexts of biblical messianism and Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence.‘Oblique Translations in David Mitchell’s Works’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 10.1-16) byClaire Beatrice Larsonneur investigates the associations between translation andautobiography in Mitchell’s Black Swan Green [2006] and The ThousandAutumns of Jacob de Zoet, as well as two translations of non-fictional works thatMitchell undertook with his wife. Larsonneur suggests that the ‘Japanese trad-ition of translation, devolved narratives and autobiofiction, all partake of the aes-thetics of oblique discourse’ (p. 14) and have informed Mitchell’s practice andfacilitate a form of lateral (re)writing that has the potential to navigate powerdynamics.Similar thematic concerns cropped up not only across the three issues of C21,

but also in other journal articles on contemporary British literature. The role ofcapitalism in mediating the individual’s relation to the global space provides thebedrock for Joel Evans’s ‘Ali Smith’s Necessary-Contingent, or Navigating theGlobal’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 629–48). Evans extracts the concept of what he dubsthe ‘necessary-contingent’ (p. 629) from Ali Smith’s The Accidental [2005] andThere but for the [2011] and employs it as a way of reading the two texts. Hegoes on to analyse the interconnectedness of necessity and contingency in thetwo novels, and argues that they are drawn together in the domain of the globaland provide a vantage point from which to examine the contradictions ofcapitalism.A sense of interconnectedness underpins much critical writing on the

Anthropocene and globalization, and it drives Jill Marsden’s ‘Thought on theOutside: Twenty-First-Century Modernism in Will Self’s Umbrella’ (TPr32:iv[2018] 689–706), albeit in a different direction. Marsden suggests that Selfrepurposes modernist stream of consciousness in Umbrella [2012] to dismantlethe textual illusion of the isolated mind and instead locate thought alongside the‘implication of persons, bodies and things within larger, transpersonal processes’(p. 692). Through a series of excellent close readings and theoretical interven-tions, Marsden makes a claim for the political importance of this shift away fromthe individual and towards an understanding of relationality.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Huw Marsh’s ‘Narrative Unreliability and Metarepresentation in Ian McEwan’sAtonement; or, Why Robbie Might Be Guilty and Why Nobody Seems toNotice’ (TPr 32:viii[2018] 1325–43) puts narrative theory to work in a revisedreading of Atonement [2001] that doubts the reliability of protagonist BrionyTallis and, by extension, reconsiders the role of the implied author. JacksonAyres takes on a new British literary phenomenon in ‘Hitler Wins Now: NewNazi Alternate Histories in British Popular Fiction’ (ConL 59:iii[2018] 308–32).Ayres reads Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy, Farthing [2006], Ha’Penny[2007], and Half a Crown [2008], as an ‘eerily prophetic parable for the pastdecade in Britain’ (p. 307). He uses his reading of Walton’s trilogy to make abroader commentary on contemporary texts that employ the plot in which Hitlerwins, and argues that they parallel neoliberalism with mid-twentieth-centuryfascism.

In ‘“Takes You Back Even If You Were Never There Originally”: Class,History, and Nostalgia in Gordon Burn’s The North of England Home Service’(TPr 32:viii[2018] 1405–23), Phil O’Brien tracks the tensions between Britishsocial realism and American postmodernism in Burn’s writing. He explains thatspectres of the past appear as ways of dealing with or seeking solace from thepresent moment. The article then argues, however, that the ‘compulsion to repeatbanal and inauthentic modes of historical experience creates a cultural impasse, aform of hyperreality which blocks any access to a positive subjectivity’ (p.1407). In other words, history is treated as a spectacle. O’Brien reveals the waysthat The North of England Home Service [2003] depicts the appropriation andmarketization of the nostalgic mode by capitalism, and the alienation of the nos-talgic subject.

Katy Shaw examines the spectral presence of the past in the present through adifferent lens in Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First-CenturyEnglish Literature. She argues that hauntology is a peculiarly English phenom-enon that dissolves the separation between now and then and contains not only‘the compulsion to repeat the past’ but ‘an anticipation of the future’ (p. 2).Shaw does justice to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx [1993], whence she draws haun-tology as a concept capable of thinking beyond the post-liberal end-of-historynarrative that dominated the end of the twentieth century. Each of the book’sfour chapters is focused on a specific text, and develops different aspects ofhauntological literary analysis. Shaw’s analysis of Zadie Smith’s NW [2012], forinstance, establishes the spectral topographies of the novel and depicts Londonas a distinctly haunted city that is at once both living and spectral. The chapteron David Peace’s Patient X [2018] explores the uncanniness of the spectral dou-ble through extra-textual authorial presence, and suggests that the form of theshort story is haunted in distinct ways. Hauntology is not only an important con-tribution to British contemporary literary studies, but a necessary political inter-vention that seeks to open up possibilities for the future.

Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Eileen Pollardand Ginette Carpenter, is the first scholarly volume to bring together a range ofessays on Mantel, one of the most prestigious English novelists writing today.Wolfgang Funk’s contribution, ‘Becoming Ghost: Spectral Realism in HilaryMantel’s Fiction’ (pp. 87–100), argues that Mantel’s fiction counteracts the ram-pant consumerism of the contemporary moment by privileging the unseen and


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the supernatural. He investigates the ghost as a literary metaphor and, althoughhe does not mention hauntology, leans on Derrida to expand a description ofwhat he terms ‘spectral realism’ (p. 88). Hauntings characterize many of the laterchapters of this collection. Kathryn Bird analyses the way that the home ishaunted by unseen physical and psychological violence in ‘“I Am a Settlement, aPlace of Safety, a Bombproof Shelter”: Hauntings, Hospitality and HomelandInsecurity in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black’ (pp. 133–46). Lucy Arnold’s chap-ter, ‘Holy Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in Wolf Halland Fludd’ (pp. 117–32), takes an analysis of haunting into the realm of author-ship and suggests intertextuality is a spectral and haunting form.Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness, edited by Katy Shaw and Kate Aughterson, is

a timely contribution to the burgeoning field of Crace studies. This essay collec-tion grew out of a symposium on Crace’s writing that was facilitated by ManBooker’s charitable ‘Big Read’ programme (p. 4). Each chapter is thought-provoking in its own right, and taken as a whole the book provides critical in-sight on themes ranging through ecocriticism, spirituality, gender studies, tempor-ality, cognition, and the pastoral. Diletta De Cristofaro’s chapter, ‘“False Patternsout of Chaos”: Writing Beyond the Sense of an Ending in Being Dead and ThePesthouse’ (pp. 65–79), examines the way that Crace’s fiction subverts the trad-itional sense of apocalyptic revelation and exposes ‘the sense of an ending as aconstruction’ (p. 66). Through a series of astute close readings, De Cristofarodemonstrates that these two texts underline our reliance on the sense of an end-ing to make sense out of time itself, while also emphasizing that such teleologic-al sense-making is an exercise in narrative construction. In ‘Searching for theGleaning Fields: Gleaners and Leanness in Jim Crace’s Harvest’ (pp. 131–48),Natalie Joelle explores Crace’s fascination with gleaners, and the practice ofgleaning, in his fiction. She argues that Harvest [2013] is a distinctly politicalnovel that depicts a moment of transition from gleaning, and a sense of enough,towards leaner thinking, accumulation, and the ‘increasingly capitalised econo-mies of coming large-scale agriculture’ (p. 138).Edited collections on single authors seem to be on the rise this year, with

Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire, edited by Philip Tew, joining thoseon Crace and Mantel. The latter half of this collection focuses on Coe’s post-2000 fiction. Sebastien Jenner takes on ‘Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle and aSatiric Mirror’ (pp. 125–40), while Francesco di Bernardo tackles ‘A TerriblePrecariousness: Financialisation of Society and the Precariat in Jonathan Coe’sThe Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim’ (pp. 141–54). Both deal with the onset ofneoliberalism and the withering away of state support, and Jenner contrasts thepolitical homogenization of the early twenty-first-century Third Way with thehotly contested politics of the 1970s. Philip Tew and Vanessa Guignery focustheir critical attention on Coe’s Number 11 [2015]. Guignery’s ‘Gothic Horrorand Haunting Processes’ (pp. 169–84) considers the novel’s reliance on Gothichorror alongside international British politics, such as the invasion of Iraq, whileTew’s ‘Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity’ (pp. 185–200) examines the novel’snarrative concern with the suffering of disempowered individuals under an indif-ferent sociopolitical system that serves the privileged few.Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau edited The Wounded Hero in

Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest, a collection of essays that consider


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



heroes who embrace, rather than overcome, their struggles. Renate Brosch’s con-tribution, ‘Reading through the Body: The Damaged Mind in Tom McCarthy’sRemainder’ (pp. 178–99), considers the emergence of the neuronovel subgenrealongside the notion of the wounded hero. He explains that a major common fea-ture of these novels is the presence of an injured or ill character. Unlike typicalevent-driven hero narratives, Brosch argues, these contemporary fictions tend todeal with the after-effects of traumatic events. Remainder [2005] emerges as acase study that reflects this broader trend in neuronovels, and the chapter analy-ses the way that the novel utilizes the injured body to elicit empathy despite anarrative tone of emotional indifference. Rosario Arias’s chapter, ‘WoundedCharacters and Vulnerable Lives and Places in Ian McEwan’s Saturday’ (pp.114–29), draws a somewhat tenuous parallel between the cultural aftermath of 9/11 in the United States and that of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. Ariaslooks to Saturday [2005] as an example of wounded hero fiction, in which theprotagonist discovers through his interactions with vulnerable others his own pre-cariousness in a wounded world. The chapter goes on to make insightful pointsabout the wounding of spaces, especially those that used to be associated withthe sense of the heroic, in the twenty-first century. Other chapters on post-2000British fiction include Jean-Michel Ganteau’s ‘Espousing the Wound:Dispossession as Practice in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin’ (pp. 60–73), Georges Letissier’s ‘The Eclipse of Heroism and the Outing of PluralMasculinities in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child’ (pp. 42–59), andLaura Colombino’s ‘Caring, Dwelling, Being: The Phenomenology ofVulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ (pp. 203–22).

Merritt Moseley’s ‘Julian Barnes and the Contemporary English Sequel’ (pp.128–41), Isabelle Robin’s ‘P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley: A Sequelwith Many Twists’ (pp. 163–73), and Georges Letissier’s ‘Uncanny Repetitions:The Generative Power of the “Reader, I Married Him” Mantra in TracyChevalier’s Anthology of Short Stories’ (pp. 177–92) are all collected inPrequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, edited byArmelle Parey.

Terrorism and Literature, edited by Peter C. Herman, contains some importantcontributions to post-2000 British literary studies. Most notable here are MichaelC. Frank’s ‘“Why Do They Hate Us?”: Terrorists in American and BritishFiction of the Mid-2000s’ (pp. 340–60) and Tim Gauthier’s ‘ConceptualConfusion: The Ambiguities of the War on Terror in Roy Bhattacharya’s TheWatch and Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations’ (pp. 412–31).

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story began as BettinaJansen’s Ph.D. thesis. Through a focus on black British writing from the 1950sto the twenty-first century, Jansen traces the complex and heterogeneous com-munities that comprise Britain and places them in direct opposition to ‘populistand nationalist evocations of an “original” ethno-racial community’ (p. 1). Thelatter third of the book deals with post-2000 fiction, namely the work of SuhaylSaadi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Hari Kunzru. Jansen’s chapter on Saadi’srenegotiation of his Scottishness is particularly interesting. It explains a lack ofcritical interest in Saadi’s work in the context of his Scottish nationality, Muslimfaith, Pakistani community, and his writerly interest in working-class lives.Jansen examines Saadi’s Scottish stories as challenges to ‘the reductive image of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



white, Celtic Scottishness’ (p. 188). She distinguishes between two differentforms of literary exploration in Saadi’s writing, suggesting that his urban writingtends to offer a postcolonial rewriting that culminates in a mythical vision of anall-encompassing unified future, while his rural stories caricature stereotypes toundermine essentialisms. These two forms work in tandem to keep each other incheck.The final section of Narratives of Community considers black British writing

in the context of cosmopolitanism, and especially the post-9/11 shift towards acosmopolitanism that ‘acknowledges conflict, crisis and threat’ (p. 251). Jansendoes an excellent job of problematizing the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ itself byexplaining its roots and historical trajectory before landing on contemporary post-colonial theories of plural ‘cosmopolitanisms’. A chapter on Kunzru’s develop-ment of a ‘global vista’ (p. 261) in spatial and thematic terms is followed by thebook’s closing chapter, which returns to Saadi and asserts that he is the ‘contem-porary black British writer who is most concerned with cosmopolitanism in hisshort fiction (p. 279). Though this claim is not necessarily defended to the extentit deserves, the chapter of analysis that follows convincingly demonstrates thecosmopolitan strain in Saadi’s writing.Emily Spiers’s Pop-Feminist Narratives: The Female Subject under

Neoliberalism in North America, Britain, and Germany dedicates its fourth chap-ter to contemporary British fiction (pp. 135–83). Spiers analyses the ways thatthe writing of Scarlett Thomas, Helen Walsh, and Gwendoline Riley problematizesubjectivity by fragmenting coherent identities. She argues that these writers pre-sent female transgression as a complex oscillation between liberating and con-taining agency. The chapter is built upon reading these literary fictions againstpop-feminist handbooks by British journalists like Caitlin Moran and HaleyFreeman that offer an explicitly feminist identity ‘packaged as a ready-made, ce-lebrity-endorsed ontological product’ (p. 135). This proves to be an exceptionallyinteresting method to critique these ready-made pseudo-feminist products thatdoubles up as a remedy to the paucity of critical attention paid to writers likeScarlett Thomas.Incest in Contemporary Literature, edited by Miles Leeson, collects a series of

essays in an attempt to work through the fractious relationship that literature haswith the depiction of incest. Most of the essays consider the multiple ways inwhich incest is deployed as a political metaphor. Richard Duggan, in ‘“OurClose But Prohibited Union”: Sibling, Incest, Class and National Identity in IainBanks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale’ (pp. 180–97), for instance, identifiesthe motif of sibling incest in this novel as signifying a shift in Banks’s reflectionson Scottish national identity towards a sense of Scotland existing between cul-tures rather than in isolation. This book tends towards thinking of a long contem-porary moment, with scant offerings on post-2000 fiction beyond Duggan’schapter.Nicole Falkenhayer’s Media, Surveillance and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States

offers a cultural study of the integration of surveillance into everyday life. Sheinterrogates the affective implications of social control, and explores not only theways in which we imagine and narrate surveillance but also the ways in whichsurveillance has itself been used to narrate stories of Great Britain. This is aninterdisciplinary book that analyses film and even CCTV footage as well as


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



literature. The third chapter of the book contains the most sustained engagementwith British literature, focusing on Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost [2007]and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English [2011]. Falkenhayer defines these as fic-tions of being captured, and contends that they narrate a world in which we arealways already captured by the pervasive and invasive apparatus of surveillance.Media, Surveillance and Affect is a captivating appraisal of technologies thathave become normalized exceptionally fast in contemporary life, especially inBritain, but have enormous implications in the social and political realms.

Twenty-First Century British Fiction and the City, edited by Magali CornierMichael, is a wonderful collection of essays. The entire book is an importantcontribution to twenty-first-century British literary studies. Ella Mudie’s chapter,‘Convulsions of the Local: Contemporary British Psychogeographical Fiction’,uses close readings of Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Nick Papadimitrou on theunique capacity of psychogeographical writing to ‘question neoliberal capital-ism’s pervasive restructuring of everyday life’ (p. 208). While its uniqueness inthis regard is somewhat taken for granted, the chapter impressively elucidates themyriad ways in which psychogeographical fiction destabilizes neoliberal spatial-ity. For example, Mudie uses an analysis of Iain Sinclair’s Dining on Stones, orThe Middle Ground [2004], which she characterizes as a psychogeography of theA13, to think about the liminal zones outside of the capital city’s boundaries andthe significance of shifting beyond and outside of the parameters of ‘LiteraryLondon that was very much the focal point of psychogeographical practices inEngland in the 1990s’ (p. 211).

Cosmopolitanism crops up again in Magali Cornier Michael’s chapter, ‘TheCosmopolitan Potential of Urban England? Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks ofRemarkable Things’. She examines fictional representations of and responses tothe tension between universal concern and respect for difference in the cosmopol-itan ideal, and identifies If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things [2002] as a par-ticularly strong case in point. Cornier Michael links the novel’s alternationbetween two narrative strands, one made up of short sketches and the other anomniscient narrative, with the oscillation between the universal and the particularthat cosmopolitan thought must mediate. By emphasizing everyday material ex-istence alongside bodily vulnerability, Cornier Michael argues, the novel cham-pions a grounded sense of potential connection that gestures towards a hopefulcosmopolitanism in spite of that which appears to stand in the way. NickBentley’s chapter, ‘“Why Should You Go Out?”: Encountering the City inMonica Ali’s Brick Lane’, considers the spatial politics of the city/village dichot-omy which he reads alongside other binaries, such as modernity/tradition, public/domestic, and multiculturalism/monoculturalism. He is quick to emphasize thatBrick Lane [2007] cannot simply be explained through these binary oppositions.Like Cornier Michael, Bentley shifts his focus to oscillation and the way thenovel depicts interstitial spaces between binaries. This chapter deals not onlywith the poetics and aesthetics of space in Brick Lane, but also the politicalimplications of the novel within and beyond the real space of Brick Lane.

Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, edited by Deirdre Flynn andEugene O’Brien, is a collection of essays that address loss in Irish literature in anumber of ways, ranging from ‘loss of language to personal loss, sovereign lossto economic loss’ (p. 1). The essays assembled here engage poetry and drama as


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



well as the novel. Two chapters are of particular interest to scholars of post-2000fiction: Maria Beville’s ‘In Search of Lost History: Embodied Memory and theMaterial Past in Post-Millennial Irish Fiction’ (pp. 21–36) takes a new materialistapproach to Anne Enright’s The Gathering [2007] and John Banville’s The Sea[2005] in order to explore the relationship between objects, the material past, andmemory. Beville succinctly explains the new materialist desire to centre the bodyin cultural criticism, and makes an excellent observation that the transition frompoststructuralism to new materialism is ‘literally the plot of Enright’s TheGathering’ (p. 22). She argues that both of these novels chart a shift away froma relativizing and destabilizing relationship to memory and history towards aresolute, material-reliant approach to the past. Deirdre Flynn’s chapter, ‘Holdingon to “Rites, Rhythms and Rituals”: Mike McCormack’s Homage to Small TownIrish Life and Death’ (pp. 37–52) explores the effects of neoliberalism, with par-ticular emphasis on the fall of the Celtic Tiger, through McCormack’s SolarBones [2016]. The novel’s protagonist, Marcus Conway, has died and returns forAll Souls’ Day. Flynn argues that, in order for him to come to terms with hisown loss of life, he must first come to terms with economic loss and the effectthis has had on the rites and rituals of his small-town home. She suggests thatthe liminal space between life and death that Marcus inhabits provides a uniquevantage point from which he can see through the chaos to find connections, be-tween life and land, and the personal and political.

4. Drama Pre-1950

(a) General

Interest in the impact of the two world wars on theatre continues to be high,with the publication in 2018 of several books that look at representations of theGreat War, musical theatre, and developments in the immediate period after1945. There have also been additions to the growing studies of suffrage drama,theatre in Ireland, and a welcome reprint of a book on left-wing theatre.There has been a pleasing rise of interest on theatre between 1914 and 1918.

Roger Foss’s book, Till the Boys Come Home: How British Theatre Fought theGreat War, is a useful addition to this, and it is lavishly illustrated with pic-tures of plays, programmes, and sheet music. He starts with a description ofGerald du Maurier’s An Englishman at Home [1909], in which an ordinarymiddle-class family is invaded by foreign soldiers. The themes of national fearand patriotism picked up on concerns at the time about the country’s lack ofnational defence.Lord Kitchener approved of battalions made up of professions, and only a few

months into the war, 600 ‘actor-warriors’ had joined up. Ivor Novello’s ‘Keepthe Home Fires Burning’ was described by the Daily Mail as ‘the battle hymn ofthe Great War’, providing morale for the troops. Programmes advertised shopsthat sold all-British products, publicity photographs showed cast members knit-ting items to be shipped abroad, and everywhere there was huge support for jin-goistic material. The theatre had already been at the forefront of recruitmentcampaigns, encouraging men to enlist to protect ‘their’ country. When war wasdeclared in 1914, any even remotely patriotic piece was greeted with enthusiasm,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



whether that was Clara Buck singing ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’ or a tableau ofactresses representing Russia, Belgium, Britannia, and France in the revue NotLikely at the Alhambra [1914]. Many productions were altered to include topicalreferences or at least one patriotic song or address.

It was important for theatre workers to stress British credentials. The Lorchfamily, the highest-paid circus troupe in the world, was arrested inMiddlesbrough because they were German-Jewish. Others anglicized or changedtheir names, including the royal family (although that didn’t happen of courseuntil 1917). There are also lively descriptions of what happened to men who hadnot enlisted, such as when a seaside concert party in Colwyn Bay nearly pro-voked a riot on the erroneous presumption that the performers were shirking theirduties.

Foss’s book has a chapter dedicated to each year of the war, which means thatthere is less emphasis upon the cross-fertilization of ideas across the period; how-ever, this structure does provide a useful trajectory of the rise, decline, and riseagain of the theatre during the war years, much of which was affected by the pri-vations of war and interference of the government. While the book focuses onthe home front, Foss conveys the excitement felt by soldiers abroad of visitingconcert parties, including those headed by Lena Ashwell, who established ascheme to have theatres in every camp in the country and took her concert par-ties to the front from 1915. By 1916 enlistment had been so successful thatwomen had to take over many traditionally male roles: stage-door keepers, the-atre managers, producers, and so on. This is an under-researched area and itwould have been useful to hear more on this topic, but altogether this is a valu-able book on theatre during the war years.

Naomi Paxton continues her researches into women and theatre in StageRights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–58, andlike Foss’s book it contains illustrations of artefacts of the time. Chapters areentitled: ‘Exhibition’, ‘Sisterhood’, ‘Visibility’, ‘Militancy’, ‘Hope’, and‘Legacy’. The introduction sets out to re-evaluate the AFL, explaining that whilemuch has been written on the topic, there has been so much emphasis upon theAFL’s links with the suffrage movement that its wider nuances have been leftunder-explored. Acknowledgement is given to Julie Holledge, whose InnocentFlowers sparked the first wave of interest in suffrage drama in 1981. Paxton’sbook draws on this seminal work and other studies, but goes further by makingconnections, not just between the AFL and suffrage drama but wider theatre his-tory at the time, such as socialist and political drama. In this way, greater weightis given to the influence of its many male supporters, including J.M. Barrie,George Bernard Shaw, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Israel Zangwill. Paxtondraws upon ‘micro history’ (p. 2), such as details of factual data and oral narra-tive. There is much information here on how the AFL used large-scale exhibi-tions to publicize its work. One important aspect is the commodification ofwomen in general and the suffrage movement in particular at this time. The AFLmade good use of exhibitions to promote the work of the suffrage movement.The greatest was the WSPU Women’s Exhibition at the Prince’s Skating Rink inKnightsbridge during 1909; but these also became testing places for performersto try out their work, thereby aiding professional development. Again, the AFLacted as a counterpoint to the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ with a strong sisterhood


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



forming between members, not just within the suffrage movement, but in the the-atre industry as a whole, as female playwrights, actresses, directors, and technicalstaff made connections that helped their careers. This was perhaps an earlier in-carnation of the ‘consciousness-raising groups’ of the Women’s LiberationMovement, with spaces provided for women to explore their similar experiencesof patriarchal oppression which then fed into the kind of plays being written.One important aspect of the AFL was the development of the Woman’s

Theatre, headed by Inez Bensusan in 1913. This put women in charge of a the-atre designed by and for them: more female roles, greater opportunities for the-atre workers, improved employment conditions, and a better share of the profits.This fed into a wider international network, aided by a large foreign contingentof workers in the AFL: Bensusan herself was a Jewish Australian. The AFL’spresence in the form of respectable working women at mass marches and demon-strations helped to dispel the equation made between theatre and prostitution,women as the weaker sex, and ‘populist stereotypes of ugly, hysterical, disorgan-ized, militant suffrage campaigners’ (p. 87). The AFL had to be careful not toalign itself with the militant activities of the suffrage movement but rather tomaintain a neutral stance, even while putting forward a social and politicalagenda. This helped to increase the longevity of the group. Indeed, past workson this topic have sometimes petered out after the start of the First World War,but there is plenty of information here about the AFL’s work during both worldwars and beyond, showing how its legacy lasted until the end of the 1950s.While it was in existence for fifty years, suffrage drama only accounts for thefirst six years of this and has been, up to now, the most written about. Paxton’sbook is therefore a welcome account of the wide range and impact of this politic-ally based theatre group.Unusually but effectively, each chapter of Leslie Hill’s book, Sex, Suffrage

and the Stage, starts with an anecdote about Elizabeth Robins, who is accordedher rightful position as a pioneer of women’s theatre and feminism. Hill uses thepremiere of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1889 as her starting point and ends withthe outbreak of war in 1914. This is treated as ‘one theatrical “generation” interms of its understanding of theatrical conventions and innovations, literaryassociations, experiences and memories of current events, and interpersonal con-nections between people in overlapping social circles’ (p. xix). There are explora-tions of how the binary dualistic representations of the Victorian ‘fallen woman’and the ‘angel in the house’ gave way to the role of the New Woman in the1890s, and then how female stage roles became more politically charged in theEdwardian period. The broad sweep of this is well-trodden material, but Hillinvigorates it with her mention of other works. For example, Robins’s book MyLittle Sister [1913] was initially a success, but failed when adapted for the the-atre, not so much because of its subject of sex trafficking but because its indict-ment of the complicity of the establishment was deemed too problematic for thepublic stage. Perversely, Robins’s work may well have inspired ChristabelPankhurst to publish The Great Scourge and How To End It [1913], a condemna-tion of the sexual double standard and suffering of women infected with sexuallytransmitted diseases. In this way the interconnections between art and politics aretherefore persuasively made. The usual suffrage plays are discussed: How theVote Was Won [1909] by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John; A Chat with


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Mrs Chicky [1912], by Evelyn Glover; and Lady Geraldine’s Speech [1909], byBeatrice Harraden [1909]. It is pleasing, though, to see that there are also refer-ences to less well-known works such as Mary Cholmondeley’s Votes for Men[1909], Netta Syrett’s Might is Right [1909], and Joan Dugdale’s 10 ClowningStreet [1913]. In the latter play, the prime minister’s daughters return from a stintworking in low-paid jobs and challenge their father on his out-of-touch views onfemale working conditions. This is one of the plays at this time not just con-cerned with enfranchisement, but with social injustice as well. There is also afascinating selection of photographs, including the ‘Trafalgar Square’ scene fromRobins’s Votes for Women [1907], Marjorie Annan Bryce as Joan of Arc at thehuge Women’s Procession in June 1911, and Indian suffragists on the Women’sCoronation Procession in the same year.

One of the male supporters of female suffrage, J.M. Barrie, is the focus of asmall book on Peter Pan by Lucie Sutherland. This is part of Routledge’s FourthWall series, which is designed to give new critical perspectives on plays in ashort format. Its size may be unusual (it is not even a hundred pages long) but itincludes much useful information. Sutherland looks at Peter Pan, for too longseen as merely an entertaining children’s Christmas show, to explore not onlywhy it has become a perennial favourite since its first performance on 27December 1904 (the use of spectacle, action, nostalgia, and the power of imagin-ation), but also its darker elements. Her book covers such issues as loneliness,loss, and death (Peter’s line ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ was thetitle of one of Beryl Bainbridge’s novels). However, while they are raised, therecould have been much further analysis of these areas, not just in terms ofBarrie’s personal relationship with the ‘Lost Boys’ but how this gained greatersociopolitical resonance after the First World War with its own ‘LostGeneration’.

The author considers the commercial aspects of the play, the royalties fromwhich are given in perpetuity to Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Children’sCharity. Much of the book is given over to aspects of staging and the myriadways in which the play has been adapted. This includes Barrie himself, who con-tinued to revise the text until his death in 1937, suggesting perhaps his inabilityto comes to terms with the traumatic roots of the subject. We learn that, whileBarrie disapproved of Ibsenite realism, the stage directions of Peter Pan demandthat all elements of the play, even including the fantastical, be treated with thesame level of meticulousness. It is indebted to commedia dell’arte: Peter is atrickster based on Harlequin (who also influenced the role of the principal boy inpantomimes); similarly, Wendy is Columbine, who often takes control of the situ-ation, as this female character does at the end of the play. Much enlightening in-formation is provided about the ‘age-blind’ casting of the first production.Creating the role of Peter, Nina Boucicault’s unhelpful instruction from Barriewas to play him as a ‘one-day-old bird’ and she was so relieved to hear thunder-ous applause from the first-night audience that she burst into tears of relief. Inthe same production, Peter’s costume gave the appearance of dying vegetation sothat he could blend into the landscape of Never-Never Land, and Tinker Bell didnot wear a fairy outfit with wings, but one that gave the impression of a shim-mering mirage of coloured lights.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



The genre of pantomime also appears in Ben McPherson’s book CulturalIdentity in British Musical Theatre 1890–1939, which is a handsome hardback,although it would have been greatly enhanced by the use of illustrations.McPherson is commendably concerned with the representation of identity onstage, especially in relation to Britishness and the empire, and shows how thisintersects with issues of class and gender. Evidence is provided of the complex-ities of national identity, noting the differences between English, Irish, Scottish,and Welsh, and how the concept of being British changed under the three mon-archs who ruled from 1837 to 1936. This was also affected by developments inthe way that the empire was seen, as well as the First World War. The authornotes that musical theatre is a catch-all genre, encompassing burlesque, comedy,music hall, and English comic opera. McPherson shows how this genre affordedthe perfect opportunity for the cultural performance of Britishness, though theincreasing use of terms such as Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Scottish, and Anglo-Welshhad the effect of redefining ‘Britishness’ as more specifically meaning‘Englishness, with London at its metropolitan centre’ (p. 37).Musical comedy soon became a genre that showed the pressure of modernity:

its issues often focused on the clash between the rural and the urban, as well ascharting the changing role of women. There is an especially interesting chapteron how the representation of the ‘shop girl’ in musical comedy helped to prob-lematize the Victorian division of the spheres. As McPherson explains, ‘In an erawhere a woman’s place was in the private domestic sphere, young, working classwoman . . .quickly became part of the public sphere; a potent symbol of material-ism and female empowerment (or “transgression”) in modernity’ (p. 67). This ismore evident in plays such as The Shop Girl [1894], The Girl from Kays [1903],and The Girl Behind the Counter [1906] rather than in the commercially advanta-geous relationship between the stage and the fashion and beauty industries. Thewar changed the late Victorian view of masculinity as imbued in Christian sto-icism based on the Protestant work ethic to one more concerned with the self-effacing loyalty of the working classes in The Lads of the Village [1917], as wellas expressing anxieties about the lessening of the power of the patriarch, demon-strated in Betty [1915].Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the section on empire:

‘Ornamentalism and Orientalism’. The author reminds us of the power andspread of the British empire and shows how this was represented on stage, obvi-ously in terms of the depiction of racial difference, but McPherson also showshow this is shown too via class, rank, and status. Much has previously been saidabout representations of China and Japan, but here there is also mention of othercolonies, most specifically in India, in The Cingalee [1904] and The Blue Moon[1905], and Sri Lanka in In Sweet Ceylon [1905].Gill Plain’s edited collection British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960:

Postwar provides a persuasive argument that literature of the period between thelandslide victory of the Labour Party in 1945 and the start of the SwingingSixties was an important (and oft-overlooked) period of rapid transformation.Plain sees ‘post-war’ as referring not only to a historical period but also a‘“cultural sensibility”, reaching back into the war and forward into the secondhalf of the twentieth century; it is a political condition and a state of mind’ (pp.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



3–4). This consists of a tension between the need for change but also for the sta-bility of the familiar.

Two chapters relate specifically to the theatre. Rebecca D’Monte’s‘Democracy, Decentralisation and Diversity: The Renaissance of British Theatre’(pp. 68–84) suggests that the theatre of the immediate post-war period is far lessconservative than generally thought. Instead, this was a period that continued theradicalization of theatre during the Second World War, especially in terms of lo-cation, staging, and subject matter, the latter of which was heavily influenced byEuropean pioneers, including Brecht, Ionesco, and Sartre. It was also a time thatthe boundaries between amateur and professional and regional and the metropoliswere redrawn, along with the bringing together of the commercial and the avant-garde.

Class and gender lines were being renegotiated well before the appearance ofthe Angry Young Man in the mid- to late 1950s, some expressions of which, likeJohn Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger [1956], were dramatically far less rad-ical than, say, Bridget Boland’s Cockpit eight years earlier in 1948. The shiftingpopulation of the war years, with the concomitant growth in regional theatre, hadled to a new type of audience, triggering a growing egalitarianism, furthered byinterest in the civic function of theatre as a place to educate and enlighten, notjust to entertain.

Clare Cochrane’s chapter, ‘Creating Vital Theatre: New Voices in a Time ofTransition’ (pp. 313–30), again considers how the canon of this period’s dramawas set by Look Back in Anger, a play that marked the watershed moment whichseemingly separated the past and the present. However, figures like JoanLittlewood and George Devine were more essential to the concept of a ‘vital the-atre’, promoted by Encore magazine between 1956 and 1965 as bringing togetherthe theatrically avant-garde with the socially concerned. It is good to see mentionmade of N.F. Simpson (seen by William Gaskill as a link between the GoonShow and Monty Python’s Flying Circus), Arnold Wesker, and John Arden, allunderrated playwrights of the period. Cochrane’s research shows how the RoyalCourt theatre championed not only plays about the working classes and regionsbut also (if only occasionally) work that reflected the growth of multi-culturalBritain with its racial issues, including plays by Barry Reckord, Errol John, andWole Soyinka.

Lady Augusta Gregory appears in most studies of Irish theatre, but EglantinaRemport’s Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics is thefirst full-length account of her vision of her aesthetic and social ideals. Ampledemonstration is given of how she was affected by, or was part of, several keyartistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Pre-Raphaelites, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement.Her plays Spreading the News [1904] and Hyacinth Halvey [1906] were verymuch taken up with the co-operative ideals put forward by Horace Plunkett andGeorge Russell, but she was mainly impacted upon by John Ruskin’s views onsocial reform and artistic freedom, and much is made of his influence. In this,she differed from Yeats, with whom she co-founded the Abbey Theatre (original-ly known as the Irish National Theatre) in 1904.

During her time Gregory worked tirelessly to promote change in Irish polit-ics and the arts, but Remport interrogates the view that she was merely a


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



member of the landed aristocracy, patron of the arts, and dilettante dramatist.Along the way the myth is also exploded that she was a consistently militantIrish nationalist. Cathleen Ni Houlihan (written with Yeats in 1902) and TheRising of the Moon [1907] are regularly touted as nationalist plays, but thisignores later texts which differ from this political view, such as The Canavans[1908] or The Wrens [1914].Here we are given a fresh perspective which focuses on Gregory as an import-

ant social reformer whose Ruskinian beliefs brought about significant changes.Her artistic vision was shaped not just by the European Grand Tours that shetook, but also Ruskin’s view that art should be for the many, not the few.Remport therefore highlights the reciprocity for Gregory between social reformand art to a level that has not been done before. In this way she puts forward apersuasive argument for Gregory as a social, political, and theatrical pioneer whodid much to shape Ireland in the first part of the twentieth century.Fabio Luppi’s Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904–1938) also offers

a fresh look at the history of the Abbey Theatre, this time by focusing on thetension between fathers and sons. He argues that the father figure on stage is arepresentation of a patriarchal figure (familial and religious) as well as a politicalmetaphor for a crucial period in Irish history. Luppi makes reference to classicalfather–son relationships—such as Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus,Priam and Hector—to show how these figures were subverted in a way thatunderpinned the tragedy of post-colonial Ireland. Reference is also made to thepsychoanalytical theories of Freud, Jung, and Lacan. One of the best aspects ofthe book is that it does not just draw on familiar dramatists associated with theAbbey Theatre, including Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Lady Gregory, but also onsome of the less discussed playwrights of the period: Padraic Colum, GeorgeShiels, and Teresa Deevy. St John Ervine, better known as a theatre critic, alsocrops up. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [1907] is perhaps the mostcommonly cited Irish play in which a son imagines the death of his father, illus-trating the desire to escape from authority and the constrictions of the past.Interestingly, Luppi points out that at this time there were many more theatricalinstances in which a father destroys his son, such as On Baile’s Strand [1904],The Blind Wolf [1928], and Purgatory [1938], suggesting that even across fourdecades the forces of tradition, religion, and politics were still too strong tobreak.The book continues the view that the history of the Abbey Theatre and that of

the politics of the time can be mapped onto one another, and this is used as away to structure the book. From the opening of the theatre in 1904 to the EasterRising of 1916, the plays tended to debate the impossibility of a non-violent re-sponse to British colonialism versus Irish paralysis. From 1916 to 1922 therewas emphasis upon pro-independent views; 1922 to 1932 was the most tumultu-ous period, witnessing violence and riots, while the period 1932 to 1938 wasboth more peaceful yet ironically less experimental.As Luppi cogently points out, the father–son relationship calls ‘into question

basic concepts regarding social life: the concept of blood, intended as family val-ues and the transmission of legacy; the idea of progress; the concept of familialcohesion that did not coincide with an increase in the Irish population; the nat-ural conservative structure of rural societies in contrast with the need for change


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



felt by new generations; social friction in urban areas’ (p. xvi). At the end of thebook a short but useful chapter gives brief biographies of some of the play-wrights, especially Yeats, to consider how their own relationships with theirfathers might have influenced their work.

Finally, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements inBritain and America, edited by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and StuartCosgrove, appears as part of the Routledge Revivals series, which reprints im-portant past works on theatre. First published in 1985, this is an excellent source-book of documents and commentary from the high point of working-classtheatre. It takes into account the history of theatre and socialism from 1880 to1935 and how this led to the founding and development of the Workers’ TheatreMovement between 1926 and 1935. There are also several of their propagandapieces here, including The First of May [1932] and The Rail Revolt [1932]. RoyWaterman gives his experience of Proltet, the Yiddish-speaking arm of theWTM, and Ewan MacColl explains how Theatre of Action came into being inManchester. An international perspective is given by referencing the Workers’Theatre in America, with scripts including the famous play by Clifford Odets,Waiting for Lefty [1935].

(b) George Bernard Shaw

This year saw four notable new additions to Palgrave’s Bernard Shaw and HisContemporaries series. The first of these, Christopher Wixon’s Bernard Shawand Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives, delves into Shaw’s understanding anduse of advertising both in the fashioning of his public persona as ‘GBS’ and inthe expression of ideas in his plays and other works. After an introduction thatconnects Shaw personally and professionally with the rise of modern advertising,chapter 2 contextualizes the influence of the marketing of medicine in London atthe turn of the century and Shaw’s own views about both. This, in turn, informsan analysis of Misalliance that focuses on the elements which, like the Turkishbath, epitomize the novel phenomenon of health products as modern commod-ities. This question is also connected to Shaw’s personal habits in diet, hygiene,clothing, and exercise, for example. The portable bath unit becomes an iconicelement in a household that Shaw depicts as ‘toxic, contaminated not only bymass cultural consumption but also by idleness and physical degeneration’ (p.44). Chapter 3 illustrates how ‘the continued honing of the testimonial techniquein commercial advertising would prove anything but a misalliance’ with Shaw’s‘rhetorical prowess’ (p. 62). As the rhetorical and technical aspects of this typeof advertising evolved, to the point of being ‘marred by both overusage and im-proper attribution without consent’ (p. 67), Shaw took issue with this phenom-enon. Chapter 4 discusses how ‘Shaw’s participation in two product campaignsin 1929, one for Harrods and one for Simmons mattresses, plants him in the mid-dle of the industry controversy over what to do with the testimonial’ (p. 95).Along these lines, this chapter provides insights into ‘how executives and writersin the industry worked to render profitable mergings of literary personality withcommodities’ (p. 97). Chapter 5 describes how, as the industry was fighting ‘forlegitimacy and seek new ways to regain the public’s attention and trust’, Shawagain became ‘the linchpin of a campaign that sought to counteract the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



technique’s beleaguered public reputation’ (p. 135). Shaw’s hand in the campaignto promote Ireland as a tourist destination is then described in great detail, fromits genesis and relative success to the part the playwright played in its delineationand ultimate outcome. All of this is done against the backdrop of Shaw’s viewson the travel industry and its connections with imperialism and the political situ-ation of Ireland, particularly as shown in John Bull’s Other Island. The book, inconclusion, encapsulates the idea that Shaw had a ‘prophet motive’ in his en-gagement with advertising, as he seems to have foreseen the industry’s growthand ramifications.Concentrating on Shaw’s novels, Stephen Watt’s Bernard Shaw’s Fiction,

Material Psychology, and Affect studies concepts that are rather elusive, like af-fect or value, alongside others that are more palpable, like money. Chapter 1argues that the confluence of ‘economics, psychology, affect theory, and, perhapssurprisingly, performance studies’ is necessary to Watt’s approach (p. 1). Thisintroductory chapter connects the feelings of worthlessness, anger, and disgustthat Shaw often felt as a result of his ‘chronic impecuniosity’ (p. 3), which tosome extent led to his study of economic theory. This resulting interest, in turn,made him the acquaintance of a number of his contemporaries who were know-ledgeable in this field. These circumstances, Watt argues, sparked ‘The Theatreof the Future’, a work that constitutes ‘both a forecast of and a prescient“shorthand” for Shaw’s understanding of human subjectivity’, especially in rela-tion to performance, ‘the substitution inherent to it’ and the vital role of moneyin the ‘psychical life of the human subject’ (p. 19). These intersections lead tothe introduction of key characters in Shaw’s plays as subject studies for Watt,whether it be because they are ‘self-made’, like Undershaft (Major Barbara), orbecause money is at the root of their ethos, like Crofts (Mrs Warren’sProfession). Chapter 2 uses psychoanalytic theory in order to link Shaw’s psy-chological scope on value and affect with his symbolic use of money in playslike On the Rocks, ‘which braids affect with money but also comments on pro-fectitious and adventitious money’ (p. 52). The second part of the chapter doeslikewise with Georg Simmel’s economic theory, which serves as the basis for adiscussion of Shaw’s own understanding of value in technical terms. This, inturn, goes full circle when we understand ‘the manner in which the discourse ofmarginalist economic thought informs both Freud and Shaw’ (p. 66). In this re-gard, Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money is a fundamental text for the author atthe intersection of economics and affect. As such, it shapes the interpretation ofShaw’s works: the psyche of Shaw’s characters is deeply influenced by money,even though his plays are still ‘plays of life, character, and human destiny’ andnot essays on economics (p. 79). Chapter 3 explores the ‘power of money’ in allits manifestations. The power of money for Shaw involved ‘money’s relationshipto respectability in both social and psychical arenas’, as well as ‘the analogousrelationship of affect and psychical drive’ (p. 91). Watt connects the young, im-pecunious Shaw who was writing these novels (and the negative feelings associ-ated with his largely unsuccessful drive for money) with the process of ‘how thenaıve young writer evolved into a knowledgeable economist’ (p. 96). By andlarge, the ‘affective value’ of money and the feelings it generated for the youngShaw are the backbone of this chapter, whose social and psychological ramifica-tions are illustrated using the characters in The Irrational Knot and Immaturity.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Chapter 4 stems from Watt’s assessment of ‘Shaw’s framing of highly emotiveaction within the context of money’ (p. 140) in two chapters of Love Among theArtists. Apart from the Simmelian elements that these passages anticipate, theuse of ‘the theatre in these novels functions like’ many other ‘places where fic-tion meets the psychical realities of its audience, where conceptions of value aredebated and either endorsed or toppled’ (p. 144). Chapter 5 uses Shaw’s fourthnovel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, as the basis for a discussion of psychic econ-omy and the ubiquity of economic elements in the society of the turn of the cen-tury, as studied by Freud. This combination of the psychological and the materialaccounts for ‘the confirmation of shame’s existence through the blush, thestooped shoulder, or the averted gaze’ (p. 149), since shame is one of the nega-tive feelings associated with poverty. The chapter then goes on to provide exam-ples of a ‘taxonomy’ of ‘facial coloring in Shaw’s fiction’ as well as otherexamples of reactions that suggest shame, disgust, and other negative feelingsbrought about by economic questions (p. 156). Chapter 6 draws on the apparentparadoxes that critics have pointed out in An Unsocial Socialist in order to scru-tinize ‘the overdetermined nature of Trefusis’s unsocial “heartlessness”’ and ‘thebroadly subjective dimensions of “industrial kingship”, particularly its mechaniz-ing and fracturing of the human subject’ (p. 182). Trefusis’s behaviour is readagainst the backdrop of Shaw’s biography and a Freudian approach to narcissism.It should also be noted that the original project of the novel was ‘intended as ei-ther the inaugural installment of a multivolume chronicle of the “dissolution” ofcapitalism or as a social comedy aimed at eviscerating the arrogance, enervation,and greed of the privileged class’ (p. 183). In light of these premises, the conse-quences of industrialization are then studied from the perspective of Shaw’s ownunderstanding of Marxist theories and marginalism. Here value is usually embod-ied by production and material objects, which ‘emerge as metaphors both in anal-yses of the failings of Victorian society and in more innocent observations aboutlove, desire, and emotion’ (p. 203). A final chapter stresses how the combinationof Shaw the socialist and the radical thinker on sexuality should be taken intoconsideration when trying to disentangle the difficult relationship between ‘sexualrevolution and politico-economic theory—or, expressed more precisely, betweendesire and socialism’ in Shaw’s case (p. 218).

The fourth and final monograph from Palgrave, Joan Templeton’s Shaw’sIbsen: A Re-appraisal, takes up a long-standing challenge in Shaw studies, reca-pitulating the immense critical tradition of both Ibsen’s influence on Shaw andShaw’s critique of Ibsen. It also, perhaps most importantly, reassesses a series offossilized ideas about the intellectual and artistic concomitances between bothplaywrights. The book follows a chronological progression from Shaw’s forma-tive years as a budding dramatic critic to the revised edition of The Quintessenceof Ibsenism [1913]. Chapter 1 covers the period in which Shaw was introducedto Ibsen and how his ideas were shaped by the different works he had access toand the different Ibsenists he was in contact with, such as Eleanor Marx. Shaw’sfriendship with William Archer is a case in point, for his translations of Ibsenwere a ‘transformative experience’ for Shaw (p. 9). ‘Even in another language’,Templeton argues, ‘without the rhyme and meter of the original, Peer Gyntshocked Shaw into an awareness of Ibsen’s power’ (p. 10). Much of the rest ofthe chapter is concerned with Shaw’s ‘spirited defense of A Doll’s House’ (p. 22)


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



during its successful London run in 1889. In chapter 2, Templeton delves intothe genesis of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The primal spark here was the1890 lecture to the Fabian Society. Ibsen’s anti-idealism is here placed in contextwith a succinct section on the development of his revolutionary ideas, especiallythrough his intellectual (and largely epistolary) relationship with Georg Brandes.By outlining the scheme of Shaw’s train of thought in an orderly manner and bypointing out the qualities that Shaw stressed in each of Ibsen’s plays, Templetonmanages ‘to explain both the essential core of Ibsen’s thinking and the meaningof the term “Ibsenism” in contemporary parlance’ (p. 55). Chapter 3 examinesIbsen’s influence on Shaw as a playwright and critic during this period.Templeton revisits classic connections, such as those between A Doll’s Houseand Candida, but also explores interesting, sometimes obscure intellectual, cir-cumstantial, or personal links between other plays by both authors. ExploringShaw’s dramatic criticism too, Templeton shows how he put his ‘Ibsenite lens’(p. 185) to good use, whether in his reviews of Ibsen productions or in his habitof using ‘Ibsen as his standard for making invidious comparisons’ (p. 187).Chapter 4 offers commentary upon Shaw’s obituary of Ibsen in 1906 as well asthe revised edition of The Quintessence, published seven years later. Templetonargues that, apart from a largely laudatory tone, Shaw is able to pinpoint the‘new element’ in Ibsen’s work—modernism—as well as technical innovationsthat effectively brought about a new genre: the drama of ideas.The journal SHAW began 2018 with a themed issue on ‘Shaw in Performance’

that is more eclectic than is customary. This begins with a general introductionby the guest editors, Robert A. Gaines and Michael O’Hara, who declare their in-tention to veer off the road ‘of literary criticism and theory’ (p. 1). The resultingvolume incorporates contributions from the ‘the emerging field(s) of performancestudies/theory’ (p. 1), alongside several articles which cast light on the practicalconundrum of how ‘the director, dramaturg, and actress’ make decisions thatgive ‘her the dignity and respect Shaw envisioned for her’ (p. 4). Susan Felder’s‘Finding Shaw: A Hard Look at American Theatre Trends, DwindlingTechnique, and the Next Generation of Actors’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 6–19), repro-duces a conversation between the author and two directors known for their pro-ductions of Shaw, Robert Scogin and William Brown. Their prognostic opinionsabout Shaw’s legacy are based on reflections about how actors are trained, theintellectual habits of audiences, and the role of ‘discussion plays’ in the age ofTwitter, among other things. The practical implications of these reflections canbe seen in four subsequent essays: John M. McInerney’s ‘Directing Shaw Playsfor Community Theatre Audiences’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 41–7) uses a productionof Arms and the Man he directed at the Providence Road Theatre in Scranton,Pennsylvania, as the basis for comment on what separates Shaw from other play-wrights. Susan Frances Russell and Mary Christian use their respective essays todiscuss whether or how to update certain aspects of Shaw’s dramatic works.More specifically, Russell’s ‘The Personal Is Political: Performing Saint Joan inthe Twenty-First Century’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 88–112) explores how future pro-ductions of the play could benefit from the success of two one-act plays aboutthe Maid of Orleans written by women. ‘Looking at Shaw’s Saint Joan side byside with Carolyn Gage’s deliberately provocative polemic The Second Comingof Joan of Arc and Martha Kemper’s autobiographical collage Me, Miss Krause


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



and Joan’, Russell argues, allows ‘directors, dramaturgs and actors’ to access ‘amore feminist performance of Shaw’s play’ (p. 89). Of particular relevance arethe passages that relate to intertextuality and how, in general terms as well as inthe plays mentioned here, our reception of a play is inevitably shaped by otherworks that have been written ‘in dialogue with it’ (pp. 91–2). Mary Christianfocuses on ‘Plays Present and Unpresent: Updating Shaw’s Drama inPerformance’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 113–25), commenting on the challenges andopportunities of modernizing Shaw’s plays by ‘setting [their] characters and ac-tion in the present’ (p. 123). Christian takes the 2015 production of Pygmalion atthe Shaw Festival as a case study. In doing so, she looks into techniques thatwere unheard of when the play was originally written. These vary from utilizingBBC video to portraying Higgins as a snob who own lots of ‘expensive gadgets’from the digital era (p. 119). Other ways of updating the setting of the play haveto do with changes in costume design, the professions of some of the characters,and even the ‘racial otherness’ of the actress playing Eliza (p. 121). All of theseaspects, as the author eloquently points out, have deep ramifications for theplay’s meaning, and not only its social meaning.

The other three articles in this issue take a historical approach. Gustavo A.Rodrıguez Martın’s ‘Santa Juana: The Opening Season in Spain (1925–26)’(ShawR 38:i[2018] 20–40) analyses the premiere of Saint Joan in Spain. Actorand impresario Margarita Xirgu, who was almost singlehandedly responsible forthe first Shaw success in Spain, led a production that toured the country for overa year. The argument of the essay is informed by circumstantial elements, suchas the influence of the political situation in the country and the composition andaccuracy of the translated text or the inevitable comparisons with other simultan-eous productions in Europe. Soudabeh Anisarab’s ‘Too True To Be Good at the1932 Malvern Festival’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 48–65) explores this particular pro-duction to illustrate how Barry Jackson’s change of direction in the mandate ofthe festival—which involved an ‘emphasis on overseas visitors’ and consequently‘the announcement of plans for presenting a pageant of English drama’ (p. 51),conflicted with Shaw’s pessimistic (‘dystopian’) views about the future ofEngland. Anisarab singles out Shaw’s critical views towards religion and the em-pire in the play, not only to explain the conflict that is at the heart of the essay,but also to introduce later opinions expressed by Shaw about ‘his sense of es-trangement from’ the Malvern Festival (p. 62). Finally, Keith Dorwick’s ‘JoinedTogether as One: The Animal Dances in Androcles and the Lion’ (ShawR38:i[2018] 66–87) pinpoints a very concrete, and very Shavian, aspect of thisplay: the dances between the two title characters. A likely elaboration on a draw-ing from the Comic Almanack, the dance is one of the novel elements that Shawincorporates into the traditional accounts of this legend, which Dorwick summa-rizes at length. The author then moves on to explain the genesis of the play andof the features that deviate from the original fable, especially the unlikely friend-ship between slave and lion and its theatrical expression.

The other issue of SHAW from 2018 contains some articles that follow onfrom or complement previous work published there, inevitably prompting avidShavian readers to reach for earlier issues. Thus, for example, Daniel Leary’s‘Anagogue/Archetype in Arms and the Man: Shaw, Virgil, and Jung’ (ShawR38:ii[2018] 196–213) is a continuation of the article he wrote for the themed


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



issue on ‘Shaw and Classical Literature’ in 2017. Here, Leary closes his com-parative arguments between Arms and the Man and Virgil’s Aeneid by focusingon the anagogical level of this intertextual study. In his part-Jungian, part-spirit-ual analysis of the hero that was later to become the Superman, Leary drawsfrom varied sources to illustrate the genesis of the play and Shaw’s true inten-tions in writing it. In addition, there are relevant parallels between the characters,as archetypes, and between the structure of plot and sub-plot (or supra-plot) inboth works. Similarly, Peter Gahan had already outlined in previous work someof the elements discussed in ‘Bernard Shaw’s The Glimpse of Reality and theIconography of Saint Barbara’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 133–61), albeit with referenceto other plays. This time, instead of Major Barbara, Gahan focuses on a playthat has been neglected by critics for the most part. The main tenet of his articleis that Shaw’s first-hand knowledge of fifteenth-century Flemish art, especiallyafter his 1902 visit to Bruges to see an exhibition of the Flemish primitives,underlies some of the visual imagery in the play. The article begins by establish-ing the relevant background for his discussion, succinctly outlining the traditionaliconography of St Barbara and describing the relevant paintings from the Brugesexhibition. In light of this evidence, Gahan explores Shaw’s ‘“serious” intent’ (p.135) in writing The Glimpse of Reality through the potential connections betweenspecific artwork and some of the elements in the play, particularly Van Eyck’sSaint Barbara. Lagretta Tallent Lenker writes on ‘Shaw’s Interior Authors:Censored and Modern’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 162–95). This essay looks intoShaw’s controversial relationship with the Lord Chamberlain and censorship atlarge through the exploration of those characters in his plays who either self-censor their work or are censored by fellow characters. More specifically, Lenkersingles out Mrs Clandon in You Never Can Tell, John Tanner in Man andSuperman, Fanny O’Dowda in Fanny’s First Play, the Brothers Barnabas in Backto Methuselah, and the Maid in Saint Joan. After a preliminary discussion of thegeneral situation of censorship in Shaw’s time and his own views on the matter,Lenker sees Shaw’s fictional authors as reflections of the playwright himself‘against the dialectic of censorship and modernism that shaped Shaw’s work’ (p.167). Howard Ira Einsohn’s ‘Prophetic Comedy: Bernard Shaw, FlanneryO’Connor, and the Sacred Laughter of Distance Realism’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018]214–39) finds more parallelisms between Shaw and Flannery O’Connor ‘thanperfunctory assessments might suggest’ (p. 214). Einsohn uses ‘Good CountryPeople’ and Major Barbara as case studies that illustrate the similarities betweenthe two authors. These lie both in the methods they employed, such as shockingcomedy, and in the ideological basis of their ‘gospel’: a set of beliefs anchoredin what may be loosely termed as Christianity. An article in this issue that willsurely serve as a reference to Shaw scholars in the future is Michel Pharand’s ‘AGospel of Shawianity’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 240–53). After some brief introduc-tory remarks about Shaw’s very personal religious beliefs, this ‘SelectedBibliography of Writings By and About Bernard Shaw on Religion’ lists the pri-mary sources chronologically and the secondary sources alphabetically. After theusual section devoted to book reviews, this issue features ‘A ContinuingChecklist of Shaviana’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 272–330). Edited by Gustavo A.Rodrıguez Martın, this annotated bibliography is a more detailed version of the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



present bibliographical essay—at least in the sense that it also lists and commentson items that deal with Shaw studies only tangentially.

The only other monograph devoted to Shaw-related questions is BernardShaw’s Postmistress, edited by Leonard W. Conolly. This is the memoir ofJisbella Lyth, whose tenure at the post office of Ayot St Lawrence and her ac-quaintance with Shaw make her an invaluable witness to the life and epistolaryexchanges of the Irish playwright. This is not to mention the fact that Lyth was theinspiration for Z, the postmistress in Village Wooing. Of special interest also areher recollections of daily life around Shaw’s residence and her personal anecdotesabout the writer, including her acquisition of interesting pieces of Shaviana throughher contact with him. This memoir was originally recorded by Irish teacher and au-thor Romie Lambkin, whose manuscript lay largely forgotten in David Grapes’stheatre collection until it was published by Conolly, who puts his scholarly acumenand his knowledge of Shaw’s life and works to good use in this edition.

Elsewhere, Shaw continues to excite scholarly interest for his reinterpretationof historical figures. His study of Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra featuresimportantly in Miryana Dimitrova’s Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and ItsDramatic Afterlife. Among some of the peculiarities of Shaw’s treatment ofCaesar, Dimitrova observes ‘Shaw notably refused to accentuate the romanceplot’ with Cleopatra, something that foreshadows what happened between Elizaand Higgins in Pygmalion (p. 105). Dimitrova also stresses the fact that Shaw’sCaesar is a man of action, who ‘confirms his reputation by demonstrating impa-tience symptomatic of his efficiency’ (p. 106). However, the most Shavian elem-ent is ‘the pronounced contemporizing’ of the protagonist (p. 185).

Such use of history and historical figures by Shaw is famously anachronistic,largely because it is often a way of deploying his social critique while detachingthe obvious subject matter of the play from contemporary concerns. Along theselines, Gustavo A. Rodrıguez Martın argues in his essay ‘Bernard Shaw and theSubtextual Irish Question’ (in Villanueva Romero, Amador-Moreno, and SanchezGarcıa, eds., Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context, pp. 187–208) that thereexists a series of overt and covert references to the political situation in Irelandin his two most famous historical plays: Caesar and Cleopatra [1899] and SaintJoan [1923]. The references occur in semiotic elements that range from paratextsand phraseology to symbolism and imagery.

Jennifer Janecheck’s ‘Gendered Information Networks and the TelephoneVoice in Shaw’s Pygmalion and Village Wooing’ (TSLL 60:i[2018] 32–55)explores the representation of the ‘telephone voice’ in two of Shaw’s plays,claiming that these two plays utilize the ideal of the voice of the RomanticMother, which still polices the articulations of flesh-and-blood women throughtheir adherence to and reproduction of ‘BBC English’. Janecheck argues thatPygmalion and Village Wooing trace the desexualization of textual production,with the male–female relationships they depict imagining the new experiencewomen might have with language in a telephonic world.

Shaw’s musical criticism is a major area of study among scholars of his work.A case in point is Paul Watt’s ‘The Rise of the Professional Music Critic inNineteenth-Century England’ (in Golding, ed., The Music Profession in Britain,1780–1920, pp. 110–27). This describes the careers and professional qualities ofBernard Shaw alongside two other ‘versatile critics’ (p. 112) of the period,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



namely, Ernest Newman and Neville Cardus. Watt stresses the features theyshared, like coming ‘to their profession almost by accident’ and the connectionsthey enjoyed, while also pointing out the differences in the ‘style in which theywrote’ (p. 118). A more specific approach is taken in Harry White’s ‘“MakingSymphony Articulate”: Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History’ (in Dibble andHorton, eds., British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950, pp.102–22), where the author discusses Shaw in the intellectual and stylistic contextof his contemporary critics, particularly as pertains to Shaw’s championing ofWagner and Elgar. All of this without losing sight that ‘Shaw’s sense of musicalhistory was deeply inflected by his own search for a voice and subject-matter inthe theatre’ (p. 104).Shaw’s career as a playwright and critic is inextricably linked to his outspoken

political activism, especially as regards the Great War. This is at the core ofPhilippa Burt’s discussion in ‘From the Western Front to the East Coast:Barker’s The Trojan Women in the USA’ (NTQ 34:iv[2018] 320–38). Shaw’sopinions reveal themselves as truly relevant to understanding the ramifications ofthis production, when Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season inNew York following the outbreak of the First World War.In recent years little attention has been paid to the history of Shaw produc-

tions, particularly in the second half of the last century. In this regard, AudreyMcNamara has singlehandedly filled some of that niche with two publications.‘Longford Productions, Bernard Shaw, and the Irish Big House’ (in Clare, Lally,and Lonergan, eds., The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft, pp. 181–92) focuses on two high-profile productions of Heartbreak House, in 1946 and1956, which are responsible for properly introducing Ireland to the play andwhere the ‘way of life portrayed demonstrates recognition that war is a conse-quence of boredom and lack of purpose as much as international tensions’ (p.192). McNamara seeks to illustrate why Shaw was ‘a staple part’ of the reper-toire of the Gate Theatre during the twenty-four years of Longford Productions’existence (p. 182). A more contemporary scope is to be found in her chapter,‘Reflections on Bernard Shaw and the Twentieth-Century Dublin Stage’ (in ThePalgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, pp. 819–25), where she comments on the Shaw productions at the Abbey Theatre and theGate Theatre in the 2000s and 2010s. Special attention is paid to Mrs Warren’sProfession, Pygmalion, and Heartbreak House to conclude that Shaw’s ‘playsstill resonate in the twenty-first century in harmony with the work of the play-wrights who have succeeded him’ (p. 824).Shaw’s personal life is also the subject of much scholarly debate, his sexuality

being a case in point. Such is the focus of A.M. Gibb’s ‘Erica Cotterill and thePassionate Self of G.B. Shaw’ (ELT 61:iv[2018] 450–74). This essay ‘presents anew exploration of the Shaw–Cotterill relationship and of Shaw’s experiences of,and attitudes towards, sex’ in a way that challenges the view that he was a‘bloodless, asexual vegetarian’ (p. 450).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



5. Drama Post-1950

Amongst trends to the fore in this field during 2018 have been neoliberalism,Brexit, feminism, and issues around the body of the performer. The tenth anni-versary of Harold Pinter’s death has been marked by two monographs, andSimon Stephens’s work continues to attract considerable critical attention.

Stephen Wilmer’s Performing Statelessness in Europe examines a whole hostof performative work about refugees that has emerged in recent years, a situationresulting, he believes, from collective government inaction in providing an ethic-al asylum policy. Wilmer argues that theatre enters this vacuum and becomes animportant forum for debate and representation. The book considers responses byartists and theatre companies across Europe. Chapter 2 considers howAeschylus’s tragedy The Suppliants (adapted in 2016 by the dramatist DavidGreig) can be understood against the UK’s decision to leave the EuropeanUnion, and the way that refugees informed many debates held during the referen-dum. Chapter 3 discusses work that attempts to produce empathetic responses tothe figure of the refugee. One case study here is Anders Lustgartern’sLampedusa [2015], a monologue that uses direct address to its audience, a tech-nique Wilmer identifies as reminiscent of Brecht’s Lehrstucke plays such TheMother [1931]. Wilmer also believes that the internet podcast of Lampedusa bythe Guardian newspaper represents another method of reaching other sympatheticaudiences. This search for a wider constituency has also included performancesof Lustgarten’s play throughout Europe as well as Malta. Wilmer sees this venueas significant given its near location to the island itself.

Anna Harpin’s Madness, Art & Society: Beyond Illness is a fascinating studythat crosses the disciplines of film, theatre, and television. The book is organizedinto two sections: ‘Structures: Psychiatrists, Institutions and Treatments’ and‘Experiences: Realities, Bodies, Moods’. The former focuses on how sites ofpower associated with mental illness, such as asylums, are represented. Chapter1, ‘R.D. Laing and the Figure of the Psychiatrist’, looks at David Edgar’s MaryBarnes [1978]. This is still the key play that examines the relationship betweenthe patient and Laing’s methodologies for the treatment of psychosis. Harpin iscritical of some modes of representation employed in the play, commenting forexample that ‘we only look at and never with Mary’ (p. 34). Chapter 2, ‘Sites ofMadness’, includes a discussion on two plays by Joe Penhall, Some Voices[1994] and Blue/Orange [2000]. These both examine the treatment of the schizo-phrenic subject within the institution of the psychiatric hospital and post-treatment discharge in society. Some Voices is also considered through the waysthat the patient is constructed and sometimes misunderstood following dischargefrom hospital and out into the wider community, while Harpin focuses on pedan-tic demarcations in the diagnoses of mental illness in Blue/Orange. In Part II,chapter 4, ‘Imagining Reality: Figuring Perceptual Experiences on Stage andScreen’, focuses discussion on aesthetic representation: here Anthony Neilson’sRealism [2006] and debbie tucker green’s nut [2013] come under scrutiny for theways in which reality and delusion are both demarcated and demonstratedonstage.

Two major studies on the work of Harold Pinter mark the tenth anniversary ofthe playwright’s death. In what might be seen as a companion to his previous


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



study A Harold Pinter Chronology [2013], William Baker’s Pinter’s World:Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavours incorporates published andunpublished documents (mainly from the Harold Pinter archive housed at theBritish Library) as well as new interviews that map out key areas in Pinter’s lifethat held particular importance for him. Chief amongst these is the correspond-ence between his childhood friends, whom the actor, director, and writer (andmember of the circle) Henry Woolf refers to as ‘the Hackney gang’. The book isa combination of biography and chronological reference guide. Other chaptersare divided into ‘Passions’, ‘Restaurants and Friendships’, ‘Women’, ‘Religion’,and ‘Literary Influences and Favourites’. Taken together, the latter encompassesPinter’s work in theatre, as actor, director, and of course playwright; his lifelongpassion for cricket, both as spectator and player, as well as a later interest in thegame of bridge; and his musical tastes. The book also outlines Pinter’s extensivenetwork of friendships, with chapter 4 focusing on the women who wereinvolved in his life, both personally and professionally. Not surprisingly, thechapter ‘Politics and Religion’ focuses on Pinter’s shifting attitudes to his ownJewish background and his growing engagement with political issues. The con-cluding chapter, ‘Literary Influences and Favourites’, makes excellent use ofPinter’s personal library, which Baker has monitored closely since the play-wright’s death. This knowledge affords an appraisal of authors who drew Pinteras a youth, such as Kafka and Beckett, as well as his less well-known literarytastes, including Wordsworth. This chapter also looks at the network of artistsPinter got to know and sometimes collaborate with in his professional career.Farah Ali’s Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in

Selected Works of Harold Pinter is clearly the work of a doctoral thesis (theintroduction still calls it a dissertation) with all that this implies. ‘The objectiveof this study’, the introduction explains, ‘is to bring a new concept of how iden-tity is conceived in Pinter’s plays’ (p. 11). Apart from chapters on Betrayal[1978] and A Kind of Alaska [1982], this study focuses on Pinter’s shift to writ-ing overtly political drama form the mid-1980s onwards. In this respect it is likeother recent work such as Basil Chiasson’s The Late Harold Pinter [2016].Chapters are divided into single case studies in which plays are subjected toreadings through the lens of a particular theorist. The aim of this approach, weare told in the introduction, is to be ‘useful and original’ (p. 10). One for theRoad [1984] and Mountain Language [1988] are examined linguistically throughthe work of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while Party Time [1991] andCelebration [2000] are paired up with Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, andHegel. How useful the reader will find this approach will depend upon their levelof receptivity to the usefulness of high theory as a critical tool, especially whenattempting to write about a free-floating signifier such as ‘identity’.There have been two new additions to Routledge’s innovative Fourth Wall ser-

ies of detailed short books that explore a particular landmark play. David IanRabey looks at Alistair McDowell’s Pomona [2018], while Glen D’Cruz’s contri-bution examines Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis [2000]. In both, analysis is devel-oped and heightened by their own practice of directing these plays in universityproductions. Rabey begins by offering a tour of Pomona itself, an uncanny dis-trict within the city of Manchester that forms the setting of the play and an areathat Rabey describes as a ‘mutating wasteland’ (p. 8). The second chapter is


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



given over to a highly detailed and perceptive reading of each scene of the play,while chapter 3 consolidates this with ‘some of the connections and echoeswhich may become apparent on a second viewing, reading or consideration’ (p.39). Chapter 4, ‘Aftershocks and Resonances’, continues this process of assess-ment and placement of Pomona against McDowell’s existing work and that ofother dramatists. Rabey concludes that one of his distinctive characteristics is the‘incorporation of fantastic and (sometime nightmarish) transformative effectswhich offer sometimes hauntingly unsettling rather than escapist wish-fulfilment’(p. 61). D’Cruz’s book on 4.48 Psychosis is more focused on the practicalaspects of the play, where analysis is informed by his experience gained fromdirecting it, as well as productions by the Belarus Free Theatre in 2005 andMelbourne’s Red Stitch theatre in 2007. Chapter 1 engages with the issue ofKane’s suicide in 1999, and with it the perhaps inevitable impulse towards inter-preting the play through this particular lens. It also provides a brief contextualaccount of Kane’s place in 1990s British theatre and her association as an ‘In-Yer-Face’ dramatist. Chapter 2 provides a series of alternative interpretations ofthe play, drawing on psychoanalysis and theories of depression and melancholiathrough loss and mourning for a beloved, as well as the play’s own bitter attitudetowards the figure and institution of psychiatry, and ends with a brief, but usefuldiscussion on the relationship between madness and artistic creativity drawnfrom Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Chapter 4 considers claims by somecritics that 4.48 Psychosis is a representative example of Han-Thies Lehmann’sterm ‘post-dramatic’ theatre, offering space for advocates of and sceptics regard-ing this view. The final chapters consider Kane’s play in the context of perform-ance and pedagogy, approaching it within the differing contexts of the seminarroom and the rehearsal studio, before ending with detailed reflections on produc-tions by the Belarus Free Theatre and Melbourne’s Red Stitch theatre.

Several articles this year looked at the work of Simon Stephens. John Bull’s‘Add-Adaptation: Simon Stephens, Carrie Cracknell and Katie Mitchell’s“Dialogues” with the Classic Canon’ (JCDE 6:ii [2018] 280–99) concentrates onStephens’s English-language versions of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House [2012],Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard [2014], and Brecht’s collaboration with Weill,The Threepenny Opera [2018]. Taking the act of translation as the starting pro-cess for adaptation, Bull considers how these versions fare in traditional debatesover questions of fidelity and how they contrast with appropriative works thatmove away from the original source texts. Bull attempts to address these ques-tions by seeing Stephens’s versions as combinations of adaptation and appropri-ation and calling them ‘Add-Adaptation’. At the same time, he notes that theseworks shift more towards the realm of appropriation through the intervention ofCarrie Cracknell and Katie Mitchell, directors who shift the plays ‘even furtheraway from any sense’ that they attempt ‘to be “true” to the original’ (pp. 282–3).In the same journal, Basil Chiasson’s ‘Simon Stephens, Birdland, and a FewAffects of Neoliberalization’ (JCDE 6:ii [2018] 331–57) uses the play as a casestudy to explore how neo-liberalization functions on a subjective level, but alsohow the ‘free market penetrates cultural forums such as the music industry’ (p.332) through its central character, the rock star Paul. Chiasson identifiesStephens’s attitude as being formed during the Thatcher governments of the1980s and at the beginning of his career as a dramatist in the late 1990s.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Chiasson’s article provides a close reading of Birdland, while also pointing outhow the play draws heavily on the plot and structure of Brecht’s early play Baal[1923], as well as demonstrating how forces such as consumerism might operateon the individual with dehumanizing effects.Lara Kipp’s ‘“What Is This Place. . .?”: Howard Barker’s Spatial Scenography’

(JCDE 6:ii[2018] 249–64) looks at playwright Howard Barker’s practical in-volvement as a scenographer in his own work since the 1990s. Comparison ismade between A House of Correction [2010], Found in the Ground [2008], andUnd [2012], where specific stage directions given in the texts come to be real-ized in production, most frequently placeless or uncanny locales such as bottom-less wells and endless courtyards. Not surprisingly Kipp conclude that the‘imaginative limitless . . . upheaval of boundaries coexists with the necessarilylimited and physically defined stage space’ (p. 250). Kipp argues that the audien-ce’s imaginations are required to bridge this gap, but Barker achieves this in partthrough the introduction of domestic objects, such as the tea tray in Und or thebed in A House of Correction, which take on powerful significance within alargely empty stage space.The Journal of Beckett Studies contains several articles on drama, all of which

in one way or another focus on the body of the performer. James Little’s‘Beckett’s “Mongrel Mime”: Politics and Poetics’ (JBeckS 27:ii[2018] 193–210)focuses on the unpublished play Mongrel Mime, set in a series of prison-likerooms. This becomes the basis for a wider discussion about how confined spacesin Beckett’s work impinge upon political readings. Little uses successive draftsof Mongrel Mime to argue that Beckett’s gradual inclusion of such spaces in hisdrama makes this ‘a key case study when analysing the politics of Beckett’s writ-ing’ (p. 198). He also speculates that one of the main reasons for Beckett’s aban-donment of the piece might have been an aversion to making the relationshipbetween space and incarceration too explicit. Patrick Bixby’s‘“this. . .this. . .thing”: The Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethicsof Witnessing’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 112–27) discusses a production of Endgameby the American actors Dan Moran and Chris Jones. Both suffer fromParkinson’s disease, and this became central to their performances as Hamm andClov. Bixby argues that the production highlights the issue that in the past theplay has been mined for its comic, theatrical, and literary merit, but the issue ofdisability has been largely ignored. Bixby contends that the uniqueness of thisproduction lies in the way it communicates to its audience the relationship be-tween the actors’ bodies so that audiences are ‘called on to witness not justHamm and Clov’ (p. 125), but the actors playing them. Cal Reveley Calder’s‘Choreographed Footfalls’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 54–68) also concerns itself withhow the body of the performer expresses meaning from the scripted text. Calderasks us to consider Beckett’s Footfalls [1976] as a piece of choreography, draw-ing attention to similarities in the series of poems, the Mirlitonnades, written be-tween 1976 and 1980, that coincided with the writing of the play. Calderobserves that these poems also contain ‘a strong focus on physicality and clearlyaudible rhythmic tread’ (p. 61), and she concludes, ‘Beckett’s mid-1970s poetry,then joins his mid-1970s drama in pacing out the difficulties of a spectator’s orreader’s attention to the body’ (p. 65). Footfalls is also the subject of JulieGaillard’s article, ‘Esse? Percipi? Referentiality and Subjectivity in Footfalls’


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



(JBeckS 27:i[2018] 54–68), which sees the ambitious use of names attributed tothe body of the performer on stage as having a destabilizing effect on notions ofsubjectivity and identity, in which the audience or reader become unsure whetherthey are witnessing an interior dialogue or two separate voices belonging to Mayand her mother.

The work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the drama of SamuelBeckett are the subjects of a monograph study and article this year. DanielKoczy’s Beckett, Deleuze and Performance: A Thousand Failures and aThousand Inventions believes that ideas from Deleuze’s writings on the body andcinema can provide ‘fertile terrain’ for coming to an understanding of whyBeckett’s drama can ‘stir our passions and our sympathies and yet stubbornly re-sist interpretative security’ (p. 3). The book concentrates mainly on Beckett’slater work, including Come and Go [1965], Not I [1972], and Footfalls [1975].Amanda Dennis’s article, ‘Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Beckett andAgency in the 21st Century’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 5–21), also brings Deleuze’swork on embodiment to her reading of Beckett’s Quad [1981], addressing how‘the compulsive repetition of bodily movement, despite its uncomfortable close-ness to addiction, may harness a loss of individual control’ (p. 6). At the sametime Dennis also points out that this has the potential to produce a kind ofagency through the performers, which is at odds with most readings of the playup until now.

In a special edition of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review entitled‘Feminisms Now’, two articles engage with the politics of neoliberalism. TrishReid’s ‘Killing Joy as a World Making Project: Anger in the Work of debbietucker green’ (CTR 28:iii[2018] 390–400) productively draws upon the work ofSara Ahmed’s term ‘feminist killjoys’ in her discussion of tucker green’s hang[2015]. Reid describes this as a ‘grim satire’ (p. 392) on the remorseless logic ofneoliberalism in a projected future dystopia in which a black female victim of anunnamed crime is allowed to choose the method by which her attacker is exe-cuted. Reid also draws attention to how the normally passive representation ofvictimhood is overturned in this play, with the victim demonstrating her angerthrough a refusal to play by the rules, so undermining assumptions often positedin white feminist criticism. Reid sees this character as a black female embodi-ment of Ahmed’s killjoys, who resists expectations that cast her as a passive vic-tim. The other article, Elaine Aston’s ‘Enter Stage Left: “Recognition”,“Redistribution”, and the A-Affect’ (CTR 28:iii[2018] 299–309), argues that a re-turn to socialist feminism has been used as a counter-measure to the maligneffects of neoliberalism. Aston uses two case studies: Laura Wade’s stage adapta-tion of Sarah Waters’s novel, Tipping the Velvet [2015] and Caryl Churchill’sEscaped Alone [2016]. The representational strategies that the two plays adopt,she argues, serve to defamiliarize (as implied by the tile of Aston’s article) neo-liberal hegemony. Aston also returns to another play by Laura Wade, Posh[2010], in a separate article this year: ‘Structures of Class Feeling / Feeling ofClass Structure: Laura Wade’s Posh [2010] and Katherine Soper’s Wish List[2016]’ (MD 61:ii[2018] 127–48) examines Wade’s best-known play to date,alongside the less well-known Wish List. Aston marshals several critical works inher close readings of these two plays, including by Raymond Williams, PierreBourdieu. Sara Ahmed, and Owen Jones. This article reads as a companion piece


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



to Aston’s contribution to Contemporary Theatre Review, where she argues thatboth plays offer resistance to the processes by which neoliberalism classifies andentrenches class positions, but more pessimistically point out how both Posh andWish List confirm these same entrenched class positions in British culture.Papers from the annual German Contemporary Drama in English conference at

the University of Reading, UK, in 2018 on the theme of crisis largely make upthe contents of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. Liz Tomlin’s ‘AVictory for Real People: Dangers in the Discourse of Democratisation’ (JCDE6:i[2018] 234–48) identifies a potentially worrying recent trend in verbatim the-atre whereby the playwright and actor are displaced in favour of the public, ei-ther in person or through personal testimonies. Here, subjectivity and non-expertise become prized in the context of suspicions of expertise and the so-called ‘liberal elite’. Looking at work produced since the 2016 referendum,Tomlin cites the National Theatre’s My Country: A Work in Progress [2017] as acase study. Despite its claims for authenticity, this is used to demonstrate howthe very same derided ‘experts’, whose views the play purports to question, arequite literally working behind the scenes in the form of the play’s productionteam to shape what appears to be an outpouring of genuine public sentiment.Tomlin exposes the irony of a situation where the views largely expressed withinthe play in favour of leaving the European Union were unlikely to be the sameas those shared by the regular patrons of the National Theatre who attended theperformance. Tomlin identifies these prominent views coming to the fore at theend of the play, where Brexit itself takes on the form of a tragedy, expressedthrough the stage figure of Britannia, who interprets it as an act of matricide.Tomlin also saw the production as a missed opportunity for the National Theatreto interrogate the ways that the media and political interest groups manipulatedevents leading up to the EU referendum.William C. Boles’s ‘Theatricalizing the National Housing Crisis in Mike

Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 55–68)presents both plays, which opened around the same time in 2015, as offeringdystopian commentaries on the exclusion of a so-called ‘underclass’ broughtabout though rising rents and property prices in many of the UK’s larger cities.Boles sees the two plays as following a number of other examples such as BolaAgbaje’s Off the Endz [2010] and Che Walker’s Britain’s Got Tenants [2016],where housing issues have featured. In the plays by Bartlett and Ridley, however,the poor are either exploited by being used as unpaid labour in making propertyhabitable for later, wealthier, clients or become the hunted targets for the sport ofthe middle classes. Boles sees these two extreme scenarios as acts of unjustifiedvengeance against the poor by the wealthy. Chris Megson’s ‘“Can I Tell YouAbout It?”: England, Austerity and “Radical Optimism” in the Theatre of AndersLustgarten’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 40–54) looks in some detail at one of Lustgarten’smost celebrated plays, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep[2013]. Focusing on the play’s response to economic austerity and mass protestas ways of forming nationhood, Megson identifies it as coming from a traditionof the British ‘state of the nation play’ established by dramatists such as DavidHare and Howard Brenton in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellen Redling’s ‘Fake Newsand Drama: Nationalism, Immigration and the Media in Recent British Plays’(JCDE 6:i[2018] 87–100) looks at the strategies employed by a number of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



contemporary British playwrights to counter rising nationalism and populism inwhat has been called a culture of ‘post truth’. Here, plays including MarkJagasia’s Clarion [2015], Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby [2007], andNathanial Martello-White’s B.S. [2017] employ (and manipulate ) documentarydrama or revisit postmodern techniques surrounding truth. Through these meth-odologies, Redling borrows from Brecht and Ranciere to identify an intentionwithin these dramas to appeal to what she calls ‘the alert spectator’ (p. 87).Lastly, Dan Rebellato’s ‘“Nation & Negation” (Terrible Rage)’ (JCDE 6:i[2018]15–39) is the longest article in the journal and presents a closely argued andnuanced account, not only about the treatment of Brexit in recent work byBritish dramatists, allied to a trend that he calls ‘detachment of place’ (p. 15).Rebellato questions the implications of what this means when it comes to depict-ing nation, its borders, and the relations between localism and globalism. A widevariety of recent plays is discussed and Rebellato explores how different formsof placelessness manifest themselves in work ranging from Caryl Churchill’sEscaped Alone [2016] to Moria Buffini’s Dinner [2002].

Roger Porter’s ‘Oscar on the Boards: Playwrights Represent the Playwright onStage’ (NTQ 34:i[2018] 47–57) sits somewhat apart from other work producedthis year in the respect that it offers a comparative approach to theatrical adapta-tions since 1938 of Oscar Wilde’s three trials in 1895. These include EricBentley’s Lord Alfred’s Love [1979], Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar [1989], andDavid Hare’s The Judas Kiss [1998]. Porter explores the way each play looks athow verbatim court documents shape the representation of Oscar Wilde. The art-icle concludes that ‘each writer on Wilde tells his own story [and] fantasizes aWilde most in keeping with his own needs’ (p. 57), but Porter observes that that‘the most fruitful way to represent him on stage is to find a new, innovativeform and a Wilde unfamiliar to us’ (p. 57).

6. British Poetry 1900–1950

(a) General

Bonnie Costello’s The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden andOthers is a highlight of this year’s publications on W.H. Auden. Costello focuseson the rhetorical and ethical problems and possibilities around the word ‘we’ inpoetry, using Auden (the poet of ‘private faces in public places’) as a case study.She investigates how it can create and promote community in the face of socialfragmentation, alert us to the pronoun’s capacity to exclude and shift between re-strictive and inclusive forms. Among her book’s many original contributions is arethinking of lyric: not simply the space of the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, it creates ashared subjectivity that accommodates a ‘we’. The word ‘we’ recurs throughoutAuden’s writing: he finds it most slippery in the 1930s, as a public poet grap-pling with the role of ‘we’ as a tool in political rhetoric. Costello suggests furtherthat pluralized selves can be key to the lyric’s capacity to imagine community.After a consideration of how Auden’s love poetry expands to perform a civil ordidactic function, which involves reflections on the nature of love poetry whichare startlingly original, the book investigates how Auden’s use of ‘we’ relates toquestions of tribal and community loyalty. Costello studies Auden’s treatment of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



poetic audience, particularly in The Sea and the Mirror but also in relation topedagogy, before using Auden’s poetry to cast fresh light on the nature of crowdsand multitudes. The penultimate chapter considers how Auden’s aphoristicmoments bring poet and reader on to common ground, before the coda widensout from Auden to consider the ‘we’ in George Oppen, Adrienne Rich, andNathaniel Mackey. Costello’s book reads both closely and widely, offering bril-liant studies not just of different sorts of ‘we’, but of small words in poetry morewidely: ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘here’, ‘now’ are all rethought. This forceful and eloquentbook will be essential to scholars of poetry across all periods.Other publications on W.H. Auden included Carolyn Steedman’s Poetry for

Historians, or, W.H. Auden and History. This unusual book, integrating the author’sown experience with detailed, witty, and readable literary-historical work, sets outto unpick what theory of history Auden’s poetry expresses, and why it is soexpressed. Steedman focuses on the ‘perfect silence’ of Clio, the Muse of history,in Auden’s ‘Homage to Clio’; she asks what might be at stake in a history whichis silent, with nothing to say (p. 193). She concludes that Clio in the poem ‘is notHistory, or about history, or about doing history. She is about some other form oftime that isn’t historical time; she is—about—Christian time’ (p. 206).In Haunted By Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith, Richard

Harries includes short chapters on Edward Thomas, Stevie Smith, and W.H.Auden, considering these writers’ relationships to faith: Thomas’s dislike ofChristianity is simultaneous with his yearning ‘sense of an elusive call’ (p. 60)which Harries sees as having much in common with a religious orientation;Haunted by Christ also explores Smith’s fierce ambivalence towards religion andAuden’s return to Anglo-Catholicism, which he experienced as a celebration ofthe worldly and the human. Formerly the bishop of Oxford, Harries foregroundsin the introduction his Christian perspective and is open about how it mediatesthe readings that he offers.Natasha Periyan includes a chapter on Auden’s pedagogy in The Politics of

1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender (pp. 21–57). She examineshis engagement with contemporaneous educational movements to develop read-ings of his politics and aesthetics, finding that Auden considered education’svalue to be in its capacity to develop moral freedom and individual responsibilityfor decision-making. Periyan examines Auden’s use of pronouns in Ode V ofThe Orators, as well as the Raynes Park School song, which he composed, toconsider his conception of the relationship between pupil, pupils, and teacher: as‘we’, ‘you’, ‘them’, and ‘us’ become muddied terms, clear lines of allegianceand hierarchy break down, heightening the sense of the moral weight of individ-ual choice. This belief that education should equip individuals with the tools tomake rational decisions underpinned, Periyan finds, Auden’s response to fascisticpolitical crisis.Two chapters in Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten’s

Vocal Works, edited by Kate Kennedy, relate to Britten’s collaboration withAuden. John Fuller’s ‘Britten, Auden and the 1930s’ (pp. 31–48) acknowledgesthe six-year age difference between the two men as he explores Auden’s influ-ence on Britten across the GPO films, the setting of poems and writing of songs,the music to Auden and Isherwood’s plays, and Britten’s first opera. JoannaBullivant’s ‘“Practical Jokes”: Britten and Auden’s Our Hunting Fathers


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Revisited’ (pp. 206–22) urges a more substantial engagement with Auden’s con-tribution to Our Hunting Fathers. Bullivant writes well on how Auden’s poetryarticulates man’s longing to imitate animals and subverts that longing by under-scoring difference: a subversion achieved through an interchanging of violenceand practical jokes which exposes hypocrisy.

In ‘What the War Is Doing with Us: W.H. Auden, Total War, and WarLiterature’ (Mo/Mo 26:ii[2018] 309–27), Christopher Patrick Miller explores howthe ‘pervasive, ongoing, uneven reality’ of war informs Auden’s The Orators (p.310). Miller notes persuasively how Auden refuses his auditors stable humancharacters, identifiable pronouns, or durable private voices to situate this perva-sive violence; the result is that there is no virtuous entity against which ‘theenemy’ can be measured (p. 325). A short but eloquent article by EdwardMendelson, ‘Authorship, Intimacy, and an Editorial Question about Auden’ (EiC68:iii[2018] 273–82), puzzles over whether to include Auden’s private writingsfor friends in his Complete Works, connecting this quandary to the different kindsof intimacy implicit in writing for publication and for private friends. Finally,Jian Zhang’s ‘W.H. Auden’s Anti-Japanese War: “Sonnets from China” and ItsHistorical Context’ (Neoh 46:i[2018] 145–58) argues against both abstractionistand orientalist readings of Auden’s text to emphasize the extent to which thepoet’s experiences in China informed the sonnets; the author finds in the se-quence a transition from viewing the war as ‘other’ and foreign to seeing it as ‘awar of our own’ (p. 149).

William Empson figured more briefly this year. In ‘Vector Semantics, WilliamEmpson, and the Study of Ambiguity’ (CritI 44[2018] 641–73), Michael Gavinfinds a common set of assumptions between vector semantics (a subfield of com-putational linguistics which models the meaning of words using statistical meas-urements) and Empson’s critical practice; both are concerned with multiplemeanings of words, and the interrelations of those meanings. Shuang Shen’s‘Empson and Mu Dan: Modernism as “Complex Word”’ (CL 70:i[2018] 1–24)suggests that both Empson’s second stay in China and his Complex Words wererelevant to the 1940s modernist experiment. This article charts the overlappingpaths of Empson and Chinese modernist poets to cast light on the global contextfrom which both 1940s Chinese poetry and Empson’s own work emerged.

Edward Thomas continues to attract significant criticism. Edward Thomas’sRoads from Arras, edited by Andrew McKeown and Adrian Grafe, sets out tocollate fresh appraisals of the poet. Their introduction explores reasons for his‘uncertain public appeal’ (p. ix), attributing this to his own love of uncertainty.The volume begins with McKeown’s essay ‘Edward Thomas: Standpoints’, (pp.1-12) exploring where Thomas ‘is or isn’t to be found in his poems’ (p. 1); thisis a relevant question not only in poems about place and time, but in those aboutrelationships with others. McKeown identifies ‘something wilfully deadlocked’ inThomas’s writing (p. 3). Thomas cannot locate himself, he suggests, and there-fore he cannot identify stable ground on which a relationship might occur suc-cessfully. Next comes Ralph Pite’s ‘Edward Thomas’s Poems on Enlisting: “Asif the Bow had Flown off with the Arrow”’, (pp. 13-32) which sets Thomas’streatment of soil against Rupert Brooke’s famous reference to ‘richer dust’, sug-gesting that Thomas’s relationship to soil disavows Brooke’s notion, togetherwith its attendant nationalism and consolation (p. 19). William Wootten’s ‘“A


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Richer Opportunity”: Walter de la Mare’s Representations of Edward Thomas’(pp. 33-46) goes on to explore the ‘uneasy but powerful’ bond between de laMare and Thomas (p. 34). Arguing that they are both innovative, but that thoseinnovations tend in different directions, Wootten unpicks how de la Mare’s tribu-tes to Thomas are simultaneously admiring and ‘tinged with ambivalence towardsfriend and poetry’ (p. 45). In ‘Mapping the Furrow: Edward Thomas at theHeadland’, (pp. 47-58) Jack Thacker suggests that Thomas’s ‘Digging’ poemstrace the poet’s realization that the richness and complexity of the soil, as well ashis own work, derive from violence and death. Thacker’s argument widens to en-compass Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Paul Muldoon, tracing Thomas’s in-fluence on the later poets to argue for the plough’s sophistication as a poeticmotif. Emilie Loriaux’s ‘Converging Views, Poetic Voices: The Connection withThomas Hardy’(pp. 59-69) finds in both Thomas and Hardy a common interestin rural rootlessness and an attentiveness to nature, especially birds. In the nextessay, ‘“A Songless Plover”: The Delayed Arrival of Edward Thomas in theSpanish-Speaking World’, (pp. 71-83) Mario Murgia explores the reception ofThomas’s poetry in the Hispanosphere, noting that his poetry was not publishedin Spanish translation until 2012. Notable in this essay is Murgia’s own transla-tion of ‘The Sorrow of True Love’. ‘Lines on a Literary Landscape: EdwardThomas and Derek Walcott’, (pp. 85-95) by Helen Goethals, explores the ‘liter-ary landscape’ of Walcott’s ‘Homage to Edward Thomas’ (p. 85). Ian Brinton’s‘Paths to the Past’ (pp. 97-106) investigates Thomas’s yearning for an Edenizedpast. Adrian Grafe’s ‘Feminine Influence’(pp. 107-118) explores ‘feminine influ-ence’ in and on Thomas’s writing to suggest how he treats poetry, love, and foodas inseparable (p. 107). The next chapter, ‘Edward Thomas at Arras: A Responsein Word and Image’, (pp. 119-133) is illustrated, and comprises a conversationbetween the poet Deryn Rees-Jones and the artist Charlotte Hodes as they dis-cuss their collaboration on And You, Helen [2014], which approaches HelenThomas’s life through words and images. The volume concludes with ‘NewBiographical Perspectives’ (pp. 135-150) by Thomas’s biographer Jean MoorcroftWilson. This returns to the question which recurred in last year’s criticism, ofwhether or not Thomas is a war poet.Edited by Jem Poster, Biographies, the third volume of the Selected Edition of

Edward Thomas’s Prose Writings, contains the biographies of Richard Jefferiesand George Borrow. Poster’s introduction argues powerfully for the crucial roleplayed by Jefferies’ writing in Thomas’s artistic development, suggesting that hisinfluence might even be greater than that of Robert Frost. He identifies the com-mon thread between Thomas’s two subjects as ‘a sense of vigorous extraversion’(p. xxvii) to which Thomas was drawn, and ends by connecting the biographicalwork of the Borrow biography, with its emphasis on the impression rather thanobjective reality, to a literary modernist context. Nevertheless, Poster is impres-sive in his refusal to overstate this argument, noting that this ‘biographical im-pressionism’ does not recur in Thomas’s other biographies (p. xxxvi). Theeditorial work is scrupulous, acknowledging the difficulties implicit in editingwhat is essentially (due to Thomas’s habit of extensive quotation from his sub-jects’ writing) Thomas’s own editing. With its illuminating notes, this editionwill be essential to scholars focusing on Thomas’s treatment of geography andplace.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Samuel Hynes’s On War and Writing republishes a selection of Hynes’sessays, including ‘Hardy and the Battle-God’ (pp. 69–90) and ‘The Odds onEdward Thomas’ (pp. 145–52). Hynes suggests that Hardy’s The Dynasts is theclosest thing to a war epic in English poetry, and argues that Edward Thomasdeserves greater public and critical attention. In ‘Keep Innocency: EdwardThomas and Fatherhood’ (CQ 47:iv[2018] 301–24), S.J. Perry traces howThomas’s bond with his children offered an important stimulus for his writing,examining his use of children’s literary forms. Ralph Pite’s ‘Edward ThomasLighting Out for the Territory’ (PQ 97:ii[2018] 197–218) describes how Thomasdeveloped Twain’s relationship to the romance of departure. This hinges on thephrase ‘to light out’: finding beyond the boundaries of civilization somewhereradically unknown (p. 197). Pite studies Thomas’s poem ‘Lights Out’, findingthat its verbal texture positions Thomas as seeking the possibility of entering anunknown.

Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature containsa chapter of relevance to this period, on Edward Thomas and Walter de la Mare(pp. 117–44). Leighton suggests that knocking is de la Mare’s keynote, the soundof ‘lingering questions for the ear . . . irresolvably caught between a ghost and arhythm’ (p. 118). This ear for echoes and knockings made de la Mare an import-ant figure for Edward Thomas; they were regular companions between 1907 and1913, and Thomas’s ‘The Stile’ encodes his feelings for de la Mare in line withhis use of walks, gates, and crossroads as the territory for difficult friendships.Leighton focuses on de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’; noting that what eventuallygreets the Traveller ‘is the sound of his own listening returned, listeningly’ (p.129), Leighton suggests that de la Mare shapes the house’s silence into ‘a speak-ing sound that the knocked-on door both resists and releases’ (p. 133). The chap-ter goes on to trace how birdsong for both Thomas and de la Mare figures as aloaded combination of real-life hearing and poetic recalls. Birds appear as inde-cipherable, yet live and compelling, offering a language to the listener that is‘recognized yet unremembered’ (p. 143).

Several chapters in Elizabeth Black’s The Nature of Modernism: EcocriticalApproaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell andCharlotte Mew relate to this section. Beginning with a survey of ecocritical con-texts, Black goes on to argue that Edward Thomas’s ‘proto-environmentalthought’ (p. 52) reveals a continuity between rural-centred poetry and the cosmo-politan urbanism associated with modernism. Thomas positions the countrysideas subject to change and disruption, rather than being a static idyll. By focusingon war’s environmental impact on the British countryside and the ways it dis-rupts rural society, Thomas creates, Black argues, a new form of war poetrywhich challenges conventions around both nature poetry and war poetry; naturepoetry gains the power to confront global events. The sixth chapter positions EdithSitwell as using modernist techniques to revitalize poetic representations of nature,infusing them with childlike wonder; here, Black moves away from direct engage-ment with ecocritical theory to provide more of an overview of Sitwell’s engage-ment with nature. A chapter follows on Charlotte Mew, using her poetry to explorethe connection between engagement with nature and social marginality and investi-gating how alienation and trauma shape responses to nature. For instance, traumamay disturb perception into something heightened and intensified, which offers its


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



own renewed understanding. The otherness of the female subject, argues Black, isexpressed through an alliance with the natural rather than the human world; shenotes, interestingly, that this affiliation is dangerous in a patriarchal context wherenature is relegated merely to a source of profit and personal gain.Leah Budke’s ‘Reading Edith Sitwell’s Annual Poetry Anthology Wheels

through the Lens of Female Aestheticism’ (ELT 61:iii[2018] 232–49) argues thatWheels drew on traditions of aestheticism and Decadence. Budke suggests thatthis is specifically female aestheticism, and identifies it within tropes of the gar-den, the tempting fruit, and appropriated soldierly bodies in Wheels.Interest in Thomas Hardy remains strong. In ‘Thomas Hardy’s Poem “The

Aerolite” and Panspermia’ (N&Q 65[2018] 415–17), Gillian Daw contextualizes‘The Aerolite’ against the hypothesis of panspermia: the belief that life did notoriginate on earth, but was carried here from another part of the universe bycomets, stellar radiation, or (as in Hardy’s poem) meteorites. The Thomas HardyJournal’s accommodation of a breadth of scholarly approaches made for a rangeof fresh work on Hardy’s poetry in 2018. ‘Hardy’s Poems and the Reader: ThePower of Unmaking’ (THJ 34[2018] 17–34) by Linda M. Shires. This draws onTimothy Bewes’s model of ‘reading with the grain’ to articulate the pleasureswhich emerge from reading Hardy’s poems: her close readings emphasizeHardy’s ambiguous puns and echoes, framing the act of reading Hardy as arhythm of ‘unmaking’ (taking apart and dwelling in multiple meanings) and actsof reconstituting based on a search for value. Francis O’Gorman’s ‘HardyGetting Out Of. . .’ (THJ 34[2018] 35–51) frames Hardy compellingly as a writerabsorbed in the question of ‘getting out of’ things: histories, relationships,responsibilities (p. 36). O’Gorman focuses on ‘Poems of 1912–13’, followingEmma’s unexpected death, tracing how Emma’s ‘getting out’ of life offers the re-lief of release for Hardy himself from their unhappy relationship (p. 41). Thepoems negotiate, therefore, between frankness about the failure of their marriageand untruthfulness in foregrounding only love or grief, trying to ‘get out’ of both(p. 42). Finally, Roger Ebbatson’s ‘“The Face at the Casement”: WindowPatterns in Hardy’s Poetry’ (THJ 34[2018] 77–86) traces window imagery inHardy’s poetry, exploring the capacity of windows to both separate and connectinside and outside, and concluding that Hardy’s window poems are proto-modernist in their problematization of the relationship between perceptionand reality.John Hughes’s startling and absorbing study The Expression of Things:

Themes in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction and Poetry argues that selfhood in Hardy isbest understood through accidents, events, and encounters that surprise and dis-compose it, creating conditions for desire or tragedy. Noting Hardy’s insistencethat his work possessed no philosophy, Hughes proposes that the poet’s sugges-tion that his poetry constituted ‘impressions of the moment’ is not simply vague:bears on a view of writing that explores how thought is forced through bodilyencounters that provoke interpretation (p. 11). In this line, Hughes is extremelygood on Hardy’s use of dialect words and neologisms: they force a responsefrom the reader while displacing the false ideological coherences of educated lan-guage. He suggests, beautifully, that ‘Hardy’s self-portrayal often involves ashrinking, as of someone prone to retreating into an inexpressive kind of privacyor secrecy’ (p. 17); that ‘a feeling that it is impossible to make oneself fully


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



understood, to speak with one’s own voice, was inextricable from a hyper-sensitivity that shame was all too legible, and that the traces of it . . . must bedestroyed or covered over’ (p. 17). Accordingly, he sees ‘Neutral Tones’ as apoem expressing a shared failure of private expression as an unwilled public con-dition. Hughes spends substantial time considering how music, in Hardy, revealsthe mind as ‘an endlessly responsive power of self-variation’ (p. 41). He arguesthat Hardy uses music to trump social and philosophical fictions of the self.Paying detailed attention to metre, Hughes lays out how, repeatedly, Hardy posi-tions music as the occasion for a secular epiphany, where the sympathetic capaci-ties of human beings turn over the poet’s attention. The book goes on to developa subtle and convincing argument around how Hardy’s poems proceed frompurely private experiences—a mundane yet haunting pretext, around which thespeaker’s mind revolves—which threaten to become obsessional and privativeunless they can be turned outwards into words. Hughes ends by exploring,through a close examination of metre, how Hardy’s poetic sensibility occupies alocation abandoned by belief, yet still open towards hope.

Nilufer Ozgur’s Hardy Deconstructing Hardy: A Derridean Reading ofThomas Hardy’s Poetry sets out to do two things. The first is to position Hardyas a modernist or proto-modernist poet, a topic well trodden in recent and not sorecent years. The second is to draw parallels between Hardy’s poetry andDerrida’s deconstructionism. The question remains open as to whether this seeksto illuminate Hardy or Derrida. Hardy’s dramatized personae, his double selves,his experimental language, and his unconventional treatment of time and spaceare all assimilated into a model of Derridean theory which is positioned as cap-aciously equivalent to all sorts of subversions and disruptions. Ozgur examines arange of poems in detail, offering some contentious readings: her analyses of ‘Inthe Study’ and ‘The Temporary The All’, in particular, might attract livelydebate.

In Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement, GaliaBenziman argues that Hardy critiques the late Victorian move away from ex-travagant grief, positioning it alongside personal forgetfulness and disrespectfulneglect of the dead. Yet Hardy also implicates himself in this cultural and psy-chological ‘amnesia’ (p. 2). His work collapses long-standing binaries betweenremembrance and forgetting, grief and consolation. After a lucid overview ofelegy and mourning more broadly, Benziman traces how Hardy’s grieving sub-jects seldom resolve their mourning and defer to the finality of death. He sub-verts conventional elegiac patterns, undermining the psychoanalytic healingmodel and positioning human relationships as fundamentally based on projection.In the first chapter, Benziman notes how Hardy often positions death as exit ra-ther than extinction; though he introduces down-to-earth sentiment into his poet-ry, he does not, as modern elegy often does, directly confront the finality of loss.The dead saturate Hardy’s landscapes, but they bring no reassurance, only per-plexity. The third chapter focuses on prosopopoeia, noting how Hardy portraysreturning from the grave as an emotional and practical encumbrance on the livingrather than wish-fulfilment. Hardy’s dead are not comforting figures; their feel-ings, Benziman demonstrates, are unpredictable and unknowable, since deathinvolves undergoing a transformation. In speaking for the dead, prosopopoeically,the dead are obliterated as distinct subjects, and the contrast between self and


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



other is blurred. After a chapter on Hardy’s fiction, Benziman turns back to thepoetry, examining poems in which survivors benefit from deaths. She writes wellabout how poems like ‘The Pink Frock’ and ‘By Her Aunt’s Grave’ trace the jar-ring disparity between the loss of a human being and the trivialities that occupythe survivors; all the while they simultaneously acknowledge the human value ofthose very trivialities. Hardy implies that benefiting from a death and using thedead might be alternative means of enduring mortality in a world no longer sus-tained by belief in an afterlife. In the final chapter, Benziman studies howmourning and memory fuel creative energies. In a society guilty of cultural for-getfulness, the poet assumes the role of preserver of memory, though it is experi-enced as an arduous one.FATHOM, a journal which focuses entirely on Thomas Hardy, featured several

articles on his poetry. Catherine Lanone’s ‘Desire and Impaired Eyesight:Thomas Hardy’s Clinal Metaphors of Affect’ (Fath 5[2018] 40 paras.) notes howHardy’s use of medical conditions to convey emotional blindness has beenunder-studied. Focusing on the poems devoted to Emma’s absence, she suggestsconvincingly that Hardy draws on the language of cataract removal to conveythe paradigm shift that the speaker experienced after his wife’s death. Stayingwith the theme of eyes, Annie Ramel’s ‘The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy’(Fath 5[2018] 22 paras.) adds to recent studies of face-to-face encounters inHardy which tend to view such meetings as positive, using Lacanian notions ofthe ‘object-gaze’ to locate ‘Medusean’, death-dealing gazes in his work. JaneThomas’s ‘The Abyss, the Image and the Turn: Writing Desire in Three Poemsby Thomas Hardy’ (Fath 5[2018] 14 paras.) looks at ‘Where the Picnic Was’,‘The Voice’, and ‘The Shadow on the Stone’ to draw connections between thedesiring subject, the power of the gaze, and the act of writing in Hardy’s poetry.Emilie Loriaux’s ‘Unconscious Desires in “The Collector Cleans His Picture”’(Fath 5[2018] 31 paras.) positions the titular picture as an artistic mirror, whichallows the parson-collector to face his inner bad self and his own fears.As the centenary of the First World War draws to a close, poetry of both the

First and Second World Wars continues to attract study. Two chapters in TheFirst World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity, edited by Santanu Das and KateMcLoughlin, are relevant to this section. The first, ‘Scaling War: PoeticCalibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones’s In Parenthesis’ by Hope Wolf(pp. 56–73), investigates how David Jones stages ‘the failure of measuringinstruments’ in In Parenthesis (p. 57). She suggests that, in doing so, he may becountering historiographies that depend on scientific data and performing a lossof confidence in quantitative evidence. The essay focuses in particular on howthe verbal tools that communities use to manage emotionally fraught moments,such as proverbs, cliches, and idioms, which teach proportionality and weighexperiences up against each other, cease to function in such times. Wolf is fasci-nating on cliche: ‘The experience of cliche is often accompanied by a sense thatit has failed to meet the needs of the moment it responds to’ (p. 64). As a substi-tute, Jones offers the local, and its alternative measures to those imposed by thenominal centre. At the end of In Parenthesis Jones turns to myth, which ‘offers away of thinking about the significance and scale of what cannot be measured’(p. 69). The Queen of the Woods is given the task of deciding what is owed tothe soldiers, but her ‘systems are unknown to both reader and writer’ (p. 70).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



The second essay is Vincent Sherry’s ‘Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economyof “Sacrifice” in the Great War’ (pp. 74–96), on how understandings of (religiousand secular) sacrifice have been disabled by the First World War. Sherry is inter-ested in how Jones undertakes ‘intense invention’ to convey the difficulty ofcomprehending supreme types of ancient sacrifice (p. 92). He examines Jones’sfrontispiece for In Parenthesis, finding that the left hand of the depicted figureseems to be pushing away the instruments of suffering: a detail which under-mines the traditional idea that Christ was a willing sacrificial victim. Jones callsthe seventh chapter ‘The Five Unmistakable Marks’: this refers to Christ’s fivemystic wounds, but, startlingly, the phrase comes from Lewis Carroll’s nonsensepoem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. This means that ‘the enigma is more like themystery it participates in, hiding the numinous token of efficacious sacrifice be-hind the nonsensical miscellany of the words recasting it, as of the world await-ing its redemption’ (p. 92).

The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War by SallyMinogue and Andrew Palmer is a powerful and important contribution. It posi-tions its centre of gravity in the memorial poems of the Great War, finding acrossa diverse range of poets an internal conflict between the forces of cultural mem-ory and their personal understanding. Poets of this era, they suggest, continuallyseek different forms and voices, sometimes stumbling or erring towards bathosas they strive to express the inexpressible. The second chapter makes a superblycompelling argument: it locates the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘rupture’ of modernistwriting in their literal meanings, in the disembodied bodies at the Front (p. 53).In this way, the poems of this period, argue the authors, ‘remind us forcibly ofthe realist dimension of modernism’ (p. 55). When war writers retreat into disen-gagement, they do so both in response to the death that surrounds them and as adefining element of their modernism. Ellipses in Wilfrid Gibson’s ‘Between theLines’, for instance, signal vacancies in language as well as different levels oftime and space, and the wandering consciousness of an injured man. The authorssuggest that these dislocations of time, geography, and consciousness in FirstWorld War poetry have been critically overlooked, as they have been viewed asresponses to battle stress rather than in relation to contemporary modernist preoc-cupations. The third chapter traces how David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg incorp-orate mythic elements into their poetry, resisting the illusory reassurance ofmythic analogies while positing ways of thinking and feeling which move be-yond simple horror. The authors draw subtle and valuable distinctions betweenJones’s use of myth and those of Joyce and Eliot. While the latter two draw onmyth as a source to support a thesis, Jones uses myth because it is intrinsic tothe identities of the soldiers who are his subjects. As a result, he achieves not a‘programmatic parallel’, but a series of connections and failed connections be-tween the war as experienced by its fighters and the myths which underpin theircultural understanding of themselves (p. 90). Chapter 4 turns to poems aboutmemorials, finding that such texts tend to critique the values which the monu-ments embody, and the fifth chapter illuminates the striking fact that poeticdescriptions of corpses in the Great War are used to support a public argumentagainst the war rather than engaging with personal horror. They express anger ra-ther than trauma. The book closes with a fresh reading of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulceet Decorum Est’, highlighting how innovative Owen was in portraying a gas


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



attack in poetry in a text which accommodated ‘a new kind of dying’ (p. 211).Throughout, the readings are close, skilled, and convincing, with an analysis ofArthur Graeme West’s ‘The Night Patrol’ a particular highlight. Its breadth ofanalysis across a range of male and female poets, well known and less wellknown, is refreshing.Helen McPhail’s Wilfred Owen’s Shrewsbury focuses, as the title suggests, on

the poet’s teenage experiences in Shrewsbury. It is primarily a brief history ofShrewsbury in the early twentieth century, with suggestions about how membersof the Owen family might have related to one aspect or another of the town. In‘The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”’(JML 41:iii[2018] 1–17), Stephen Benz offers a reading of Owen’s famous poemin the terms of classical rhetoric, identifying its pathos, ethos, and logos. MichaelSarnowski’s ‘Enemy Encounters in the War Poetry of Wilfred Owen, KeithDouglas, and Randall Jarrell’ (Humanities 89[2018] 1–8) examines how thesethree poets grapple with the question of the wartime enemy’s humanity.Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s exceedingly detailed Robert Graves: From Great War

Poet to Good-bye to All That 1895–1929 builds on a growing critical interest inGraves as a war poet, as evidenced, for instance, by Charles Mundye’s recentedition of the war poetry. Moorcroft Wilson contends that Graves’s poetry issome of the best and most technically innovative of the Great War; nevertheless,his decision to adopt a child’s perspective and convey war through dreams andmyths rather than ‘realistic’ details means that he has remained relatively obscureas a war poet (p. 4). The book focuses on the first half of his life to emphasizethe profound effect of the war on Graves’s life and work; Moorcroft Wilson’sdiscovery of Sassoon’s personal annotated copy of Good-bye to All That offersnew and significant detail, she contends, to reframe Graves’s earlier life. Thebook highlights, among other things, Graves’s influence on the practice of ‘closereading’ (p. 276) and Moorcroft Wilson uses Sassoon’s annotations to highlightthe difference between the two poets’ relationships to factual accuracy inaccounts of the war: Sassoon pursued it diligently, while Graves did not view itas the main aim of the personal memoir.‘Ivor Gurney’s Imperfection’ by Alex Wylie (EiC 68:i[2018] 54–73) finds a

‘mode of imperfection’ in Gurney’s work which is deliberated ‘as a whole cul-tural politics and a way of writing and being’ (p. 55). Gurney, Wylie suggests, isabsorbed by the project of defining and exploring the potentialities and realitiesof the imperfect as a paradigm of both political and literary ideals; this is mani-fested in poetic form, in the ‘harmonious stammer’ of Gurney’s lines (p. 69).In Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance,

and Popular Culture, Michael Shallcross includes a chapter on the relationshipbetween G.K. Chesterton and E.C. Bentley (pp. 18–54), hinging his analysis onthe nonsense poetry that the pair wrote to and towards each other. Throughdetailed work on drafts of poems, Shallcross finds that they based their friend-ship on an oscillation between intimacy and difference; praise and criticism ofBentley mingle in earlier drafts of Chesterton’s poetic preface to his collection ofnonsense verse Greybeards at Play. Though Bentley relished academic nonsenseof the university in-joke kind, Chesterton advocated a more popular strain ofnonsense, and in the poetry of Greybeards at Play he introduces elements ofmoral satire into Bentley’s preferred nonsense mode.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Arguing for a phenomenological approach to fragmentary writing, RebeccaVarley-Winter’s skilfully written Reading Fragments and Fragmentation inModernist Literature close-reads poetry by Mina Loy and Hope Mirrlees, amongother writers, to test the idea that ‘fragmentation is, at heart, about conflictedtextual embodiment’ (p. 8). Following a suggestive introduction, Varley-Winterhighlights how part of Loy’s complexity resides in the apparent reliance of hertexts, like fragments, on absent contexts. She explores Loy’s fascination with col-lage, arguing that collage’s refusal of smoothness prevents the viewer or readerfrom immersing themselves fully and offering interesting remarks on the ana-logue between Loy’s humour and her empathy. This is followed by analysis ofHope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem, with its interest in the ‘difficulty of connection’(p. 156) and fascination with kitsch.

Highlighting the increasing critical recognition that modernism is multifaceted,Laura Wainwright’s New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing,1930–1949 identifies a ‘distinctively Welsh Modernist use of language’ in arange of Welsh writers (p. 3), including Gwyn Thomas, Glyn Jones, and IdrisDavies. Since these poets often came from a background where the English lan-guage had only fairly recently been introduced, Wainwright argues, their workmanifests both a delight in linguistic novelty, and a sense of alienation.Wainwright locates analogues and similarities to surrealism in their work, andsuggests convincingly that the linguistic collage of Davies’s Gwalia Deserta[1938] responds to Wales’s linguistic crisis, simultaneously deterritorializing andreterritorializing language into a new picture or discourse. The second chapterfocuses on the anglophone writer Lynette Roberts, revealing how an anglophoneWelsh writer occupies a distinctive deterritorialized position. By incorporatingrural writers such as Roberts into modernism, Wainwright participates in thebroader critical shift away from viewing modernism as an urban or metropolitanmovement. A chapter on Vernon Watkins emphasizes his internationalism andaestheticism to contrast him with his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries, and a fourthchapter compares Dylan Thomas to European surrealism. Like Salvador Dalı,Wainwright suggests, Thomas repeatedly invokes particular regional sites, andreimagines those sites as places where social and cultural norms could be trans-gressed and contested. The final chapter examines the role of the grotesque inGwyn Thomas and Rhys Davies.

(b) T.S. Eliot

Although 2018 was a relatively quiet year in comparison with the busy work inrecent years on the letters of T.S. Eliot and the ongoing edition of his criticalprose, those projects continue to yield results. T.S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imaginationby Jewel Spears Brooker offers an overview of his poetic career by a scholarwho has been closely involved in the Johns Hopkins University Press’s editionof the critical prose. Making ample use of his early university work on philoso-phy and anthropology at Harvard and Oxford, Brooker argues that Eliot’s poetrywas shaped by the rhythmic movement from binary opposition to synthesis thatcharacterizes philosophical dialectics. Eliot’s study of F.H. Bradley, she argues atthe outset, led to the revelation that ‘contradictions are best understood dialectic-ally, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them’ (p. 1);


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



and, Brooker suggests, Eliot understood that truth was never ‘self-sufficient, thatall truths exist in relation to other truths’ (p. 2). This sets the pattern for the argu-ments across the rest of the book. The first chapters then adumbrate Eliot’s earlypoetry in terms of his response to the split between mind and body and betweensubject and object as Eliot found it in work by Henri Bergson and F.H. Bradley.Subsequent chapters explore the ‘dialectic between internal and external interpre-tations’ (p. 65), exploring The Waste Land in relation to J.G. Frazer’s presenta-tion of myth and theories of primitivism. Later chapters explore Eliot’s turn toreligion in terms of a dialectic tension between intellect and emotion, and a finalchapter reads Four Quartets in terms of a dialectic split between the reproachfultheodicy of St Augustine and a more, self-forgiving theodicy associated withJulian of Norwich. Eliot’s insistence on division and the dilemma of being caught‘between’ forces or impulses is familiar, but, crucially, T.S. Eliot’s DialecticalImagination insists on moving beyond simple binary divisions towards the recon-ciliation of opposites that characterizes dialectical thinking. This does not alwaysconvince, but as a whole Brooker offers a complex and nuanced overview of hiswork that is deeply informed by an understanding of the intellectual, historical,and biographical contexts.A second monograph from a major university press also addresses the contours

of Eliot’s ‘imagination’. Published by Cambridge University Press, SarahKennedy’s T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination is, however, more variousthan Brooker’s emphasis upon dialectic oppositions and syntheses. Kennedystarts by invoking George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation [2001], andMetaphors We Live By [1980] by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, in order toset out her interest in ‘Eliot’s metaphoric practice in his understanding of poeticcreation’ (p. 8). What follows is a set of thematically organized chapters, each ofwhich traces out a particular recurring metaphor, figure, or trope in Eliot’s poetryand critical prose. The Dynamic Imagination starts with Shakespeare and the im-portance of The Tempest to Eliot, outlining his interest in metaphors of depth andtransformation exemplified by the sea. A chapter on ‘sea voices’ shifts intoreflections on Eliot’s attitude towards divided subjectivity. Elsewhere,Shakespeare seems to represent ‘pattern’ for Eliot: the possibility that a coherentsystem of thought might lie beneath a surface of words and sounds.Part II of Kennedy’s monograph explores contemporary science as a source of

metaphorical thinking in Eliot. There are chapters here on space, the gaps be-tween atoms, and the gaps between stars; on sight and the science of vision; andon the relation between psychology and physiology. These draw on Eliot’s en-gagement with recent writings by Arthur Eddington and Alfred NorthWhitehead, amongst others. The final part of The Dynamic Imagination exploresfigures for selfhood. Picking up on previous discussion of divisions and splits,three chapters set out Eliot’s fascination with doppelgangers, ghosts, and the con-cept of the embryonic self.Kennedy describes her project as a study of ‘the ways Eliot imagined the pro-

cess of poetic composition’ (p. 161), but the results are more complex and richthan mere reflexive self-preoccupation. The Dynamic Imagination offers a fasci-nating digest of the characteristic figures and locutions that shaped Eliot’sthought about selfhood and literature—it outlines the habitual linguistic tools forwhich he reached when he sought to express himself. At the same time, it is


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



tantalizing and elusive: each chapter ranges back and forth across Eliot’s careerwithout a strong guiding sense of argument running through the book as a whole.The material is so well chosen and the intelligence of this project so striking thatit is hard not to wish that Kennedy had pushed her findings into a stronger thesisof some kind.

As Kennedy’s monograph demonstrates, some words or phrases acquire mean-ing or emphasis through repetition; others acquire a kind of salience from therelative infrequency with which they occur. A.J. Nickerson commences ‘T.S.Eliot and the Point of Intersection’ (CQ 47:iv[2018] 343–59) by observing thatthe phrase the ‘point of intersection’ occurs only three times in Eliot’s poetry andprose, but argues that this formulation offers ‘one of the primary ways in whichhe interrogates his own poetics, thinking both about what poetic language is andthe experiences of consciousness or meaning that it uniquely affords’ (p. 343).For Nickerson the conceptual nub of ‘intersection’ lies in ‘crossing’ (a more fre-quent term in Eliot’s vocabulary): the frontiers broached by such crossings in-clude theological questions about the relation between human and divine, theknowable and the unknowable; but they also encompass formal concerns withthe relationship between words and music through pattern. The fundamentalquestion for Eliot, then, would seem to be whether these different preoccupationscoincide or intersect, whether the patterning of poetry has something to offer inEliot’s striving to make sense of his spiritual experience.

Another significant study of Eliot in monograph form, Jeremy Diaper’s T.S.Eliot and Organicism, draws together recent materials from articles and essays topresent a coherent case for Eliot’s ‘agricultural sensibility’ (p. 31). Diaper posi-tions Eliot’s critical thought and poetic output within an ‘environmental literarymodernism’ (p. 6). The book begins with a chapter exploring Eliot’s commitmentto that ‘agricultural sensibility’ in the poetry he wrote during the 1920s. Diaperfinds it telling that Eliot’s conception of social crisis in The Waste Land isexpressed in terms of a land that has suffered environmental catastrophe, onethat produces no nourishment for body or soul. In this chapter (as throughout),the book moves between figurative readings of Eliot’s most famous modernistworks and more literal readings of contemporary writers, such as ViscountLymington and H.J. Manningham, who address questions of diet, the industrialproduction of food, and the impoverishment of Britain’s agriculture.

The rest of Eliot and Organicism shifts to his more direct and explicit dealingswith agricultural thought from the 1930s until after the Second World War. A se-cond chapter engages with Eliot’s role as editor of the Criterion, examining waysin which he fostered writing and debate about agricultural policy and the envir-onment. For Diaper this not only signals the poet’s interests, but also constitutesa formative contribution to the organic husbandry movement in the 1930s.Chapter 3 explores Eliot’s involvement with the New English Weekly, connectingthe publication of part of Four Quartets there to discussion of the new organicmovement and agricultural issues. Diaper probes drafts of ‘Little Gidding’ to un-cover allusions to soil erosion, and claims that scenes frequently taken to repre-sent the dust falling after an air raid can ‘arguably’ (p. 72) be understood insteadas allusions to recent dust storms in Kansas. Chapter 4 moves on to theChristian Newsletter and tempers previous arguments about Eliot’s agriculturalconcerns by contrasting his ‘agrarian standpoint’ (p. 100) with that of


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



contemporaries John Middleton Murray and Ronald Duncan. In contrast withtheir enthusiasm for idealized rural communities, Eliot’s vision of agriculturalbliss was more qualified, and Diaper reads this into the presentation of countrylife in ‘East Coker’. Chapter 5 reads the version of Notes Towards a Definitionof Culture that Eliot published in book form during 1948 (as opposed to thearticles and essays from which it was drawn). Concentrating on his friendshipwith Philip Mairet, Diaper argues that ‘Eliot’s engagement with organic issuescontinues to permeate’ his concern with questions of culture and social organiza-tion from a Christian perspective (p. 143).Well informed throughout and full of interesting contemporary material on the

organic movement, there is a strong historicist bent throughout Eliot andOrganicism which seeks to deepen and focus existing work on the poet’s interestin agricultural matters; but Diaper is also keen to demonstrate the influence ofthese social and theoretical concerns upon the substance of his poetry. It is unfor-tunate that Diaper over-indulges his own fondness for agricultural metaphor inplaces: ‘in ploughing a new scholarly furrow for Eliot and organicism, I aim toprovide a fertile soil in which ecomodernism can produce further yields’ (p. 6).At the risk of falling into the same trap, the joke seems a bit laboured.Diaper’s monograph is just one work that considers Eliot in the light of recent

theories of ecocriticism and the ongoing environmental crisis threatened by cli-mate change. Elizabeth Black devotes a chapter to Eliot in The Nature ofModernism (pp. 87–139) as part of her broader exploration of ‘modernist poetry’senvironmental thinking’ (p. 2). Black’s chapter covers similar ground to the earlyparts of Diaper’s study. Her chapter focuses upon The Waste Land [1922] as anew way of writing about place that departs from ‘inherited forms of nature writ-ing’ (p. 88). Developing from previous writing about Eliot and nature, Blackaims to present ‘the whole poem as an expression of environmental concernregarding the broadening gulf between humans and nature’ (p. 94). Where thepoem’s urban landscape and breadth of allusive reference seem to place it withina ‘human sphere’ of interest (p. 87), Black discerns a series of figures for media-ting Eliot’s preoccupation with the environment. She connects the criticism ofmaterialism in The Waste Land to a broader ‘ecocritical’ concern with mankind’sresponsibility for preserving the natural world.Elsewhere, ‘T.S. Eliot, Ecofeminist’ by Etienne Terblanche (in Vakoch and

Mickey, eds., Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and InternationalVoices, pp. 54–67) sets about the unlikely task of casting Eliot as ‘an early eco-feminist’ (p. 54). Terblanche’s approach consists first of ‘lingering in the momentof the text’ (p. 62), delicately probing rhymes and line endings in The WasteLand to suggest more sympathetic affinities with female characters. Terblanchethen argues that Eliot’s poem aligns the act of rape with natural catastrophe andthe despoliation of landscape, before launching into a blustering attack on ‘fem-inist warmongering’ (p. 63) by critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,for interpreting the poetry through his biography (specifically, Eliot’s treatmentof his first wife). There are plausible arguments in the essay, but the style andstructure mean that the broad claim that the ‘greatness’ of The Waste Land liesin ‘Eliot’s egalitarian handling of the opposite realms of male and female experi-ence’ (p. 58) is unconvincing as presented.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



The most coherent sequence of work on Eliot this year within scholarly jour-nals can be found in the Wallace Stevens Journal, which devoted a special issueto Stevens’s relationship with his contemporaries Eliot and Yeats. After EdwardRagg’s prefatory piece, ‘Pages from Tales: Narrating Modernism’s Aftermaths’(WSJour 42:i[2018] 1–5), the issue commences with an interview between Raggand Marjorie Perloff on the ‘Eras and Legacies’ of the three poets (WSJour42:i[2018] 6–16). This ranges widely but knowledgeably across the fortunes ofall three poets in the academy (and beyond) on either side of the Atlantic; thestatus of modernism; the influence of nineteenth-century French poetry onStevens, Eliot, and Yeats; and their political views.

Skipping those articles in the journal which focus exclusively on Stevens andYeats, the special issue continues with Lee M. Jenkins’s ‘Atlantic Triangle:Stevens, Yeats, Eliot in Time of War’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 17–30). This suggeststhat a ‘three-way comparison’ of his chosen poets ‘collapses binaries that toooften obtain between these major figures of poetic modernism’ (p. 17). The com-parisons that follow explore connections through representations of war andbloodshed by Stevens, Yeats, and Eliot, but also through intricacies of form,such as Eliot’s deployment of Dante’s terza rima. In concluding, Jenkins turns toDerek Mahon’s poems about the Troubles in Northern Ireland as ‘the late prod-uct’ of this ‘circumAtlantic matrix’ (p. 27). Tony Sharpe’s ‘“Dead Opposites” or“Reconciled among the Stars”? Stevens and Eliot’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 62–76)starts from the unpromising observation that Stevens ‘had a certain investment inasserting his difference from Eliot, and Eliot seems not to have bothered greatlyabout Stevens’ (p. 62), but goes on to trace points in their work where a ‘mo-mentary confluence of feeling’ (p. 64) can be discerned or their interests coin-cide, despite the seemingly knotty intransigence which would otherwisecharacterize their relationship. They were not, Sharpe concludes, ‘dead oppo-sites’, but they were nevertheless ‘very different’ (p. 75).

‘“We Reason of These Things with Later Reason”: Plain Sense and thePoetics of Relief in Eliot and Stevens’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 99–116) by SarahKennedy considers the later works of both Stevens and Eliot, exploring ‘thestruggle to sustain creativity across a lifetime’ (p. 101). The two poets, sheargues, ‘share a commitment to an anti-creative plainness as a vital and liberatingelement of the continuous turning of the imagination’ (p. 99). Kennedy sets theapparent prosaism of Four Quartets against poems such as ‘Notes Toward aSupreme Fiction’, discerning ‘a principle of complementarity’ between them andconcluding that ‘it is precisely the turn toward plainness, the pursuit of poetry inspite of loss rather than as consolation for it, and the writing through the painfulequinoctial awareness of infirmity, that humanizes the late poetic work, grantingit power and poignancy’ (p. 114). Densely argued, this article is alert to the toneand dynamics of both Stevens and Eliot.

Looking further afield, Benjamin Madden’s ‘The Idea of a Colony: Eliot andStevens in Australia’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 77–98) explores the anti-modernistNietzschean poetics of the writers associated with the journal Vision as a meansof accounting for the reception of Eliot and Stevens in Australia. As well as trac-ing the poetic influence of Eliot and Stevens on Australian authors, this article isalert to the material conditions informing their reception. It raises important ques-tions about which texts were available and in what form, as part of canon


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



formation. ‘Australian writers’, Madden concludes, ‘have always sought . . . ameans and an idiom through which to invert the colony/metropole dyad’ (p. 96).Other articles and essays in 2018 explored Eliot’s literary relations with fellow

writers too. Alan Blackstock’s ‘Chesterton, Eliot and Modernist Heresy’(Renascence 70:iii[2018] 199–216) probes Eliot’s discussion of heresy in AfterStrange Gods [1933], using the writing of G.K. Chesterton on Heretics [1905]and Orthodoxy [1908]. Blackstone concedes their differences, characterizingEliot’s interest in tradition as ‘elitist’ in comparison with Chesterton’s ‘populist’view (p. 208). But he seeks to reconcile this contrast through their shared con-cern with ‘religious orthodoxy’ in relation to apparently literary matters. Bothmen, he concludes, acknowledged the importance of ‘openness to rival tradi-tions’, but urged the necessity of ‘maintaining a shared tradition within a com-munity, in order to allow its members to evaluate competing claims to truth’ (p.212). Felix Schmelzer’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder in Modern Lyrical Poetry’ (symplok�e26:i[2018] 293–306) incorporates a reading of ‘Burnt Norton’, alongsideNovalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht and Baudelaire’s ‘Elevation’ as part of an at-tempt to gauge the nature and impact of thinking spatially about the relation be-tween good and evil, above and below. Eliot’s poetry, Schmelzer argues,manifests a ‘particularly modern linguistic sensibility’ (p. 304) when it comes tomapping such structures onto reality.William Davies explores the disposition of Samuel Beckett towards Eliot in

‘“A New Occasion, a New Term of Relation”: Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot’(in Beloborodova et al., eds., Beckett and Modernism, pp. 111–27). Beckett’s dis-dain for Eliot, Davies suggests, has been exaggerated, and this essay traces ele-ments from ‘Eliot’s style, methods, and attitudes towards writing and art’ (p.113) across the Irish writer’s career. Providing some useful nuance for recent crit-ical accounts which identify Beckett as a late modernist, Davies argues that evenwhere he evinces disdain towards Eliot, Beckett’s stance is better understood assomething akin to Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. ‘Traces, echoes and chal-lenges to Eliot’s form of modernist composition’ in Beckett’s early works,Davies claims, constitute ‘a part of the creative impulse’ of his writing (p. 114).Several articles this year address questions of biography in relation to Eliot’s

work. Stephen D. Thompson’s ‘Eliot’s End and Beginning: Scholarship, Poetry,Forms of Life’ (TCL 64:iv[2018] 413–48) explores Eliot’s decision to publish hisdoctoral thesis on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley in 1964 to argue that the ‘be-lated’ publication ‘reimagines the forms of scholarship as fundamentally person-al’ (p. 414). For Thompson this return to scholarly forms at the end of his careerstands for Eliot’s sustained engagement with the tension between ‘objective ex-ternality’ (p. 424) and the personal nature of experience and utterance, from thenotes to The Waste Land to the meditations and observations of Four Quartets.Reviewing the ‘fraught’ relation of Eliot’s poetry to ‘life-writing’ (p. 118), JamieWood’s ‘“Here I Am”: Eliot, “Gerontion,” and the Great War’ (Biography41:i[2018] 116–42) seeks to read ‘Gerontion’ as a kind of ‘confessional poetry’that seeks to come to terms with his status in 1919 as a non-combatant. Wood’sreading starts with a biographical enquiry into the sources of the poem and itscomposition, connecting this to a strong sense of the historical moment at whichEliot worked on the poem and the ways in which this might have shaped itsform and content. The article concludes by reviewing different ways of reading


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the poem’s sardonic depictions of inaction and impotence in the face of conflictin relation to Eliot’s own position. And Marjorie Perloff’s ‘Eliot the YoungReviewer: The Formation of Aesthetic Judgement’ (LitI 19:ii[2017] 135–42)draws upon the ongoing edition of Eliot’s critical prose to reassess Eliot’s ‘earlybread-and-butter pieces’ (p. 136): reviews written for the Egoist in the first deca-des of the twentieth century, before he had acquired much fame. Noting Eliot’shostility towards the ‘Georgian poetry’ of Rupert Brooke, Alec Waugh, andothers, Perloff is impressed by the precision of his critical censure and the occa-sionally wicked turn of Eliot’s wit.

Frank Capogna’s ‘Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital and the Cultivation ofDetachment in T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry’ (JML 41:iii[2018] 147–65) re-examinesthe unpublished poems from Inventions of the March Hare to argue that Eliot‘experimented with ekphrastic poetics early in his career through ambivalentappropriations, parodies, and formal innovation’ (p. 149). Readings follow of‘Embarquement pour Cythere’ and ‘The Love song of St Sebastian’ in particular.For Capogna, who is strongly indebted to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this en-gagement with ekphrasis and the seeming refusal that followed in Eliot’s later,published, work are ‘inscribed in a cultural dialectic’ with various ‘forms of cul-tural authority’ (p. 162). ‘Modernism and T.S. Eliot’, by David Ellis (CQ47:i[2018] 53–64) takes the publication of Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’sedition of Eliot’s poetical works in 2015 as the point of departure for a generalsurvey of Eliot in relation to modernism. Competent, cogent, clear, this essaycovers familiar ground and offers an account of his work up to and includingThe Waste Land; but there is little that is new here and no sense that Ellis prof-ited from any of the copious annotation material provided by Eliot’s editors to re-fresh or alter our understanding of the poet.

In ‘Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot, and the Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads’(JVC 24:iv[2018] 542–55), Michael Craske rejects Eliot’s claim in The SacredWood [1919] that the poetry of A.C. Swinburne is divorced from music. As wellas setting Eliot’s criticisms of Swinburne in context with contemporary musico-logical theory, Craske shows that he was empirically wrong to claim thatSwinburne’s work was not of a kind that could be ‘set to music’ (p. 543). Onthe contrary, Craske cites 125 compositions inspired by Swinburne’s poetry by arange of composers, from Charles Villiers Stanford to less well-known figuressuch as Felix Corbett. Craske then traces complex synergies between the influ-ence of Wagner on Swinburne and the influence of Swinburne uponWagnerianism at the end of the nineteenth century. Swinburne’s poetry, heshows, was ‘more versatile, sophisticated and open to possibility than Eliotbelieved’ (p. 555).

Craske reveals that musical settings of Swinburne’s poems were popular inmusic halls. Eliot’s apparent ignorance of this may be mystifying given the en-thusiasm he expressed for the music-hall performances of Marie Lloyd in hiscritical writing and the saturation of allusion to music hall in his poetry. A notefrom Brian Vickers, ‘Prufrock and Mary of Argyle’ (N&Q 65[2018] 411–12),suggests that the mermaids at the close of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’may recall an otherwise forgotten source, ‘Mary of Argyle’, a Victorian music-hall ballad by Charles Jefferys. Nancy Hargrove’s ‘T.S. Eliot and Popular Music:Ragtime, Music-Hall Songs, Bawdy Ballads, and All That Jazz’ (SoAR


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



83:ii[2018] 16–28) draws on work by David Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard, aswell as her own previous research into Eliot’s time in Paris, to review the influ-ence of various popular cultural forms upon his work. Jazz and the music hallshe observes, ‘informed the rhythm and shape of his works’ as well as promptinghim to experiment with form (p. 16). There is little new here, but this essay iswell illustrated with striking images from the archive, and Hargrove links to atouching video of her late husband performing some of the works under discus-sion. Matthew Sperling’s ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ (Apollo [2 February 2018]60–5) is, if anything, even more lavishly illustrated than Hargrove’s article,reproducing works by Wyndham Lewis, Patrick Heron, David Jones, and othersin a breezy summary of Eliot’s interest in the visual arts and the subsequent in-fluence of his poetry upon visual artists.Brian Clifton’s ‘Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’ (JML 42:i[2018] 65–76) seeks to recon-cile readings of Eliot’s poem in terms of gender politics with accounts of itsform. Prufrock, Clifton suggests, understands the sonnet as predominantlyEnglish and masculine (presumably Eliot’s persona is imagined never to haveread Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), so that the con-stant approximation and then retreat from something like the sonnet within thepoem enacts Prufrock’s self-conscious failure to live up to an over-demandingstandard of masculinity. This is an ingenious reading, but one that struggles inplaces (like Prufrock) to reconcile itself to exceptions and approximations.Matthew Scully’s ‘Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land,

and Poetic Form’ (JML 41:iii[2018] 166–82) argues against readings of TheWaste Land that seek to restore a sense of ‘order’ by placing the character ofTiresias at its centre. For Scully, this figure exemplifies instead CatherineMalabou’s theory of ‘plasticity’, a ‘reading’, he explains, ‘that seeks to revealthe form left in the text through the withdrawing of presence, that is, throughits own deconstruction’ (p. 168). Accordingly, the metamorphosis of Tiresias‘displaces or defers any ontological containment of form-essence-presence’(p. 178). The ‘plastic form’ of The Waste Land, Scully concludes, ‘resists allordering impositions’ (p. 179).The additional hyphen in the title of Tony Sharpe’s ‘“Always Present”: T.S.

Eliot and Re-cantation’ (Mo/Mo 25:ii[2018] 369–87) is intended to connect theway that Eliot’s later work revisits earlier utterances in such a manner as to in-cant or sing again, rather than merely recanting an earlier position. AgainstEliot’s broad disposition to avoid repeating himself, Sharpe points to the work-ings of repetition within the poems, articulating a ‘poetics of resonance’ (p. 384).In this way, he links the disquisition on remorse in Four Quartets with the deepallusive power of poetry that alludes to some present but not fully articulatedsource of emotional energy. David Ben-Merre also offers an account of FourQuartets in the final chapter of Figures of Time: Disjunctions in ModernistPoetry (pp. 169–89). As part of a broader argument about the ‘temporalities’ ofmodernism (p. ix), Ben-Merre engages in a lucid and good-natured close readingof Eliot that understands his achievement as ‘a lyric failure, but not in a pejora-tive sense’ (p. 169). There is a complex argument here about Eliot’s representa-tion of a lyrical voice struggling to place itself in time.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Finally, Jed Perl draws on Eliot to reflect on the relative differences betweenan ‘impasse’ and an interlude when it comes to thinking about historical pro-gress, in his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of CommonKnowledge, ‘Impasse or Interlude: Reflections on an Imminent Anniversary’(CK 24:iii[2018] 474–82). Perl’s article is not really about Eliot, but his reflec-tions on historical events (the collapse of the Cold War), cultural change, andthe way in which writers and critics respond to those changes draw heavilyupon Eliot, probing and questioning the kind of example he offers to presentwriters.

7. British Poetry Post-1950

Fresh work on Ted Hughes has proliferated in the last decade, and 2018 gave nosign of bucking this trend. Hughes was the subject of two substantial edited col-lections. The first, Ted Hughes: Nature and Culture, is edited by Neil Roberts,Mark Wormald and Terry Gifford, and comes on the heels of Ted Hughes: FromCambridge to Collected [2013], edited by the same trio. It brings together long-standing Hughes scholars with a number of authoritative new voices in the field.Roberts’s introduction turns on Hughes’s ‘allegiance to “nature” and suspicionof, if not hostility to, “culture”’, but also challenges the basis of that nature/cul-ture dichotomy in the ecocritical fashion: ‘The stronger the evidence that human-kind is inescapably a part of the natural world (a position Hughes undoubtedlyespoused) the more difficult it is to position “culture” outside nature’ (p. xiii).Recent years have seen a burgeoning of ecocritical readings of Hughes, includingYvonne Reddick’s Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Sam Solnick’sPoetry and the Anthropocene, and environmental themes, while far from domi-nating the book, are again brought to the fore in several chapters in this collec-tion. Most of the essays here, though, will be of interest to Hughes scholars ofall stripes. The chapters in the first part of the book approach his work througha mix of ecological concerns, animal studies, and questions of form or poetictechnique. The book’s second half is loosely grouped around new readings onthe writers and texts that most influenced Hughes, as well as those influenced byhim.

In ‘Ted Hughes’s “Greening” and the Environmental Humanities’ (pp. 3–20),Terry Gifford shows that Hughes’s interest in contemporary environmental sci-ence, beginning with the ecological writings of Rachel Carson, was ‘essential re-search for his poetry’ (p. 7). Gifford, though, focuses less on Hughes’s poetrythan on the essays, letters, and archive materials through which the poet revealedover the years his shifting (and at times contradictory) preoccupations with con-servation, hunting, and environmental protection. His concern about global eco-logical crisis only intensified in later life, as did his polemic on the subject. In aletter Hughes wrote to Gifford himself in 1993, the poet tendered a warning aspressing now as it was then: ‘If the human race fails to survive all this it will bebecause it can’t get interested in its own annihilation’ (p. 14). Mark Wormald’selegantly conceived essay, ‘The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly’ (pp.21–38), explores the poet’s fascination with entomology and fly fishing, tracing


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



the significance of the generative, transformational, ephemeral dance of the may-fly through a series of close readings of Hughes’s poems and diaries. Hughes dis-covered in the mayfly an image for metamorphosis, and in ‘its abundance and itsfragility’ Wormald makes a case for the insect’s centrality to the poet’s ecologicalimagination (p. 24). Invoking the lives of mayflies in what Wormald calls a ‘lan-guage of the spiritual, the moral and the metaphysical’ (p. 30), the charge of themayfly is, in Hughes’s own words, akin to that of ‘Poetic electrons’ (p. 34).Neil Roberts’s essay, ‘Ted Hughes’s Paradise’ (pp. 39–52), looks to untangle

Hughes’s idea that shooting and fishing were, paradoxically, ways in which hefelt most connected to the natural world, pursuits that represented for him ‘an ex-tension of your whole organism into the whole environment that’s created you’(p. 41). Hughes was an avid hunter from his teenage years, and, as he suggestedin Poetry in the Making, came to see writing poems as an extension of his earlierhunting pursuits. Focusing mainly on ‘A Solstice’, a poem about the killing of afox, Roberts examines how Hughes’s writing reconstructs and returns to the ani-mal encounters of his childhood and adolescence. The fox was a totemic creatureof deep, reflexive significance for Hughes, particularly at the beginning and endof his career, and its recurrence in his writing becomes, as Roberts deduces, ‘akind of test of his personal and poetic integrity’ (p. 51). The theme of human–animal encounters continues in Danny O’Connor’s excellent essay, ‘Why Look atAnimals?’ (pp. 53–68). Borrowing his title from John Berger’s essay of thatname in About Looking, O’Connor scrutinizes Hughes’s obsession with animalobservation and asks why his poems so often look to ‘capture’ their gaze. Since‘the most potent connections with animals in Hughes’s poetry are often silent,and ocular’, O’Connor writes, there is something in looking at animals, and inanimals looking back, that ‘offer[s] Hughes a glimpse into a way of being humanthat culture seems to have left behind’ (p. 56). Claire Heaney’s ‘Coetzee’sHughesian Animals’ (pp. 69–86) considers Hughes’s influence on the writings ofJ.M. Coetzee. The South African novelist included Hughes’s ‘November’ in apersonal anthology of poems, each of which was handpicked by Coetzee on thebasis that they ‘mean and meant a lot to me’ and played a part ‘in my own for-mation as a writer’ (p. 70). Using ‘November’ as a springboard, Heaney exam-ines Coetzee’s animal ethics and his use of Hughes’s animal poems in his novelElizabeth Costello [2003]. The eponymous Costello is an ageing Australian nov-elist who delivers a series of talks on poetry, through which she reveals her care-ful engagement with Hughes’s work. These and other instances across Coetzee’swriting reveal not only his affection for Hughes’s poetry, but also, Heaneyargues, their shared appreciation of ‘the interrelationship of humans and otheranimals’ (p. 72).James Castell’s ‘The Nature of Ted Hughes’s Similes’ (pp. 87–106) changes

tack, moving on to a specific technical aspect of the poet’s craft: the simile. Heargues that Hughes’s similes ‘defamiliarise as often as they create connections’and ‘dehumanise as much as they anthropomorphise the nonhuman’ (p. 88).Similes, Castell writes, ‘suggest resemblance, rather than the complete identifica-tion that is sometimes associated with metaphor’ (p. 90). For this reason the sim-ile introduces a tension with its subject that metaphor does not, namely theimplied dissimilitude that comes when we say something is ‘like’ (rather than‘is’) something else. So when Hughes asks in Poetry in the Making, ‘How can a


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



poem . . . be like an animal?’, his poetry is, as Castell argues, ‘particularlyattracted to similes’ (and indeed animals) ‘because of their independence, theircapacity for uncontrollable and approximate meaning in a form that draws atten-tion to itself with a comparative marker’ (p. 102).

Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of TedHughes’ (pp. 107–24) traces the mongrelized forms and hints of multiculturalthinking which first emerge in Hughes’s early poem ‘Strawberry Hill’ fromLupercal [1960], and which can be seen again in later texts such as ‘Shibboleth’from Capriccio [1990]. In these cases, Hughes undermines popular myths of cul-tural uniformity concerning ‘England’ and ‘the English’, suggesting, asRavinthiran proposes, that ‘Englishness is not a fixed essence, at risk of pollu-tion’, but is rather ‘created and recreated by and within the mutations of culture’(p. 109). These notions seem to classify Hughes as a rather different writer of na-tionhood, and certainly a more complex one, than has been typically assumed.Addressing the idea of England through Hughes’s poetic imagining of landscape,Janne Stigen Drangsholt’s ‘Imagination Alters Everything: Ted Hughes andPlace’ (pp. 125–42) is informed by Heideggerian ideas of dwelling. Drangsholtriffs on a range of responses to Hughes’s notions of place and identity, particular-ly those of Seamus Heaney and Sean O’Brien, and draws from them the sensethat Hughes creates in his poetry ‘a landscape that comprises both a mythical orspiritual hinterland and an actual scape’ (p. 126). In other words, Hughes’s poeticlandscape manages to be both a place with real homespun physicality to it, andan almost metaphysical ‘England of the mind’.

Turning now to the book’s second half, which concentrates more on the ‘cul-tural’ than the ‘natural’, James Robinson’s ‘“Our Chaucer”: Ted Hughes, SylviaPlath and the Politics of Medieval Reading’ (pp. 143–60) is a compelling pieceon the ways in which Hughes considered Chaucer not only a major poetic ex-ample, but a key figure in his creative relationship with Sylvia Plath. AsRobinson shows, Chaucer was, alongside Shakespeare, ‘the most lastingly influ-ential literary and personal relationship of their lives’ (p. 156). For Hughes inlater years, attempting to preserve his distinctiveness as a poet in his civic role asLaureate, Chaucer presented ‘the perfect model of a public poet’, Robinson sug-gests, ‘[as] a writer who could speak to and for Royal power and yet maintainsovereignty over his own poetic voice’ (pp. 145–6). Katherine Robertson’senlightening essay, ‘“The Remains of Something”: Ted Hughes and TheMabinogion’ (pp. 161–76), examines another of Hughes’s medieval intertexts.Through a mix of close readings and archival research, Robertson makes a per-suasive case that Hughes was drawing on and retelling the medieval Welsh talescollected in the Mabinogion, building some of those stories into his mythologicaland folkloric frameworks for Crow and several poems in Cave Birds.

In ‘Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins’ (pp. 177–94), John Goodby chartsHughes’s influence by Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets of the1940s, a school much under the influence of Blake and Yeats, which has longbeen marginalized by critics. Their mode of ‘visionary modernism’, as outlinedin the New Apocalypse anthology [1939], grappled with ideas of ‘(im)mortality’and other such ‘“grander themes”’ (p. 181). Goodby sees in Hughes ‘a continualtrading in the currency of apocalyptic vision’, and finds echoes of the poeticmovement, often via Thomas, ‘traceable everywhere’ in his work (p. 182). The


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



essay concludes with a delicate reconsideration of Hughes’s position within theEnglish tradition and the Apocalyptic poetics he took with him, in whichGoodby labels Hughes ‘the maverick the establishment adopted out of fear of amore countercultural alternative’ (p. 190). The next essay, Carrie Smith’s‘Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations Contextually in TedHughes’s Cave Birds’ (pp. 195–214), is a strikingly original take on Hughes’s re-lationship with Plath. It begins with a draft of ‘Something Was Happening’ fromCave Birds [1975], from which Hughes crossed out two lines about Hamlet look-ing at Ophelia’s corpse. The erasure, Smith argues, ‘resonates with a much largerstructure of omission and silence connecting Plath and Ophelia in his writing andcompositional process’ (p. 196). Hughes’s anxiety about his work being inter-preted through his relationship with Plath leads to what Smith identifies as aheightened ‘sensitivity about particularly charged cultural references, likeOphelia’, and to other deletions, rejections, and omissions from his manuscriptsand published work, such as his decision not to translate the story of Orpheusand Eurydice in his Tales of Ovid [1997]. The essay broadens from here into aconsideration of the poetry’s spectral character and ‘Hughes’s careful excision ofbiography from his authorial persona’ (p. 214).In ‘The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald’ (pp. 215–30),

Laura Blomvall reads Hughes’s influence as ‘a source of acute discomfort’ forOswald (p. 218), who only belatedly conceded his influence on her writing. AsBlomvall neatly argues, this is less an issue of Bloomian anxiety than of Oswald,in the aftermath of her debut volume The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile [1996],wishing not to be narrowly defined as pastoral poet in the Hughesian vein. Laterin her career, in ‘Poetry for Beginners’ and her introduction to A Ted HughesBestiary [2014] as well as in various interviews, Oswald has openly celebratedHughes’s importance, and Blomvall traces the compositional and stylistic symme-tries that have emerged across their work. Lastly, Seamus Perry’s free-form essayon ‘Hughes and Urbanity’ (pp. 231–44) sifts through various anecdotes, letters,poems, and telling observations to explore Hughes’s decidedly non-‘urbane’reputation as a writer, and to reflect on the ‘double life’ he led as both a poetand a man in the wider society (p. 236). Hughes’s prose and poetry writing notonly has an urbane side, but in places is prone to the jarringly (and deliberately)mundane or quotidian; for Perry, these awkward moments suggest that ‘a kind ofprosaic [is breaking] through the aspiration to sublimity’ (p. 243). Such dualitiesin his verse are, Perry argues, ‘a stylistic expression of Hughes’s intuition aboutlife involving one reality underlying another, which is also lived and certainlyreal but sits precariously above the first’ (p. 241).Ted Hughes in Context is the second major title of Hughes criticism in 2018

and has Terry Gifford reprising the role of editor-contributor. The thirty-sixessays collected here cast a wide net, and together provide the most comprehen-sive survey to date of Hughes’s work and its contexts. The chapters themselvesare fairly short, inviting the reader to sample an array of critical approaches inthe style of a Cambridge Companion or Oxford Handbook. The collection openswith little preamble, launching almost immediately into the first of its ten sec-tions, Hughes’s literary contexts. Jonathan Locke Hart’s outline of ‘Hughes andHis Contemporaries’ (pp. 3–12) focuses on three Faber poets in Philip Larkin,Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. Larkin came to regard himself as a rival,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Gunn was a professional admirer and advocate, and Heaney was a close friend.From Hart’s overview of their personal and professional relationships Hughesemerges as a generous figure, supportive of his contemporaries, and above all anearly, formative influence on Heaney. In ‘Hughes and Plath’ (pp. 13–22),Heather Clark sketches out the couple’s turbulent relationship, from an impas-sioned first encounter to the prodigious literary talents which, before the end,they cultivated in one another. Clark’s essay sidesteps the personal controversiesand focuses purely on their literary legacy, noting how, ‘even after [their] uniondissolved, neither poet would abandon the aesthetic vision that had first broughtthem together’ (p. 20). Ronald Schuchard’s ‘Hughes and Eliot’ (pp. 23–32) elab-orates on the two poets’ personal acquaintance from 1957 until Eliot’s death in1965, and reflects intriguingly on Hughes’s early and formative absorption of‘Eliot’s creative and critical theories into his own’ (p. 23). His reinterpretation ofEliot’s work, based on his vision of Eliot as ‘a romantic, shamanic poet, as aseer and prophetic of his age’, was a model Hughes returned to frequently in hiscriticism, and one he sought to emulate in the shamanic quests of his own verse(p. 28). In ‘Hughes’s Literary Legacy’ (pp. 33–42) Fiona Sampson considers thevarious ways in which a literary legacy can disseminate itself. She singles outfor praise all Hughes did ‘to make poetry a lively force and accessible mediumfor children’, and suggests that ‘the diversity of contemporary British poet[s]’,many of whom grew up in Hughes’s heyday, is part of his lasting legacy (pp.40–1).

Next come five essays appraising Hughes’s work in other literary genres.Following Fiona Sampson’s take on Hughes as a champion of children’s im-aginative lives, Lissa Paul expands on the subject in ‘Hughes’s Writing forChildren’ (pp. 45–53). Paul finds that his works for children ‘run like a riverthrough the body of his work—a mainstream not a tributary’ (p. 46), and notesthat having a child of his own ‘opened up a space in [Hughes’s] early work forinvoking a child’s way of seeing’ (p. 51). In Jonathan Locke Hart’s second con-tribution to the book, ‘Hughes and Drama’ (pp. 54–62), Hughes is framed as ‘apoet of drama’ as well as ‘a dramatic poet’ (p. 54). Indeed, Hart argues that whatHughes did for the stage was an extension of what he sought to do as a poet,‘writing ancient tragedy and myth as intervention in the concerns of our times’(p. 61). In the next chapter, Alex Davis approaches ‘Hughes as Literary Critic’(pp. 63–71), exploring the ‘enthusing didacticism’ of critical works like Poetryin the Making, in which Hughes sought to nurture the creative impetus in youngwriters and his adolescent audience (p. 64). Davis remarks on the way Hughes’scriticism stressed the extempore and unrefined, prized improvisation in otherwriters, and defended a creative practice of sense-for-sense translation againstthose who would have it word-for-word. Picking up this interlingual thread, TaraBergin’s essay, ‘Hughes as Translator’ (pp. 72–81), marvels at Hughes’s successas a translator despite not being fluent in any language other than his own. Allof his translations are in fact co-translations, worked up from English cribs.Hughes was committed nonetheless to introducing English-speaking readers toforeign poetry. In 1965 he co-founded the magazine Modern Poetry inTranslation, which remains today a thriving centre for new translated poetry. Hisown translations in verse and drama embraced the idea of remaking the original,and chimed with his broader ambition ‘to revitalise, but at the same time exist


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



outside . . . a British literary tradition that he himself felt no part of’ (p. 79). In‘Hughes as Correspondent’ (pp. 82–90), Joanny Moulin reads Hughes at hismost unguarded, in his letters, which were never meant to be published. In morerigidly descriptive or formal modes Hughes’s letter-writing is tedious, but theessay springs to life when discussing ‘Ted Hughes the humourist, who can relishin tag-names and word-plays, in a fantastic, almost surrealistic nonsensical style’(p. 86). While everybody writes differently to different correspondents, Moulincalls Hughes ‘a chameleon letter writer’ (p. 86), capable of great ‘spontaneity ofexpression’ (p. 89) and composing in a variety of tones that find echoes in hispoetry.The five essays that follow are loosely grouped around considerations of style.

In ‘Hughes and Voice’ (pp. 93–102) Carrie Smith listens to the distinctive tonesof the poet’s West Yorkshire voice, a voice described by Plath as ‘angry, gritty,macho’ (p. 93), which is now preserved in the studio recordings and radio pro-grammes he made throughout his career. These considerations take Smith to theimportance of sound in his poetry, and the way vocal performance might relateto the process of composition. For Hughes, reading aloud and written compos-ition were intimately intertwined (pp. 97–8). Sam Perry’s ‘Hughes andSurrealism’ (pp. 103–12) attunes itself to the poet’s affinity with surrealism andhis delight in the absurd. ‘The most conspicuous sign of Hughes’s surrealist sens-ibility’, Perry claims, ‘is his fascination with the world of the unconscious andthe associated realms of sleep and dreams’ (p. 104), on which the poet expandsilluminatingly in Poetry in the Making. Perry explores Hughes’s surrealist icon-ography as it reaches its apotheosis in Crow, and highlights telling crossovers be-tween his writing and the poems and manifestoes of the father of surrealism,Andre Breton, whom Hughes read. Tara Bergin’s ‘Hughes and EasternEuropeans’ (pp. 113–22) also centres on Crow, looking at the text through theprism of Hughes’s appreciation of Herbert, Popa, and Pilinszky, whom the poetread in their first English translations. Bergin deftly illumines how, in their ap-proach to apocalyptic experience, these and other post-war eastern and centralEuropean writers shaped Hughes’s own poetic development. In ‘Hughes and theClassics’ (pp. 123–32), Roger Rees outlines the vast network of classical refer-ence in Hughes’s work. These references are not only central to poetry collec-tions such as Prometheus on his Crag, but form the basis of much of Hughes’stranslation-cum-adaptation work, as in his Tales from Ovid or his versions of theplays of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Seneca. The essay further explicates the pointthat Hughes’s translations of works, in this case those in Latin and Greek, didnot treat the source texts with particular reverence; though it should be noted, asRees does, that Hughes himself ‘is reported to have said that his best-ever workwas his version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia’ (p. 130). In ‘Hughes’s Collaborationwith Artists’ (pp. 133–42), Lorraine Kerslake takes in the extraordinary range ofHughes’s work for both adults and children that appeared in collaboration withvisual artists. Of these artists, Leonard Baskin was his most productive and influ-ential working partner, with their collaborations in the end encompassing somethirty books (p. 134). Kerslake’s essay paints a fascinating picture of Hughes as‘a writer whose appreciation for the artefact of the book led him to repeatedlyexplore the risky business of offering his readers more than his texts by workingclosely with visual arts that inspired him in their turn’ (p. 141).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Steve Ely’s chapter, ‘Hughes’s Yorkshire’ (pp. 145–54), is the first of threeessays on Hughes’s geocultural contexts, all of which take a broadly biographicalapproach. The distinctive West Yorkshire dialect with which Hughes was raisedis inextricable from his poetic voice. As a result, Ely argues, ‘a kind ofYorkshire essentialism at the most basic linguistic level is fundamental toHughes’s poetic self-conception’ (p. 145). After leaving Yorkshire in his twenties,Hughes maintained ties with his original home place, particularly through corres-pondence with his friend Jack Brown. In Brown, according to Ely, ‘Hughes sawa living link to his Mexborough childhood and adolescence that met his atavisticneed to remain connected to that now distant . . . yet profoundly formative place’(p. 153). In the next chapter, Gillian Groszewski turns our attention further afieldto ‘Hughes and America’ (pp. 155–64). ‘From adolescence’, Groszewski claims,‘Hughes had been developing an interest in American poetry that affected hiswriting’, though his American education greatly intensified after meeting SylviaPlath (p. 155). While his engagement with American writing has since been con-sidered as a by-product of his relationship with Plath, Groszewski counters withthe suggestion that ‘reading American books and living in America allowedHughes to develop his writing as he chose, away from what he saw as the claus-trophobic proscriptions of the British literary establishment’ (p. 163). MarkWormald’s illuminating chapter, ‘Hughes and Ireland’ (pp. 165–74), draws onHughes’s letters to explore the poet’s romanticized relationship with Ireland,where he often contemplated moving. Wormald describes his ‘preoccupation withthe richness of Irish myth and folklore’ (p. 166).

Turning now to anthropological contexts, David Troupes, in ‘Hughes andReligion’ (pp. 177–86), discusses Hughes’s often polemical views on variousdenominations of Christianity. The word ‘religion’ derives, as Troupes notes,from the Latin ligare, ‘to tie, fasten’. Whether or not Hughes is an anti-Christianpoet continues to be debated, but Troupes affirms that he is certainly a religiouspoet. The essential re-connective purpose of religion, Troupes argues, is relatedto his work’s deep engagement with the natural world. In ‘Hughes andShamanism’ (pp. 187–96) Gregory Leadbetter examines the link between poetryand shamanism, which Hughes first encountered through Mircea Eliade’s study,Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy [1964]. This work, Leadbitter writes,‘spoke directly to Hughes’s own psychological experience of “a personal, poetic,profound engagement with the miraculous forces of the universe”’, and ‘activatedthe entire network of Hughes’s prior reading of esoterica, folklore and myth’ (p.189). Leadbitter’s chapter offers a fascinating account of the ways in which thesepatterns chimed with and nourished Hughes’s verse and prose. Ann HenningJocelyn continues the examination of Hughes’s more esoteric interests in‘Hughes and the Occult’ (pp. 197–206). The symbology of astrology held a par-ticular appeal for Hughes, who drew many horoscopes of his own, as Jocelynhas found, and who once suggested to Plath that he might consider practising as-trology for a living.

James Robinson documents Hughes’s wider interest in medieval culture in‘Hughes and the Middle Ages’ (pp. 209–18), paying keenest attention to the in-fluence of his reading and incomplete translation of Sir Gawain and the GreenKnight. Daniel O’Connor’s chapter, ‘Hughes and History’ (pp. 219–27), exam-ines Hughes’s understanding of England’s history, or as it is told in Shakespeare


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



and the Goddess. Hughes sought (impossibly) to make this ‘mythic history’ ofEngland compatible with the modern age in which he lived. In ‘Hughes andWar’ (pp. 228–37), Helen Melody explores the legacy in Hughes’s work of thetwo world wars. He felt that the First World War ‘overshadowed his [early]childhood’ (p. 228) and experienced the Second World War at first hand. WhileHughes struggled, as Melody writes, ‘to escape war as a theme’, he held a deepappreciation for the war poetry of Owen, Douglas, and others (p. 235). NeilRoberts begins ‘Hughes and the Laureateship’ (pp. 238–48) with a history of theignominy and satire heaped on previous holders of the Laureateship, and thepost’s enduring status as something of a poisoned chalice. The essay also brieflycompares Hughes’s work as Laureate with that of his predecessors and succes-sors in the role. In the next two chapters Laura Blomvall and Janne StigenDrangsholt take up the gender contexts of Hughes’s life and writing. Blomvall’s‘Hughes and Feminism’ (pp. 251–60) complicates earlier accounts of gender rep-resentation in his work, and provides a nuanced reconsideration of Hughes’sdepictions of Assia Wevill and Sylvia Plath in Capriccio [1990] and BirthdayLetters [1998] respectively. In ‘Hughes, Masculinity and Gender Identity’ (pp.261–70), Janne Stigen Drangsholt brings a range of theorists (Jung most promin-ent among them) to bear on representations of masculinity, and the gendering ofanimals or particular attitudes, across Hughes’s work.Terry Gifford’s essay, ‘Hughes and Nature’ (pp. 273–82), is the first of four

chapters that turn on environmental matters. Gifford outlines what he sees as ‘thesix stages of greening’ in Hughes’s work (p. 273), beginning with the close ob-servation of animals in early poems that deprecate hunting, and ending with asense of cusping environmental crisis that Hughes feared was largely beingignored. In ‘Hughes and Agriculture’ (pp. 283–91), Jack Thacker provides anelegant account of Hughes’s rural roots and the persona he cultivated as a farmer,which Thacker connects to ‘his self-fashioned roles as educator and environmen-talist, especially when it came to countryside matters’ (p. 289). Mark Wormald’s‘Hughes and Fishing’ (pp. 292–301) reflects richly on the poet’s lifelong obses-sion with fishing and the effect it had on his poetic imagination. In ‘Hughes’sEnvironmental Campaigns’ (pp. 302–12), Yvonne Reddick condenses the arch-ival discoveries and lively ideas that formed the basis of her 2016 monograph onHughes’s ecopoetry and his work in environmental activism, which she focusesupon here. The following two chapters pay sustained attention to Hughes theeducator. Hugh Dunkerley’s ‘Hughes and Creative Writing’ (pp. 315–24)addresses the poet’s brief spells as a creative writing teacher and reveals howthose roles prompted him to reflect on his own process of composition. Hughesarticulated his ideas most succinctly in Poetry in the Making [1967], a text whichwas ‘little less than revolutionary for many teachers’, Dunkerley argues, and onethat made a sizeable impact on creative writing in schools and higher education(p. 323). In ‘Hughes, Anthologising and Education’ (pp. 325–34), David Whitleyoffers a compelling account of Hughes’s work as an anthologist and the stance itrevealed towards the cultural values of his age. Focusing on three anthologies,The Rattle Bag [1982], The School Bag [1997], and By Heart [1997], Whitleytakes the measure of the poet’s influence on younger readers particularly, andhow Hughes shifted the course of poetry education in the British Isles.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



The study’s final section concentrates on biographical contexts, beginning withMark Hinchcliffe in ‘Hughes’s Publication History’ (pp. 337–46). Not a conven-tional publication history, this chapter opens up the poet’s less well-known, oftenoverlooked creative outlets, and explores Hughes’s making of books with visualartists, his involvement with craft presses, and his own skills as an artist. In‘Hughes’s Archives’ (pp. 347–58), Amanda Golden presents an overview of theTed Hughes papers held at Emory University, the British Library, and SmithCollege, bringing her own experience as an archivist to bear on the collections’rich potential for future study. Claire Heaney’s ‘Hughes and the Biographers’(pp. 359–69) chronicles the controversies that surround Hughes, his feministdetractors, and the difficulties of approaching a life story that has already beenso widely sensationalized or demonized. The collection ends, appropriately, with‘The Ted Hughes Myth’ (pp. 370–8). Daniel O’Connor reflects here, as ClaireHeaney does, on the difficulty of separating Hughes’s biography from his poetry.Certain events in Hughes’s life cast long shadows across his work, and by thesame token, O’Connor writes, ‘the mythical Hughes that surfaces in the poemshas overtaken the man behind them’ (pp. 370–1). O’Connor’s appraisal of theenormous, enduring myth of ‘Ted Huge’ is a fitting finale to this all-encompassing collection of essays, which does justice not only to the scale ofHughes’s achievements, but also to the range of scholarly approaches his workcontinues to inspire.

The final addition to Hughes scholarship in 2018 was Daniel Weston’s ‘TwoContemporary Poets and the Ted Hughes Bestiary’ (TedHSJ 7:i[2018] 89–101).Weston considers Alice Oswald’s and John Burnside’s debts to Hughes’s animalpoetry, which he roughly categorizes between two poles: ‘creatures recorded inlyric, observational mode (The Hawk in the Rain, Remains of Elmet, MoortownDiary) and sometimes-mythical beasts carrying the heavy metaphorical burden ofthe spirit world and creation myth (Wodwo, Crow, Adam and the Sacred Nine)’(p. 90). The essay illustrates how Hughes’s reputation for anthropomorphosiswas cultivated in the first instance by Al Alvarez, whose influential introductionto The New Poetry [1962] and earlier review of Hawk in the Rain [1957] empha-sized the metaphorical and allegorical dimensions of Hughes’s animals at the ex-pense of the creatures that were, ostensibly, the poems’ chief subject. Rightly orwrongly, Alvarez’s interpretation has coloured much of the subsequent criticismabout Hughes’s animal poetry. Against this, Weston proposes that ‘detailed obser-vation is always the anchor of metaphor’ in Hughes’s bestiary, and that his writ-ing about animals places a premium on ‘retaining creaturely experience in poeticlanguage’ (p. 7). In addressing the influence of Hughes’s animals on more recentpoetry, Weston uses the introduction to Oswald’s edition of A Ted HughesBestiary [2014] as an entryway into the Hughesian inflections of her poem ‘Fox’in Falling Awake [2016]. The essay ends with discussion of John Burnside’spoem ‘Animals’, from The Light Trap [2002], which, like Oswald’s ‘Fox’, bearssignificant resemblances to Hughes’s ‘The Thought-Fox’. As in the edited collec-tions discussed above, Weston finds that both poems, following Hughes, look toembody their animal subjects rather than simply describe or metaphorize them.

Tony Harrison, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in April 2017, was thefocus of a seven-essay special issue of English Studies, edited by Rachel Bowerand Jacob Blakesley. Harrison’s work has long cultivated a distinctive regional


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



character; but despite his personal affiliations with the city of Leeds, where hewas born and raised, Harrison has spent much of his career travelling, collaborat-ing, and translating works from other places and periods. In this special issue,the editors look to resituate his work in the international contexts to which muchof it belongs. Bower and Blakesley’s introduction, ‘Tony Harrison: InternationalMan of Letters’ (ES 99:i[2018] 1–5), outlines their aim to ‘highlight the signifi-cance of transnational literary relations’ in Harrison’s writing, as well as takestock of ‘the startling range of mediums, languages and cultures across whichHarrison has worked’ (p. 1). Part of this brief reflects the editors’ conviction thatliterary criticism ought to be moving away from the study of writers within theframework of single national traditions. As a poet who persistently entwines thelocal and the international and so often crosses disciplinary lines, Harrison allbut demands such a transcultural approach.John Whale’s article, ‘Tony Harrison: The Making of a Post-War English

Poet’ (ES 99:i[2018] 6–18), focuses on Harrison’s conception of ‘the identity ofa poet’, and on the peculiar ‘labours’ and ‘obsessions’ that were, for him, centralto the poet’s vocation. Opening Harrison’s archived notebooks, journals, and cor-respondence from the 1950s, Whale examines these ‘self-authenticating and self-fabricating fictions’ from his early years and emphasizes their lasting influenceon Harrison’s creative process (p. 17). Hannah Copley’s ‘From Baghdad toSarajevo to Beeston: The War Poetry of Tony Harrison’ (ES 99:i[2018] 19–33)repositions Harrison as an international, contemporary war poet, drawing on hispersonal notebooks and photo albums as a news correspondent during theBosnian and Gulf Wars. The article argues that Harrison’s engagements withinternational military conflict set their store by poetry’s public role ‘on the frontline of history’ (p. 26). Developing what Copley calls ‘a civilian front-linepoetics’, Harrison’s war poems combine the ‘immediacy of journalism’ and the‘irreverence . . . of music hall’ with a form of ‘tortured humanism that simultan-eously despairs of poetry in the face of atrocity and celebrates its enduring role’(p. 23).In ‘Tony Harrison in Nigeria: Teacher, Translator and Dramatist’ (ES

99:i[2018] 34–50), Rachel Bower examines the notebooks composed at AhmaduBello University in northern Nigeria, where Harrison was a lecturer from 1962 to1966. Bower also examines the manuscripts and rehearsal scripts of his first play,Aikin Mata, which was an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, produced incollaboration with the Northern Irish poet James Simmons. Jacob Blakesley’s‘Tony Harrison the Translator: “Life’s a performance. Either join in /Lightheartedly, or thole the pain”’ (ES 99:i[2018] 51–66) continues the emphasison translation, foregrounding the formative role it has played across Harrison’spoetic career. In the four monographs written on Harrison, writes Blakesley,‘there exists no comprehensive overview of his translation practice and ideology’(p. 51). Focusing on the poet’s interlingual translations of Aeschylus,Aristophanes, Euripides, Martial, Palladas, and Racine, Blakesley argues that‘Harrison’s approach to translating drama is different to the majority of poet-translators’, insofar as ‘he works collaboratively with directors . . . readily andwillingly incorporates suggestions from actors, translates directly from the sourcelanguages, and brings a forceful ideological poetics and language of his own tobear upon the text’ (p. 63).


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



In ‘Finding Patria and Pietas in Leeds: Tony Harrison and Virgil’s Aeneid’(ES 99:i[2018] 67–76), Hallie Marshall exposes and questions why so little hasbeen written about Harrison’s debt to Latin poetry. Since his 1981 translation ofAeschylus’s Oresteia, critics of Harrison’s classicism have understandablyfocused on his close association with ancient Greek drama, but this, claimsMarshall, has obscured a debt to Latin poetry of equal significance to his work.‘There may be no explicit allusions to Virgil’s poetry’, Marshall writes, ‘but itsinfluence is everywhere’ (p. 76). Reading Harrison’s work through a Virgilianlens (with particular reference to Book VI of the Aeneid), Marshall focuses onsilences, absences, and the poet’s implicit turn away from Virgil. These manifestin his work as ‘a refutation of Virgilian values, and those of the ruling elite, andan articulation of an opposing set of values . . . that sets Harrison’s agenda forthe entirety of his poetic output from the late 1970s onward’ (p. 76). The finalarticle in the issue, Edith Hall’s ‘Statuary and Classicism in Harrison’s TheLoiners and Beyond’ (ES 99:i[2018] 77–91), examines Harrison’s creativeexperiments with statues in The Loiners [1970]. Hall suggests that the centralimage of the statue may be ‘a helpful route into Harrison’s complex experientialworld’, and argues that his use of statuary in The Loiners anticipates ‘the moreambitious and sustained uses of visual artefacts in his later works’ (p. 78).Exploring the analogy between poetry and artefact in his writing, Hall alsoreflects on Harrison’s later use of the Greek epigram as a form deeply associatedwith statues and sculptural inscription.

Two of Harrison’s older contemporaries, Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson,are the subject of Magdalena Kay’s fascinating study, Poetry Against the World:Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain. The pair havebeen regularly counterposed by critics and journalists, and not only for the ‘mu-tual antipathy’ that characterized their personal and professional relationship (p.6). Larkin earned his reputation as a writer of ‘accessible, traditionally crafted,“human” poetry with a discernible lyric speaker who expresses clear emotions’,Kay writes, whereas Tomlinson was best known as ‘an unusual, vaguely experi-mental poet of “inhuman” material, with a strikingly impersonal voice whoseemotions were either submerged, muted, or, simply, not accessible’ (p. 7). Kaysets up a series of such dichotomies and polarized preconceptions, such as thepro-modernist, internationalist Tomlinson versus the anti-modernist, ‘provincialnativist’ Larkin (p. 175). Her study then gradually unpicks these across fivechapters. Beyond this ongoing comparative exercise, the book has a broader aimin mind. Addressing these two divisive, deeply divided poets in tandem enablesKay to consider ‘what is at stake in their far-reaching quarrel over the socialplace of poetry’ (p. 13). It also allows her to explore the different kinds ofEnglishness represented by two writers who were, in many ways, united in op-position to the state of contemporary poetry and the consumerist values of post-war Britain. Each, in his own way, was ‘writing against [this] world’ (p. 106).

The first chapter frames these mid-century debates over the direction of post-war British poetry and establishes Larkin’s and Tomlinson’s positions in relationto the Movement in the 1950s. During this period, both writers began to forgetheir own poetic identities and to establish very separate circles of literary allies.The Movement’s dedication to clarity, honesty, and plain speech resonated withLarkin, who was effectively co-opted by the group and widely touted as its


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



figurehead. A close friend and former teacher of Tomlinson’s, Donald Davie,was a founding member of the Movement, though Tomlinson himself styled hiswork in direct opposition to the principles of the Movement and against Larkin,whom he saw as its chief representative. But, as Kay shows, both poets were infact similarly disdainful of the key tenets of the Movement, which they saw asbeing ‘compromised by its dependence on a culture of opportunism, publicity,and noise’ (p. 37). Looking at their letters and essays as well as the poems,Kay’s book fleshes out this literary history and the interpersonal relationshipsthat helped shape it. She also provides a thorough examination of Tomlinson’sown ‘objective’ aesthetic, heavily influenced as it was by his American contem-poraries Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams (p. 55).After the modernist-inspired volume The Necklace [1955] set the tone for muchof Tomlinson’s subsequent work, Kay observes a dramatic shift, most starkly evi-dent in Annunciations [1989] and The Door in the Wall [1992], at which pointhis verse turns from an empiricist world-view rooted in the physical world to-wards a more meditative poetry of religious metaphor and ‘visionary radiance’(p. 71). This shift speaks to a central theme in the book, namely, its challenge tothe veracity of a secularist world-view that both Larkin and Tomlinson claimedindependently as their own. Kay does not go so far as to say that Larkin andTomlinson are religious poets, but argues that their secularism is complicated inthe poetry by a shared recognition of ‘a numinous realm above the world as weknow it’ (p. 19). That sense of a numinous realm is, she claims, fundamental tothe way their poetry frequently travels ‘back in time, off in space, or away into arealm of essences and mysteries’ (p. 179).Tomlinson died in August 2015. The obituaries and critical retrospectives on

his career that followed seem ‘to necessitate mention of Larkin’, Kay reflects, ascommentators and journalists made hay from the assumption that ‘these twopoets function as each other’s antitheses’, one providing an antidote to the other(p. 175). But, as Kay’s study so effectively demonstrates, their reciprocal animos-ity was in fact ‘often fuelled by . . . a concealed similitude’ (p. 22). Offering asensitive, balanced, extremely well researched account of Larkin’s andTomlinson’s careers in the round, Poetry Against the World shows up many spatsand contradictions, but also numerous striking parallels, which together cast thelegacies of both writers in new and mutually illuminating light.Andrew Duncan’s surefooted monograph, Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside

and Outside in Modern British Poetry, 1960–1997, is an ambitious attempt tomap prevailing trends and trace the presiding ‘shape’ of modern British poetry. Itaims to offer a sense of ‘the range of good poetry’, from which Duncan findshimself omitting a number of significant poets, as well as ‘a glimpse of thewhole cultural field’ (p. 7). The scale of the task necessarily involves large datasets, a fair amount of number-crunching, and any number of informed estima-tions based on those results. Naturally, as Duncan readily concedes, this leads toa fair amount of guesswork, and to suggestions such as the following: between1960 and 1997 there were ‘roughly 7,000 poets’ writing in Britain, though thatnumber could just as easily be ‘more than 4,000 and less than 16,000’ (p. 13).Early parts of the study involve exhaustive cataloguing and evaluation of thekinds of poetry produced in different anthologies, usefully divided into variousaesthetic, racial, national, and ideological bands. Duncan also explores the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



overlaps that extend, or, tellingly, do not extend between them. These case stud-ies provide insight into the agendas, power relations, and quarrelling factions thatprevail across poetry anthologies in the period. They also tell us much about thepolitics of taste-formation, Insiders and Outsiders, and the Silent Rules informingthe anthologist-gatekeepers, whose selection process often stands between poetsand the public. The same charges might be levelled at the selectivity of criticaloverviews such as this one, as Duncan is right to acknowledge. One of the bindsthat this book strives to overcome is the issue of specialization in poetry criticismand anthologies, which itself stems, in no small part, from the sheer volume ofpoetry being published and sold. ‘Poetic theorising is not quite distinct frompoetry marketing’, he notes, and the poetry itself no less answerable to thedemands of the market. If ‘the pressure of being accountable for sales returnsdrives impresarios to creative flights’, Duncan fears that ‘the noise of the market-place forces them to cry out simple concepts’ (p. 107). What follows in the se-cond part of the book is a series of short close readings or descriptions of aroundseventy major poetry collections. These are broken into various categories:Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! [2000] is filed (rather reductively) under‘Christian Poets’, while David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation [1969] comesunder ‘Noble Relics’, a subtitle that refers to those poets whose work survivedfrom eras pre-dating the 1950s. Each is scrutinized through Duncan’s own, ad-mittedly personal, view of their poetic achievement, influence, and significance.The range is remarkably extensive. Duncan resists the urge to conclude the studywith any sweeping evaluation or by locating ‘a shared pattern’ across the vol-umes he addresses (p. 308). Instead he elects to foreground the diversity of thesepoets and their work, and to make clear the folly of making generalizations aboutthis incorrigibly plural period in British poetic history.

Lee Spinks returns to the question of poetic value in his article, ‘Geoffrey Hilland Intrinsic Value’ (EiC 68:iii[2018] 369–89). This traces Hill’s enduring pre-occupation with the metaphysics of value, asking whether Hill’s understanding ofvalue exists in relation to other things or if it can inhere, intrinsically, in the thingitself. It is a question that recurs in Hill’s critical prose and poetry, and Spinkspursues it through Triumph of Love, Mercian Hymns, and Hill’s Tanner Lectureson ‘Poetry and Value’ and ‘Intrinsic Value: Marginal Observations on a CentralQuestion’. The disappearance of intrinsic value is linked, for Hill, to his grimdiagnosis of cultural memory and historical reflection in the post-war age, whichhas degraded to the stage that, as Hill mournfully observes in Speech! Speech!,we now need ‘Footnotes / to explain BIRKENAU’ (p. 381). While Spinks con-cedes this waning of historical sense, he challenges Hill’s ‘style of dogmatic as-sertion’ and his ‘self-approving contempt for contemporary modes thatconstitutes orthodox conservative opinion’ (p. 387). Hill’s accounts of the needto resist tyrannical simplification and the coercive consensus of established opin-ion are no doubt persuasive, as Spinks readily admits; but ultimately, it is hard toresist the essay’s conclusion that Hill is conflating ‘the loss of historical memorywith the loss of a particular English spiritual tradition’ (p. 387). Karl O’Hanlon’s‘“A Final Clarifying”: Form, Error, and Alchemy in Geoffrey Hill’s Ludo andThe Daybooks’ (EA 21:ii[2018] 207–21) is a nuanced account of the burden oferror and failure in the poet’s late work. Hill’s poetics of error are read in relationto the outlandish formal experiments of The Daybooks [2007–12] and their


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



playful prelude, Ludo. O’Hanlon pinpoints an apparent tension or ambivalence inthe poet’s attitude to mistakes which stems from Hill’s longstanding adherence tothe Christian doctrine of original sin: namely, that error and failure are to beavoided at all costs, even if some forms of error are unavoidable, ‘inescapabletextures of poetry as an ethical craft’ (p. 214). The essay riffs brilliantly on Hill’srevisions, marked as they are in these final few volumes, which indicate toO’Hanlon ‘an attitude to error and “amends” in the late work [that is] strikinglyresistant to an idea of the poem as a final, fixed perfection’ (p. 217). There arealso moments in these poems of flagrant self-sabotage, brought upon himself bythe severity of his poetic forms: ‘I checkmate my own moves’, he writes inLudo, before requesting a ‘medal for my rhymed sabotage’ in Expostulations onthe Volcano (see p. 218). These mordant, playful, self-satirizing episodes contrib-ute to a vibrant picture of Hill’s late work, which ‘courts esoteric processes ofopen-ended and botched experimentation’, as O’Hanlon shows, and enlists ‘ludi-crously complex forms to probe the nature of error’ with a refreshing air of falli-bility (p. 220).Elsewhere, Alice Oswald and Don Paterson round off this year’s entries. In

‘“A Word from Another World”: Mourning and Similes in Homeric Epic andAlice Oswald’s Memorial’ (CRJ 10:ii[2018] 170–90), Corinne Pache brings aclassicist’s eye to Memorial, a book-length poem Oswald herself describes as ‘atranslation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story’ (p. 171). Pache’s focus is onthe use of lament which Oswald makes the presiding motif of her text, dispens-ing with the Homeric narrative centred on the figure of Achilles, and insteadremembering in turn all the warriors who die in the battle at Troy. Her descrip-tions of these deaths are registered in pointedly passive registers (Phegas, for in-stance, ‘met a flying spear’). Importantly, their killers’ names and actions areelided from the text (p. 176). In the urge to elegize the dead, and to reverse theHomeric trope of memorializing the triumphant warrior at the expense of the fall-en, Oswald not only ‘privileges dying over killing’ (p. 183) but ‘leaves out thenotion of epic glory that is so important in the Iliad’ (p. 186). And finally, BenWilkinson’s essay ‘“Something Axiomatic on the Nature of Articulacy”: DonPaterson’s “An Elliptical Stylus” as Ars poetica’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 597–609)delves back into Don Paterson’s debut collection, Nil [1993] to address his em-bryonic ars poetica poem, ‘An Elliptical Stylus’. Wilkinson focuses first on theunder-appreciated class dynamics and identity politics at work in this poem andin the collection as a whole, before reading ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ in relation toPaterson’s later writing, for which, he argues, it lays the groundwork. The stylis-tic reverberations of this poem across his body of work are clear to see:Paterson’s tone, then and now, is neatly captured in Wilkinson’s description as‘punchy and jokey and to-the-point while also striving to be lyrical, meditative,fiercely intelligent’ (p. 607). And the deep self-consciousness and reflexivity ofhis writing, a trait that once led Peter Haworth to comment, ‘You are neverallowed just to overhear a Paterson lyric; nods must be exchanged and glancesreturned’, is as on display in this earliest collection as in all Paterson’s subse-quent offerings. Moreover, as Wilkinson observes, the poet’s eschewing a fixedor stable voice in ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ anticipates not only the multiple personaeconstructed in his second collection, God’s Gift to Women [1997], but ‘the in-creasingly autonomous and anonymously voiced poems of The Eyes [1999]


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



onwards’ (p. 606). The relatively small body of critical work devoted to Patersonis, at present, failing to measure up to the scale of his artistic achievement, andWilkinson’s essay makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of hispoetic development.

James Booth’s edition of Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936–1977 is reviewedelsewhere in this year’s YWES by William Baker.

8. Modern Irish Poetry

While 2018 lacked some of the diversity of recent years in the field of modernIrish poetry, happily the scholarship on offer was rigorous and illuminating.Unsurprisingly, Yeats once again received the lion’s share of scholarly attention.While there was no Yeats Annual published in 2018, International Yeats Studiesappeared twice, including a special issue edited by David Dwan and EmilieMorin on ‘Yeats and Mass Communications’. This issue examines Yeats’s mas-tery of literary and media cultural fields, including journalism, radio, and cinema.The editors have a fine feel for that great bundle of contradictions that Yeatswas, his simultaneous disdain for a popular audience and mastery of the literarymarketplace, his ‘anti-journalistic journalism’ a form of inoculation (IYS3:i[2018] 1–13). Dwan and Morin pass a keen eye over the terrain, observing forinstance the fact, blatant as it is under-appreciated, that Yeats was ‘an adept log-roller’ (p. 3). In ‘Broadcasting the Rising: Yeats and Radio Commemoration’(IYS 3:i[2018] 15–32), Emily Bloom demonstrates that the radio for Yeats wasnot merely a mode of artistic expression but a valuable tool for emphasizing ‘thecontingency of historical meaning and of shaping history’ (p. 10). The medium’sephemerality is seen as particularly suited to the ‘changing meaning’ of theRising over time; for instance, Yeats’s framing of his Rising poems endorsed therevolutionary period from a vantage point of relative security within the IrishFree State, even as his preamble seeks to cast any anti-revolutionary affect as op-position to socialism (p. 21). Clare Hutton’s ‘Yeats, Pound, and The LittleReview, 1914–1918’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 33–48) shows how Yeats’s involvement withthe modernist magazine The Little Review recasts his poetry as intertexts in dia-logue with other contributors to the magazine. Hutton draws on Sean Latham’sconception of ‘emergence . . . a particular kind of complexity that arises not fromthe individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction’ (p. 42). ‘InMemory of Major Robert Gregory’ is read in tension with the anarchist and anti-conscription sentiments of the magazine and its editors, Jane Heap and MargaretAnderson. In ‘“Some Ovid of the Films”: W.B. Yeats, Mass Media, and theFuture of Poetry in the 1930s’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 49–63), Charles Armstrong analy-ses an unpublished fragment of A Vision, ‘Michael Robartes Foretells’, to elicit‘the spiritual and metamorphic possibilities’ Yeats envisaged in a future literature,effected by contemporary mass media and technology (p. 49). Armstronguncovers the potential link in a casual phrase by Yeats in the fragment, ‘someOvid of the films’, to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for cinema as a radical-ly new art form. Nonetheless, the article doesn’t overlook Yeats’s ambivalenceregarding poetry’s place in this new media nexus. Melissa Dinsman’s ‘Politics,Eugenics, and Yeats’s Radio Broadcasts’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 65–80) decodes the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



structural allusions that govern Yeats’s thinking in broadcasts from the 1930s,pointing to ideas of degeneration and regeneration in his political thinking andinvolvement with the para-fascist Blueshirts in the same period. Yeats’s carefulframing of his broadcasts in intimate imaginary settings with the trappings ofAnglo-Irish Ascendancy and Fine Gael bourgeois stability ‘attune listeners to acultural hierarchy’ (p. 73).The spring issue opens with Sean Hewitt’s ‘Yeats’s Re-Enchanted Nature’ (IYS

2:ii[2018] 1–19), which tackles the ‘secularisation thesis’ that modernity spells ahard border between the mental and physical worlds (p. 1). Hewitt instead exam-ines the ways in which a ‘porous self’, to use the terminology of the philosopherCharles Taylor, persists in Yeats’s immanent Celtic vision, an animistic rejectionof disenchantment. Hewitt’s work on early drafts of The Shadowy Waters is par-ticularly persuasive in conjuring this natural ‘arcana’ (p. 12). Ashim Dutta’s‘India in Yeats’s Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee and K�alid�asa’ (IYS2:ii[2018] 20–39) asserts that Yeats’s early interest in Indian lore remained ‘fun-damental to the syncretic spirituality of his thought’, against the thesis that theseenthusiasms were merely ‘amateurish poetic experimentation’ (p. 20). Dutta’swork is a vital corrective to the relative neglect of Yeats’s interaction with India,joining a rich new body of scholarship emerging in the past five years. This art-icle argues that Chatterjee’s theosophy blends and blurs in Yeats’s thought withthe fifth-century poet K�alid�asa, and sets up an unstable synthesis in which theformer’s asceticism is infused with the sensual spiritualism of the latter, andbrims with sharp insights: the elitism of Chatterjee apparent in an epigraph toYeats’s essay on him from Villiers d l’Isle-Adam: ‘As for living, our servantswill do that for us’. Symbolism is here presented as in lockstep with highBrahmin disdain (p. 36). Wayne K. Chapman’s article ‘Yeats’s White VellumNotebook, 1930–1933’ (IYS 2:ii[2018] 40–68) is an invaluable piece of biblio-graphical scholarship, that is meticulous and methodologically thoughtful, par-ticularly in its attention to a rather convoluted issue when it comes to Yeats’spapers, that of provenance. An appendix serves as an inventory-cum-guide to thecontents of the famous talismanic notebook.In ‘W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and the Cinema, 1909–1939’ (ISR

26:iv[2018] 455–71), Megan Girdwood establishes that Yeats played a prominentrole in an early, indigenous Irish cinema. Girdwood’s archival recovery is deft,larded with sharp insights into Yeats’s involvement with British AuthorsProductions and other cinematic outfits, including diplomat Josephine McNeill’smordant appraisal of the involvement of the Abbey ‘clique’ (p. 463). What isuncovered is ultimately ‘a narrative of tantalising potential turned repeatedly tofinancial failure’ (p. 467).As with Dutta’s article, Javier Padilla’s ‘Yeats’s Meditative Spaces’ (JML

41:iv[2018] 107–24) seeks to move beyond the accepted terms of the postcolo-nial versus modernist Yeats debate. Padilla argues that Yeats anticipates a worldof postcolonial promise that is nevertheless embedded in and attached to coloni-alism, reading Yeats through Said, Jameson, and Benjamin. The article paysEdna Longley a backhanded compliment regarding how ‘her polemics elucidatesome of the blind spots and aporias of postcolonial theory’ (p. 122), particularlythe elision of colonial, as opposed to colonized, identity in Yeats. It is in the gap


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



between ‘progressive meditation and regressive ambivalence’ where Padilla seesthe real work of interpretation taking place (p. 122).

Lauren Arrington’s ‘The Blindness of Hindsight: Irish and British Poets LookBack on Early Fascist Italy’ (IrishPolSt 33:ii[2018] 246–58) is similarly excellentin harnessing a methodology that combines archival finesse with intellectual his-tory. The article situates Yeats and the young Irish modernist ThomasMacGreevy within a milieu centred on Ezra Pound’s home in Rapallo in the1920s. McGreevy’s exculpations for Yeats’s ‘strident support for constructive au-thoritarianism’ are found to be based on the grounds of eccentricity and ineffect-iveness (p. 253). Nevertheless, Arrington reads traces of fascist thinking in bothYeats’s and McGreevy’s ideas of productive government and the folk-familyorientation of their politics. She connects this to the Rapallo network, which hasbeen obscured by a scholarly tendency to hive Pound off as a political pariahwithout seeing the latent spread of his influence among contemporaries.

In ‘Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus: Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetryof Yeats and Stevens’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 31–45), Margaret Mills Harper consid-ers the music of dissolution in the late work of these modernist masters as adrive beyond the disintegration of the ageing human body into the ‘fol de rol’ ofthe occult, gender, and the ‘“almost” comic’ (p. 44). This constitutes an exquisiterecognition on Mills Harper’s part and a trinity of inflections that give the workof Yeats and Stevens that antic energy in their later years. By contrast, order, ra-ther than anarchy informs Hannah Simpson’s ‘“Where / Do I begin and end?”:Circular Imagery in the Revolutionary Poetics of Stevens and Yeats’ (WSJour42:i[2018] 46–61). This examines their turn to ‘the circle as an ordering structurewhen faced with the political crises of modernity’ (p. 46), contrasting a ‘localisedscope’ in Stevens to Yeats’s cosmic gyres (p. 60).

Chen Li’s ‘Irish Literature in China’ (Eire 53:i–ii[2018] 268–91) bracingly cor-rects any notion of cross-cultural interest in Ireland from China as a product ofthe ‘Irish studies’ phenomenon, excavating the early interest in Yeats from theleft-wing writer and intellectual Mao Dun, and the sustained restaging and recon-ceptualization of Wilde’s Salome throughout the 1920s.

Aoife Lynch’s ‘Yeats, Wittgenstein and the Ladder of Linguistic Inversion’(ISR 26:ii[2018] 237–51) reveals ‘the strangeness of the language we use’ bytracing a logic of internal contradiction at play in the ‘masterful images’ ofYeats’s ragged final refrains viewed through Wittgensteinian language analysis(p. 237). Lynch makes an impassioned case for recognizing the power of words‘in the post-truth age of overtly constructed realities and alternative facts’ (p.249). Although Wayne K. Chapman’s edition of W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-AherneWritings is concerned with Yeats’s prose writings, there is plenty here in terms ofannotation and contextualization to help unpick Yeats’s poetry, including the fig-ure of Leda in one of his most celebrated poems.

Alison Garden’s superb article, ‘Queering the Poetics of Race andNationalism: Yeats, Casement, and Paul Muldoon’s “A Clear Signal” (1992)’(NewHibR 22:iv[2018] 78–96) takes its departure from Muldoon’s poem, widelyavailable in the New York Times, which Garden first encountered in LucyMcDiarmid’s The Irish Art of Controversy [2005] (as she points out in a foot-note). The poem invokes a Yeatsian nod to the ‘ghost of Roger Casement’ toabash the homophobia of the Ancient Order of Hibernians New York branch,


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



who refused Irish gay and lesbian representation at the 1991 St Patrick’s Dayparade (p. 79). As Garden notes, both controversies, the original fallout ofCasement’s ‘Black Diaries’ and the 1991 furore, were propelled by an idea ofhomosexuality and Irishness as antithetical. Muldoon’s poem responds to the ‘on-going “intertextual hysteria”’ of that idea (p. 96).Intertextuality is the focus in Shane Alcobia-Murphy’s ‘Forging Intertextual

Encounters with Death: Medbh McGuckian’s The High Caul Cap’ (NewHibR22:iii[2018] 124–43), which puns on ‘craft’ and ‘graft’ to explore howMcGuckian’s appropriative methodology in her elegiac collection The High CaulCap, written for her late mother, cleaves to an idea of ‘anti-elegy’ (p. 143). Theintertextual effects of McGuckian’s ekphrastic encounters produce ‘memorablepuzzling’ (p. 143) and the transmutation of grief into an exploration of mother–daughter power relationships.Matthew Campbell’s chapter, ‘“A Bit of Shrapnel”: The Sigerson Shorters, the

Hardys, Yeats, and the Easter Rising’ (in Houen and Schramm, eds., Sacrificeand Modern War Literature, pp. 124–44), delves into unpublished poems byDora Sigerson to reveal a complex network of pastiche and allusive jibe betweenSigerson, Thomas Hardy, and Yeats in terms of the aftermath of Easter 1916.Campbell writes with characteristic persuasive aplomb in his soundings of the ar-gument implicit in rhymes between ‘Wolfe Tone’ and ‘bone’ in Yeats and‘breath’ and ‘death’ in Sigerson, suggesting a connection between these twoforms of ‘violent reanimation’ (p. 134).The third issue of Irish Studies Review in 2018 was dedicated to Irish modern-

ism, a topic that has not lacked interest in recent years. Deaglan O’Donghaileand Gerry Smyth stake out the terrain in their introduction ‘Remapping IrishModernism’ (ISR 26:iii[2018] 297–303), identifying the ‘three cardinal points’ ofYeats, Joyce, and Beckett (p. 299). Taking this triangulation as a given,O’Donghaile and Smith wish to open up the cultural field to photography, music,and other less well-trodden turf, to reassert ‘the lived experience’ of modernism,from Doolin to Dublin, Portlaoise to Paris (p. 300). Tom Walker’s ‘The Cultureof Art in 1880s Ireland: The Genealogy of Irish Modernism’ (ISR 26:iii[2018]304–17) appraises the culture wars in Irish studies surrounding the vexed cat-egory of Irish modernism, locating one dominant genealogy that fixes its emer-gence out of the rupture and dispossession of the Famine and attendant questionsof language and/or the mythologized watershed of Parnell’s death. Keen to divestthe issue of its political and historical freight, Walker raises Terry Eagleton’s ar-ticulation of ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’, with art offering its own epistemo-logical and ontological horizons, and aesthetic ideology driving artistic changerather than mere push-pin for political and social causes. Walker draws attentionto ‘a veritable body of late nineteenth century art writing’, now forgotten, andthe formation of writers like Yeats within art institutions (p. 309).The outpouring of scholarly special issues, articles, conversations, and sympo-

sia in the wake of Seamus Heaney’s death showed some sign of abating in 2018,although the scholarship that was published is by no means negligible. Arthur A.Brown’s ‘A Look and a Nod: Merleau-Ponty, Shakespeare, Heaney, and theMediation of Form’ (P&L 42:ii[2018] 311–22) examines Sonnet 73 andHeaney’s poem ‘The Nod’ through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologic-al ‘chasm’: ‘mediation through reversal’, and Heaney’s style emerge from


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



givenness, ‘his contact with the world’ (p. 320). Adam Hanna’s brief note,‘Seamus Heaney’s “Settings, xiii” and the Troubles’ (N&Q 65[2018] 440–3) sug-gests that the poem is an oblique response to the killing of three provisional IRAmembers in Gibraltar in 1988, evidenced by correspondence in Emory. EugeneO’Brien examines the symbolic use of food and of the kitchen as a site of trans-formation in the writing of Seamus Heaney in ‘“Sunk Past Its Gleam in theMeal-Bin”: The Kitchen as Locus amoenus in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney’(CJIS 41[2018] 270–90). O’Brien recovers in his poetry a Heideggerian ‘dwell-ing’ in the ‘nuances and unspoken realities of life’ (p. 286). This turn to the do-mestic complements a recent trend, including Adam Hanna’s recent work onIrish poetry. In ‘“It Was Still All Me”: Self-Forgetful Autobiography in SeamusHeaney’s Death of a Naturalist’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 649–67), Mark Bauer chal-lenges autobiographical readings of Heaney’s work by underlining a tension be-tween the ‘primacy of self’ and ‘lyric self-forgetfulness’, a phrase from aninterview describing the ‘requirement—definition even’ of lyric writing’s capacityto move out of terms of reference in which the self is the pivot and arbiter (p.650). In ‘Heaneywulf alla turca: The Composite Nature of Nazmi A�gil’sBeowulf’ (CLS 55:iii[2018] 701–20), Denis Ferhatovic examines the first transla-tion of the Old English epic into Turkish. Ferhatovic celebrates ‘the power of tri-angulation’ amongst the original, the new translation, and Heaney’s modernintermediate version, and identifies Heaney’s enabling ‘polyphony’ in layeringcultural and historical registers (p. 703). Florian Gargaillo’s ‘Seamus Heaney andthe Cliches of Public Talk’ (PQ 97:i[2018] 97–119) plays with ChristopherRicks’s notion of ‘rinsed cliche’, first coined in reference to Geoffrey Hill. Thisis the idea that poets ‘use’ cliches rather than being ‘used by them’ (p. 97). Theplatitudes of mourning and consolation in ‘Mid-Term Break’ are explored for theresistant energies with which Heaney invests them. Gargaillo examines syntactic-al play created by the introduction of a comma, pronoun, and two clauses in‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ between the prescriptive title and the descrip-tive final line: ‘whatever you say, you say nothing’ (p. 107). This is a truly illu-minating essay which gets at the heart of some real thorny issues in terms ofHeaney’s ‘public’ stature and the pressures on language such a status exerts.

Several articles in the November issue of Irish University Review focused onthe bilingual poet Celia de Freine. A conversation with Lia Mills, ‘In Full Voice’(IUR 48:ii[2018] 169–82), is illuminating on a number of fronts . It sets out heruse of translation as an editing tool, the prurience of audiences regarding ‘wom-en’s poetry’, and the status of language not just as a medium, but as a battle-ground. Mills weaves a skilful and illuminating essay around de Freine’s avant-garde anticipation of progressive legislation and wider cultural shifts in twenty-first-century Ireland. Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias examines the Odyssean figure ofthe returning soldier in ‘Impossible Returns: The Trope of the Soldier in Celia deFreine’s Poetry’ (IUR 48:ii[2018] 188–201). Gonzalez-Arias focuses on the ‘trialsof militarized masculinity’ in the poems, concluding that homecoming is an im-possibility for these brutalized and brutal modern Ithacans (p. 189). Both articlesrepresent welcome scholarship on an important poet.

Eire-Ireland dedicated its spring special issue to ‘that strange and complexman’ Douglas Hyde. Liam MacMathuna briefly mentions An CraoibhınAoibhinn’s poetry, and the ‘code-mixing’ of his Irish poem to O’Donovan Rossa


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



leaving artillery terms untranslated, in his article, ‘Great War Strains and EasterRising Breaking Point: Douglas Hyde’s Ideological Ambivalences’ (Eire 53:i–ii[2018] 7–28). In ‘Reading Between the Lines: Hyde’s Writings, 1916’ (Eire53:i–ii[2018] 48–63), Maire Nic an Bhaird focuses mainly on Hyde’s prose, butthere’s a wealth of contextual information on Hyde’s attitudes to the poets of theRising, with a sacramental mention of Pearse’s poem written on the eve of hisdeath.A prism of (gendered) labour and poetry engaging with ‘work’ more broadly

conceived has been one of the notable trends of 2018 scholarship on Irish poetry.A special issue of RISE on ‘Irish Text(ile)s’ is one notable foray. CharlesArmstrong’s article, ‘Poetic Industry: The Modernity of the Rhyming Weavers’(RISE 2:i[2018] 139–48), takes its cue from John Hewitt’s Rhyming Weavers andOther Country Poets of Antrim and Down [1974] and the agrarian Marxist visionwedded to a plea for regionalism within, but concentrates mainly on thenineteenth-century weaver-poets and not the influences they may have exerted ona later body of poets (Tom Paulin is tantalizingly mentioned). Adrian Paterson’s‘Stitching and Unstitching: Yeats Material and Immaterial’ (RISE 2:i[2018] 149–81) thinks through the textile-making analogies of poetic craft used by Yeatsthroughout his career as an allegory for collaboration with women, his sisters atDun Emer, and with May Morris, noting Bedford Park’s ‘sibling handicrafts’ ofYeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ alongside Lily’s sewing and Lolly’s painting.Paterson offers a rich unspooling of the various threads of material allusion inYeats’s oeuvre. Catriona Clutterbuck’s ‘“A Thread to the Afterlife”—Textiles andthe Otherworld in Irish Poetry: Yeats, Boland, Heaney, and Meehan’ (RISE2:ii[2018] 182–207) explores how textile imagery and fabric motifs in Irish poet-ry ‘constitute and manifest a bond of continuity between the living and the dead’(p. 182). As with Paterson’s article, Clutterbuck reveals an ecriture feminine con-cealed beneath the masculine agricultural imagery of male poets such as Heaney.Clutterbuck’s focus on Meehan’s elegy for her aunt Cora situates the latter’ssequins as ‘traces of otherworldly possibility’ in the ‘torn and pieced fragment ofone’s given’ (p. 183). In comparison, her reading of Eavan Boland’s ‘TheWomen’ posits the virtue of reading ‘cloth as text’ rather than vice versa, a lim-inal talisman between a ‘domestic female twilight world’ and otherworldliness(p. 189). Anne Karhio’s ‘“These Shirts I Borrow from the Finnish”: TheKanteletar and the Fabric of Loss in Peter Sirr’s “A Journal”’ (RISE 2:ii[2018]208–24) examines Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence and its cultural and linguisticexchanges with the nineteenth-century Finnish folk classic, The Kanteletar.Kahio focuses on textile metaphors in this crossover, particularly the figure ofthe ‘spinster’ and the paronomastic play on that word (which doesn’t exist inFinnish). These provide metaphors that suggest for Kahio ‘a process of workingthrough . . . memory and pain in the active present’ (p. 217). Patricia Coughlan’s‘“So am I detached / from the fabric which claims me”: Women, Fabric, andPoetry’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 241–61) examines the metaphorical and metonymic con-nection between women and cloth in the work of Eavan Boland, MedbhMcGuckian, and Eilean Nı Chuillenain. Boland’s well-judged plain punning ondressmaking language (‘crewel’) is celebrated, while McGuckian’s ‘determinedtroubling of limpid lyric style’ is seen, in contrast to Boland, as an evocation of‘a pre-linguistic space of meaning’ in ‘The Cloth Mother’, registered in the


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



‘oneiric’ concreteness of domestic details, such as a ‘many-pocketed beadeddress’ (p. 250). Finally, the musician protagonist of Nı Chuillenain’s recent longpoem ‘The Skirt’ is seen to ‘brook no gender constraints’ (p. 256). Dexterouslyhandling the differences between these poets, Couglan nevertheless pulls theloose ends together: all three poets broach a subjectivity that Coughlan, quotingthe psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger, describes as refuting ‘opposition andfusion because it is woven—a textile and a texture’ (p. 258). Shirin Jandani’s‘For “Text” Read “Textile”: Paul Muldoon’s Poetic Weaving’ (RISE 2:ii[2018]262–78) cartwheels joyously around Muldoon’s verbal displays (‘an almost-naked stripper takes issue with Yeats’) and meditates on the ‘politics and poeticsof flax and linen’ (p. 262). Jandani considers the juxtaposition and tension of la-bour in the linen industry and sectarian violence in ‘Glad Rags’ as subjected toDerridean deconstruction.

Wit Pietrzack also tackled Irish poetry’s jongleur in ‘Retracing Mischief: “Fol-de-Rol” and (Irish) Modernist Pastiche (Muldoon–Yeats–Trench–Farquhar)’ (ES97:vii[2018] 766–74), which examines the intertextual basis of Muldoon’s pas-tiche in ‘At Least They Weren’t Speaking French’. Pietrzack offers convincingideas on Muldoon’s notion of ‘style in writing as a “form of death”’ (p. 770) andfree will as virtually negated in the writing process linked to pastiche and influ-ence, with Yeats, Richepin, Herbert Trench, and George Farquhar shown to beoperative in Muldoon’s 2006 poem. Justin Quinn’s essay, ‘Paul Muldoon and theIrish Language’ in Litteraria Pragensia was not accessible at the time of writingthis review.

A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, was pub-lished in 2017, but not reviewed last year. It straddles genres and methodologiesto provide a timely consideration of working-class literature and the vexed ques-tion of ‘representation’ (p. 58). As Pierse points out, poetry has not received theattention that other genres have ‘in the (albeit embryonic) scholarship of Irishworking-class writing’ (p. 29). Niall Carson’s chapter, ‘Irish Working-ClassPoetry 1900–1960’ (pp. 243–56), examines the ‘ambiguity between the represen-tation and appropriation of the working-class voice’ (p. 245). This ambiguity isplayed out with visceral energy in Alice Milligan’s punning on the word ‘rise’ inthe last lines of ‘A Country Girl’: ‘A simple Southern country girl / Whose faithis that her dead will rise’. She knows more than her mockers. Carson’s nimblesiftings and reclamations sort through poets in The Irish Worker, Flann O’Brien’soccasional verse, and the rural labourer celebrated by Patrick Kavanagh. AdamHanna’s chapter, ‘Poetry and the Working Class in Northern Ireland’ (pp. 332–47), on class and the poets of the Troubles, charts the emergence of an ‘arrivisteclass’ (p. 33) of grammar school-educated poets, and explores the ways in whichsectarianized identity and class-consciousness cohabit, as well as compete, in thepoetics of Heaney and Longley. The denunciation of Northern Ireland’s middleclass in the work of John Hewitt is particularly fascinating in charting alterna-tives to that dilemma, as is the work of a relatively unfamiliar poet, the tradeunionist John Campbell.

Neal Alexander’s ‘Remembering the Future: Poetry, Peace, and the Politics ofMemory in Northern Ireland’ (TPr 32:i[2018] 59–79) provides a good round-upof key themes in Northern Irish poetry, with reference to a host of theoristsincluding Ricoeur and Levinas. The article tackles the stultification of memory in


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



commodification and memorialization, with reference to poems by the lateCiaran Carson, Sinead Morrissey, and Michael Longley. Alexander also discussesAlan Gillis, a poet whose work has perhaps not yet received similar due atten-tion, citing his excoriating verse on ‘the topsy-turvy logic’ of Northern Irish pol-itics (p. 74). Gail McConnell’s ‘No “Replicas / Atone”: Northern Irish Poetryafter the Peace Process’ (Boundary 45:i[2018] 201–29) also opens with a medita-tion on Gillis’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. McConnell explores the peace pro-cess as rebranding, ‘atonement comes only in the form of capital’ (p. 201),arguing that replication, in the form of a shared interest in and critique of historicrepetition and neoliberal normalization, and Northern Irish poetry’s involvementin market ideology, are the defining features of poetry by Gillis, Miriam Gamble,Leontia Flynn, and Sinead Morrissey.Classical influences on Irish poetry remained a fixture in scholarship produced

in 2018. Florence Impens’s Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: TheAnswering Voice is a rich and rewarding study that focuses on how an engage-ment with classical literature in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley,Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland bypassed a more direct relationship to the‘ideological conflict’ of the Troubles, allowing a poetic autonomy, the retentionof ‘creative independence’ (p. 173). Curiously, this autonomy provides a route to‘overcome the antagonisms dividing their societies’ (pp. 175–6), a form of polit-ical synthesis through disavowal of the political, which starts to sound like vari-ous aesthetic mythologies of a New Critical variety. (This is a tension at theheart of literary studies rather than Impens’s methodology as such.) One cansense, on an instinctive level, the quandary in sentences like: ‘Michael Longley’swell-known comments in 1971, on why writers could not and should not beasked to comment on politics in their creative work’ (p. 173). Within a blurringof public and private, the taking of a depoliticized stand, the so-sure demarcationof poetic and politic, Impens reveals the ‘textual precision’ of Longley’s rework-ings which have established him as ‘the modern classicist in Ireland’ (p. 119).She investigates the impulses behind Heaney’s return to classical material in TheCure at Troy, seen as ‘didactic and overly simplistic’ (p. 55). Mahon’s sense ofexile and abandonment governs his classical derivements in poems such as ‘Ovidin Tomis’, layered with Pascalian and Wildean allusions that build up a communityof the banished (p. 194). Impens reveals how Eavan Boland rewrites the classics as‘a woman poet faced with a male-dominated tradition’ (p. 8), and her unpicking of‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’ is thrilling, inventive, and precise.In ‘Object Lessons: Derek Mahon’s Material Ekphrasis’ (ILStud 20:iii[2018]

371–84), Bridget Vincent notes that his poetry often incorporates artist studiosand materiality, which sheds light on problems of ontology and representation:the physical urn of Keats’s ode, and the represented dimension in which it isimaged in the poem. Eoin Flannery’s ‘Scale, Deep Time, and the Politics ofRepresentation in Derek Mahon’s Life on Earth’ (IUR 48:ii[2018] 281–98) sit-uates that inveterate shapeshifter’s most recent work within ecocriticism, the ‘rep-resentational relationships between human and non-human ecologies’ and ‘theethics of anthropocentric historical narration in terms of geological time and the“deep” past’ (p. 281). Flannery’s prosodic analysis enlists Mahon’s rhythmiceffects to elicit the ecological music of his late work, ripe with instinct that ‘there


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



is also an intimation that despite this removal from the sea and our mammalianpast . . . some form of communicative exchange or registration is possible’ (p.289); the unusual approach to this familiar poet does prompt a rethink of hiscosmopolitan oeuvre.

Cody D. Jarman brings two unlikely poets into dialogue in ‘“A Juggler’sTrick”: The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice’ (NewHibR22:iii[2018] 65–80), emphasizing the shared species of Emergency and SecondWorld War pastoral in their poetry, the global entanglement of MacNeice’sIreland and the contrasting rural neutrality of Kavanagh’s Ireland. Luz MarGonzalez-Arias close-reads Dorothy Molloy’s poem in ‘Penelope in ThreeMovements: A Reading of Dorothy Molloy’s “Waiting for Julio”’ (RISE2:ii[2018] 225–40), situating it within an international context of ‘revisionistmythmaking’ and play with Greek myth by contemporary Irish women poets.Particularly appealing is the way in which Gonzalez-Arias draws this recurringfigure of Penelope in contemporary Irish poetry into dialogue with other artforms, Kathy Prendergast’s similar focus on patience and futility in her 1980 in-stallation Waiting (p. 241).

The recent variety and excitement of new work on Irish women poets seemlikely to remain fixtures of work in the field. Exceptional analysis such asGender in Poetry Publishing in Ireland 2017 by Kenneth Keating and AilbheMcDaid, for the ‘Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector’ initiative, found thatmale poets published 10 per cent more volumes of poetry than female poets in2017, with the larger presses with public funding displaying a much more sub-stantial bias (greater than 65 per cent) towards men; smaller presses account forthe overall smaller percentage bias (p. 10). Clearly, there is work to be done, andscholarship on modern Irish poetry has a stake in helping bring about a sea-change. Regrettably, Donna Potts’s Contemporary Irish Writing andEnvironmentalism, Taylor-Collins and Van Der Ziel’s Shakespeare andContemporary Irish Literature, and Jaime de Pablos’s Giving Shape to theMoment: The Art of Mary O’Donnell: Poet, Novelist, and Short Story Writerwere not received in time for this review.

Books Reviewed

Ali, Farah. Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in SelectedWorks of Harold Pinter. Routledge. [2018] pp. 280. £115 ISBN 9 7811 38080195.

Ambrose, Darren, ed. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of MarkFisher. Repeater. [2018] pp. 840. £25 ISBN 9 7819 1224 8285.

Anderson, Bradford A., and Jonathan Kearney, eds. Ireland and the Reception ofthe Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Clark. [2018] pp. 416. £95 ISBN9 7805 6767 8874.

Ayers, David. Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution. EdinUP.[2018] pp. 288. £80 ISBN 9 7814 7446 2709.

Baker, William. Pinter’s World: Relationships, Obsessions, and ArtisticEndeavours. FDUP. [2018] pp. xv þ 265. £70 ISBN 9 7816 1147 9317.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Balinisteanu, Tudor. Modern Political Aesthetics from Romantic to ModernistLiterature: Choreographies of Social Performance. Routledge. [2018] pp. 210.£120 ISBN 9 7811 3830 3928.

Barkaway, Stephen. ‘This Sheet is a Pane of Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman ofLetters. VWSGB. [2018] pp. 24. £5 ISBN 9 7819 1142 6035.

Battershill, Claire. Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonardand Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. xii þ 231. £85ISBN 9 7813 5004 3817.

Beeston, Alix. In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the PhotographicUnseen. OUP. [2018] pp. 280. £59 ISBN 9 7801 9069 0168.

Belluc, Sylvain, and Valerie Benejam, eds. Cognitive Joyce. PalMac. [2018] pp.285. £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 9931.

Beloborodova, Olga, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst, eds. Beckett andModernism. PalMac. [2018] pp. xvi þ 295. £88 ISBN 9 7833 1970 3732.

Benford, Gregory, Gary Westfahl, Howard V. Hendrix, and Joseph D. Miller.eds. Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy: Outstanding Essays from the J.Lloyd Eaton Conferences. McFarland. [2018] pp. 263. £37.90 ISBN 9 78147666 9281.

Ben-Merre, David. Figures of Time: Disjunctions in Modernist Poetry. SUNY.[2018] pp. xxv þ 293. $85 ISBN 9 7814 3846 8327.

Benziman, Galia. Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes ofBereavement. PalMac. [2018] pp. vii þ 173. £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 3750 7129.

Beville, Maria, and Deirdre Flynn, eds. Irish Urban Fictions. PalMac. [2018] pp.245. £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1998 3219.

Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts,Territories, Globalizations. Routledge. [2018] pp. ix þ 186. £120 ISBN 97811 3855 9950.

Black, Elizabeth. The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to thePoetry of Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew.Routledge. [2018] pp. viii þ 222. £110. ISBN 9 7811 3824 4092.

Bluemel, Kristin, and Michael McClusky, eds. Rural Modernity in Britain.EdinUP. [2018] pp. 328. £80 ISBN 9 7814 7442 0969.

Bodley, Lorraine Byrne, ed. Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, CulturalHistory and Analysis in Honour of Harry White. Hollitzer. [2018] pp. 784.e89 ISBN 9 7839 9012 4024.

Brackenbury, Rosalind. Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship: How Virginia StephenBecame Virginia Woolf. UIowaP. [2018] pp. 103. $19.95 ISBN 9 7816 09385514.

Brewster, Dorothy. Virginia Woolf. Routledge. [2018] pp. 190. £82.99 ISBN 97808 1535 8435.

Brits, Baylee. Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction.Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 224. £88 ISBN 9 7815 0133 1466.

Brockman, William, Tekla Mecsnober, and Sabrina Alonso, eds. Publishing inJoyce’s Ulysses: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing. Brill. [2018] pp. 235.e79 ISBN 9 7890 0435 9048.

Bronstein, Michaela. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. OUP.[2018] pp. 288. $78 ISBN 9 7801 9065 5396.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Brooker, Jewel Spears. T.S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. JHUP. [2018] pp.xvii þ 215. £37 ISBN 9 7814 2142 6532.

Bruns, Gerald L. Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature.UAlaP. [2018] pp. 216. $34.95 ISBN 9 7808 1735 9065.

Butler, Stephen G. Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882–1964.UMassP. [2018] pp. 232. $90 ISBN 9 7816 2534 3666.

Caws, Mary Ann. Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington.Routledge. [2018] pp. xvi þ 218. £93.99 ISBN 9 7808 1535 9739.

Chapman, Wayne K, ed. W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings: Featuring theMaking of his ‘Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends’. Bloomsbury.[2018] pp. 424. £117 ISBN 9 7814 7259 5157.

Cheng, Vincent J. Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and JamesJoyce. PalMac. [2018] pp. 162. £19.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 8170.

Clare, David, Des Lally, and Patrick Lonergan, eds. The Gate Theatre, Dublin:Inspiration and Craft. Lang. [2018] pp. 422. £33 ISBN 9 7817 8874 6243.

Colesworthy, Rebecca. Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought ofExchange. OUP. [2018] pp. xi + 288. £60 ISBN 9 7801 9877 8585.

Conolly, Leonard W., ed. Bernard Shaw’s Postmistress: The Memoir of JisbellaGeorgina Lyth as Told to Romie Lambkin. Rock Mills. [2018] pp. x þ 143.£18.99 ISBN 9 7817 7506 3216.

Cornier Michael, Magali, ed. Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City.PalMac. [2018] pp. xi þ 252. £88 ISBN 9 7833 1989 7271.

Costello, Bonnie. The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden andOthers. PrincetonUP. [2018] pp. 272. £35 ISBN 9 7806 9117 2811.

Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in theWritings of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. OUP. [2018] pp. 193. £63ISBN 9 7801 9881 5976.

Cure, Monica. Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of theCentury. UMinnP. [2018] pp. 261. £75.93 ISBN 9 7815 1790 2780.

Danta, Chris. Animal Fables After Darwin. CUP. [2018] pp. 224. £75 ISBN 97811 0842 8200.

Das, Santanu, and Kate McLoughlin, eds. The First World War: Literature,Culture, Modernity. OUP. [2018] pp. 280. £65 ISBN 9 7801 9726 6267.

D’Cruz, Glenn. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Routledge. [2018] pp. 90. pb£6.57 ISBN 9 7811 3809 7476.

De Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. EdinUP. [2018] pp. 245.£75 ISBN 9 7814 7441 5637.

Demerjian, Louisa MacKay, and Karen F. Stein, eds. Future Humans in Fictionand Film. CambridgeSP. [2018] pp. 181. £58.99 ISBN 9 7815 2751 3198.

Dhooge, Ben, and Jurgen Pieters, eds. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures onLiterature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher. Brill. [2018] pp.205. e110 ISBN 9 7890 0435 2865.

Diaper, Jeremy. T.S. Eliot and Organicism. ClemsonUP. [2018] pp. xiii þ 218.£85 ISBN 9 7819 4295 4606.

Dibble, Jeremy, and Julian Horton, eds. British Musical Criticism andIntellectual Thought, 1850–1950. B&B. [2018] pp. xvi þ 374. £65 ISBN 97817 8327 2877.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Dimitrova, Miryana. Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and Its DramaticAfterlife. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. x þ 237. £85 ISBN 9 7813 5011 7303.

Dix, Hywel, ed. Autofiction in English. PalMac. [2018] pp. xvi þ 283. £99.99ISBN 9 7833 1989 9015.

Duncan, Andrew. Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside and Outside in ModernBritish Poetry, 1960–1997. Shearsman. [2018] pp. 328. £16.95 ISBN 9 78184861 6097.

Ebury, Katherine, and James Alexander Fraser, eds. Joyce’s Non-FictionWritings: ‘Outside His Jurisfiction’. PalMac. [2018] pp. 230. £79 ISBN 97833 1972 2412.

Eckley, Grace. The Encryption of Finnegans Wake Resolved: W.T. Stead.Hamilton Books. [2018] pp. 414. $85 ISBN 9 7807 6186 9191.

Engelhardt, Nina. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. EdinUP. [2018] pp. 200.£75 ISBN 9 7801 4744 1623 3.

Falkenhayner, Nicole. Media, Surveillence and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States.Routledge. [2018] pp. 174. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3860 9433.

Ferrer, Daniel. Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. GeoffreyBennington and Rachel Bowlby. Routledge. [2018] £82.99 ISBN 0 415 0319 X.

Fielding, Heather. Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain. CUP.[2018] pp. 206. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 6046.

Flynn, Deirdre, and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Representations of Loss in IrishLiterature. PalMac. [2018] pp. xiii þ 205. £88 ISBN 9 7833 1978 5509.

Foltz, Jonathan. The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy.OUP. [2018] pp. 304. £52 ISBN 9 7801 9067 6490.

Foss, Roger. Till the Boys Come Home: How British Theatre Fought the GreatWar. HistoryP. [2018] pp. 224. £14.99 ISBN 9 7807 5096 0663.

Fraser, Wilma. Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning: AnAutoethnographic Inquiry. PalMac. [2018] pp. 223. £89.99 ISBN 9 7811 37562951.

Frattarola, Angela. Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel.UPFlorida. [2018] pp. 204. $85 ISBN 9 7808 1305 6074.

Friedman, Alan Warren. Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, andSurrealism. Routledge. [2018] pp. 248. £77 ISBN 9 7811 3810 3023.

Froula, Christine, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin, eds. Katherine Mansfield andVirginia Woolf. EdinUP. [2018] pp. 221. £80 ISBN 9 7814 7443 9657.

Gabler, Hans Walter. Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays.Open Books. [2018] pp. 410. £33.95 ISBN 9 7817 8374 3650.

Gallagher, Donat, ed. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26: Essays,Articles, and Reviews 1922–1934. OUP. [2018] pp. 640. £105 ISBN 9 78019968 3444.

Gifford, Terry ed. Ted Hughes in Context. CUP. [2018] pp. xxviii þ 430. £75ISBN 9 7811 0842 5551.

Gill, Patrick, and Florian Klager, eds. Constructing Coherence in the BritishShort Story Cycle. Routledge. [2018] pp. 274. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3850 3885.

Golding, Rosemary, ed. The Music Profession in Britain, 1780–1920. Routledge.[2018] pp. 230. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3829 1867.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Harpin, Anna. Madness, Art & Society: Beyond Illness. Routledge. [2018] pp.238. pb £34.99 ISBN 9 7811 3878 4284.

Harries, Richard. Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith.SPCK. [2018] pp. 352. £19.99 ISBN 9 7802 8107 9339.

Harrison, Andrew, ed. D.H. Lawrence in Context. CUP. [2018] pp. xxi þ 369.£84.99 ISBN 9 7811 0842 9399.

Hayes, Kevin J., ed. Herman Melville in Context. CUP. [2018] pp. 350. £89.99ISBN 9 7811 0716 9760.

Herman, Peter C. Terrorism and Literature. CUP. [2018] pp. 542. £71.99 ISBN9 7811 0849 8241.

Hill, Leslie. Sex, Suffrage and the Stage. PalMac. [2018] pp. 256. £65 ISBN 97811 3750 9222.

Hogberg, Elsa, and Amy Bromley, eds. Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf andthe Morphology of the Modernist Sentence. EdinUP. [2018] pp. 225. £80ISBN 9 7814 7441 4609.

Horan, Thomas. Desire and Empathy in Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction.PalMac. [2018] pp. x þ 212. £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1970 6740.

Hoshi, Kumiko. D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity.CambridgeSP. [2018] pp. viii þ 166. £58.99 ISBN 9 7815 2751 6182.

Houen, Alex, and Jan-Melissa Schramm. Sacrifice and Modern War Literature:From Waterloo to the War on Terror. OUP. [2018] pp. 304. £60 ISBN 9 78019880 6516.

Hovanec, Caroline. Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and BritishModernism. CUP. [2018] pp. 232. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 8392.

Hughes, John. The Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction andPoetry. SAP. [2018] pp. 256. £50 ISBN 9 7818 4519 8121.

Hynes, Samuel. On War and Writing. UChicP. [2018] pp. 224. $22.50 ISBN 97802 2646 8785.

Ilott, Sarah, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns, eds. New Directions inDiaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches. R&L. [2018] pp. 200.£85 ISBN 9 7817 8660 5160.

Impens, Florence. Classical Presences in Irish Poetry After 1960: The AnsweringVoice. PalMac. [2018] pp. 219. £69.99 ISBN 9 7833 1968 2303.

Jaime de Pablos, Elena. Giving Shape to the Moment: The Art of MaryO’Donnell: Poet, Novelist and Short Story Writer. Lang. [2018] pp. 228.£46.60 ISBN 9 7817 8874 4034.

Jansen, Bettina. Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story.PalMac. [2018] pp. viii þ 327. £64.99 ISBN 9 7833 1994 8591.

Johns Speese, Erin K. Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner,Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf. Routledge. [2018] pp. 166. £110 ISBN 9 78147248 0392.

Kay, Magdalena. Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and CharlesTomlinson in Contemporary Britain. Routledge. [2018] pp. 128. £120 ISBN9 7811 3854 5663.

Keating, Jennifer, ed. Patrick McCabe’s Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast onPluto and Winterwood. Brill. [2018] pp. 222. e110 ISBN 9 7890 0438 8994.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Keating, Kenneth, and Ailbhe McDaid. Gender in Poetry Publishing in Ireland2017. MEAS. [2018]. https://measorg481844298.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/MEAS-Report-Gender-in-Poetry-Publishing-in-Ireland-2017-v1.3.pdf [accessed5 May 2020].

Kennedy, Kate, ed. Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten’sVocal Works. Boydell. [2018] pp. 425. £60 ISBN 9 7817 8327 2853.

Kennedy, Sarah. T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination. CUP. [2018] pp. x þ259. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 5216.

Kimber, Gerri, Todd Martin, and Christine Froula, eds. Katherine Mansfield andVirginia Woolf. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 240. £80. ISBN 9 7814 7443 9657.

Knowles, Sebastian D.G. At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the ModernUniversity. UPFlorida. [2018] pp. 318. $79.95 ISBN 9 7808 1305 2328.

Koczy, Daniel. Beckett, Deleuze and Performance: A Thousand Failures and aThousand Inventions. PalMac. [2018] pp. x þ 238. £47.99 ISBN 9 7833 19956176.

Kopley, Richard. The Formal Centre in Literature: Explorations from Poe to thePresent. CamdenH. [2018] pp. 204. £65 ISBN 9 7816 4014 0325.

Lai, Yi-Peng. EcoUlysses: Nature, Nation, Consumption. Lang. [2018] pp. 195.£33 ISBN 9 7836 3174 4031.

Ledent, Benedicte, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca, eds. Madness inAnglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge. PalMac. [2018] pp. xi þ 220.£79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1998 1796.

Leeson, Miles, ed. Incest in Contemporary Literature. ManUP. [2018] pp. 304.£80 ISBN 9 7815 2612 2162.

Leighton, Angela. Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature. HarvardUP.[2018] pp. 304. £28.95 ISBN 9 7806 7498 3496.

Lounsberry, Barbara. Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her FinalDiaries and the Diaries She Read. UPFlorida. [2018] pp. viii þ 397. $84.95ISBN 9 7808 1305 6937.

Luppi, Fabio. Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904–1938).BrownWalkerP. [2018] pp. 244. pb £35.95 ISBN 9 7816 2734 6979.

MacKay, Marina. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic. OUP. [2018] pp.240. £25 ISBN 9 7801 9882 4992.

MacPherson, Ben. Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre 1890–1939.PalMac. [2018] pp. xv þ 245. £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 3759 8066.

Matviyenko, Svitlana, and Judith Roof, eds. Lacan and the Posthuman. PalMac.[2018] pp. 215. £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1976 3262.

Maude, Ulrika, and Mark Nixon, eds. The Bloomsbury Companion to ModernistLiterature. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 560. £130 ISBN 9 7817 8093 6413.

McKeown, Andrew, and Adrian Grafe, eds. Edward Thomas’s Roads from Arras.CambridgeSP. [2018] pp. 179. £58.99 ISBN 9 7815 2751 4249.

McNichol, Stella. Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction. Routledge. [2018]pp. xiii þ 182. £82.99 ISBN 9 7808 1535 9333.

McPhail, Helen. Wilfred Owen’s Shrewsbury. Logaston Press. [2018] pp. 132.£12.95 ISBN 9 7819 1083 9256.

Minogue, Sally, and Andrew Palmer. The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memoryand the First World War. CUP. [2018] pp. 244. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 8675.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



https://measorg481844298.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/MEAS-Report-Gender-in-Poetry-Publishing-in-Ireland-2017-v1.3.pdf

https://measorg481844298.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/MEAS-Report-Gender-in-Poetry-Publishing-in-Ireland-2017-v1.3.pdf

Mishra, Vijay. Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial. Routledge.[2018] pp. 366. £120 ISBN 9 7808 1538 2089.

Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-Bye to AllThat 1895–1929. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 480. £25 ISBN 9 7814 7292 9143.

Murnaghan, Sheila, and Ralph M. Rosen, eds. Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and theClassical Tradition. OSUP. [2018] pp. 304. $79.95 ISBN 9 7808 1421 3551.

Nixon, Kari, and Lorenzo Servitje, eds. Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victoriansto the Present. PalMac. [2018] pp. 192. £79 ISBN 9 7833 1966 3661.

Nuttall, Louise. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview inSpeculative Fiction. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 224. £66.50 ISBN 9 7813 5001 0536.

O’Callaghan, Katherine, ed. Essays on Music and Language in ModernistLiterature: Musical Modernism. Routledge. [2018] pp. 296. £120 ISBN 97811 3828 5651.

Onega, Susan, and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds. The Wounded Hero inContemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest. Routledge. [2018] pp. 288. £120ISBN 9 7811 3858 4129.

O’Neill, Patrick. Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations. UTorP. [2018]pp. 240. $55 ISBN 9 7814 8750 2782.

Osman, Michael. Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation inAmerica. UMinnP. [2018] pp. 280. $120 ISBN 9 7815 1790 0984.

Ozgur, Nilufer. Hardy Deconstructing Hardy: A Derridean Reading of ThomasHardy’s Poetry. Routledge. [2018] pp. 156. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3855 4429.

Parey, Armelle. Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary AnglophoneFiction. Routledge. [2018] pp. 202. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3834 5157.

Paxton, Naomi. Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism andPolitics 1908–58. ManUP. [2018] pp. 248. £75 ISBN 9 7815 2611 4785.

Penda, Petar. Aesthetics and Ideology of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T.S.Eliot. Lexington. [2018] pp. 128. £85 ISBN 9 7814 9852 8054.

Periyan, Natasha. The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class,Gender. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 278. £85 ISBN 9 7813 5001 9843.

Pierce, David. The Joyce Country: Literary Scholarship and Irish Culture. Root.[2018] pp. 278. £70 ISBN 9 7819 1222 4029.

Pierse, Michael, ed. A History of Irish Working-Class Writing. CUP. [2018] pp.482. £83.99 ISBN 9 7813 1657 0425.

Plain, Gill, ed. British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar. CUP.[2019] pp. xvi þ 422. £84.99 ISBN 9 7811 0711 9017.

Pollard, Eileen, and Ginette Carpenter, eds. Hilary Mantel: Contemporary CriticalPerspectives. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 184. £52.50 ISBN 9 7814 7429 6502.

Poree, Marc, and Isabelle Alfandary, eds. Literature and Error: A Literary Take onMistakes and Errors. Lang. [2018] pp. 264. £84.95 ISBN 9 7814 3313 6993.

Poster, Jem, ed. Edward Thomas, Prose Writings: A Selected Edition. III.Biographies: Richard Jefferies and George Borrow. OUP. [2018] pp. 608.£125 ISBN 9 7801 9958 8114.

Potts, Donna, ed. Contemporary Irish Writing and Environmentalism: The Wearing ofthe Green. PalMac. [2018] pp. 209. £54.99 ISBN 9 7833 1995 8965.

Rabey, David Ian. Alistair McDowell’s Pomona. Routledge. [2018] pp. viii þ 78.pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7811 3823 5298.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Raitt, Suzanne, and Ian Blyth, eds. Virginia Woolf: Orlando: A Biography. CUP.[2018] pp. cxvii þ 654. £82.99 ISBN 9 7805 2187 8968.

Remport, Eglantina. Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama,Politics. PalMac. [2018] pp. ix þ 237. £79 ISBN 9 7833 1976 6102.

Rice, Thomas Jackson. Virginia Woolf: A Guide to Research. Routledge. [2018]pp. xix þ 258. £93 ISBN 9 7811 3847 6011.

Roberts, Neil, Mark Wormald, and Terry Gifford, eds. Ted Hughes: Nature andCulture. PalMac. [2018] pp. xviii þ 256. £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1997 5733.

Rudaityte, Regina, ed. History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture.CambridgeSP. [2018] pp. 295. £64.99 ISBN 9 7815 2750 8767.

Samuel, Raphael, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, eds. Theatres of the Left1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America. Routledge.[2018] pp. xiii þ 260. pb £27.99 ISBN 9 7811 3821 4460.

Sartor, Genevieve, ed. James Joyce and Genetic Criticism: Genesic Fields. Brill.[2018] pp. 225. e59 ISBN 9 7890 0436 4271.

Schotter, Jesse. Hieroglyphic Modernisms: Writing and New Media in theTwentieth Century. EdinUP. [2018] pp. 272. £80 ISBN 9 7814 7442 4776.

Seeger, Sean. Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott: History Repeating Itselfwith a Difference. Routledge. [2018] pp. 180. £84 ISBN 9 7808 1538 5806.

Shallcross, Michael. Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism:Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture. Routledge. [2018] pp. 296. £110ISBN 9 7811 3867 8736.

Shaw, Katy. Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First-Century EnglishLiterature. PalMac. [2018] pp. ix þ 119. £44.99 ISBN 9 7833 1974 9679.

Shaw, Katy, and Kate Aughterson, eds. Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness. PalMac.[2018] pp. xii þ 212. £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1994 0922.

Sicker, Philip. Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture. CUP. [2018] pp. 276. £75 ISBN9 7811 0842 8408.

Spiers, Emily. Pop-Feminist Narratives: The Female Subject underNeoliberalism in North America, Britain, and Germany. OUP. [2018] pp. 272.£63 ISBN 9 7801 9882 0871.

Spoo, Robert. Modernism and the Law. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 208. $88 ISBN9 7814 7427 5811.

Steedman, Carolyn. Poetry for Historians, or, W H. Auden and History. ManUP.[2018] pp. 304. £80 ISBN 9 7815 2612 5231.

Straumann, Barbara. Female Performers in British and American Fiction.Gruyter. [2018] pp. 305. £91 ISBN 9 7831 1055 8425.

Sutherland, Lucie. Peter Pan. Routledge. [2018] pp. 74. pb. £34.99 ISBN 97811 3867 8880.

Taylor-Collins, Nicholas, and Stanley Van der Ziel, eds. Shakespeare andContemporary Irish Literature. PalMac. [2018] pp. 274. £79.99 ISBN 9 78331995 9238.

Teekell, Anna. Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the SecondWorld War. NorthwesternUP. [2018] pp. 280. $99 ISBN 9 7808 1013 7264.

Templeton, Joan. Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-appraisal. PalMac. [2018] pp. xxv þ 359.£80 ISBN 9 7811 3754 3417.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



Tew, Philip, ed. Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire. Bloomsbury. [2018]pp. 232. £85 ISBN 9 7813 5002 7671.

Tew, Philip, James Riley, and Melanie Seddon, eds. The 1960s: A Decade ofModern British Fiction. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 352. £70 ISBN 9 7813 50011687.

Thompson, Hilary. Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium.Routledge. [2018] pp. 164. £120 ISBN 9 7808 1535 6899.

Tordasi, Kathrin. Women by the Waterfront: Modernist (Re)Visions of Gender,Self, and Littoral Space. K&N. [2018] pp. 347. e48 ISBN 9 7838 2606 2650.

Vadde, Aarthi. Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe,1914–2016. ColUP. [2017] p. 288. £50 ISBN 9 7802 3118 0252.

Vakoch, Douglas A., and Sam Mickey, eds. Literature and Ecofeminism:Intersectional and International Voices. Routledge. [2018] pp. xx þ 211. £120ISBN 9 7808 1538 1723.

Varley-Winter, Rebecca. Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in ModernistLiterature. SAP. [2018] pp. 256. £55 ISBN 9 7818 4519 8954.

Veivo, Harri, Jean-Pierre Montier, Francoise Nicol, David Ayers, BenediktHjartarson, and Sascha Bru, eds. Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation,Quest and Exploration in Modernism, and the Avant Gardes. Gruyter. [2018]pp. 412. £79 ISBN 9 7831 1056 9230.

Villanueva Romero, Diana, Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, and Manuel SanchezGarcıa, eds. Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context. PalMac. [2018] pp. 294.£79 ISBN 9 7833 1966 0295.

Wainwright, Laura. New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing,1930–1949. UWalesP. [2018] pp. 256. £34.99 ISBN 9 7817 8683 2177.

Watson, Tim. Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the MidcenturyAtlantic World. OUP. [2018] pp. 240. $78 ISBN 9 7801 9085 2672.

Watt, Stephen. Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect. PalMac.[2018] pp. xvi þ 235. £79.99 ISBN 9 7830 3010 0674.

Wawrzycka, Jolanta, and Serenella Zanotti, eds. James Joyce’s Silences.Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 272. £85 ISBN 9 7813 5003 6710.

West-Pavlov, Russell, ed. The Global South and Literature. CUP. [2018] pp. xivþ 364. £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 0841 5262.

Whitworth, Michael H., ed. Virginia Woolf: Night and Day. CUP. [2018] pp. cxiiiþ 743. £85 ISBN 9 7805 2187 8951.

Wilmer, S.E. Performing Statelessness in Europe. PalMac. [2018] pp. ix þ 245.£79 ISBN 9 7833 1969 1725.

Wilson, Nicola, and Claire Battershill, eds. Virginia Woolf and the World ofBooks: The Centenary of the Hogarth Press: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. ClemsonUP.[2018] pp. 302. £75 ISBN 9 7819 4295 4569.

Witen, Michelle. James Joyce and Absolute Music. Bloomsbury. [2018] pp. 320.£59.50 ISBN 9 7813 5001 4220.

Wixon, Christopher. Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives.PalMac. [2018] pp. ix þ 181. £59.99 ISBN 9 7830 3008 7494.

Zink, Susana. Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. PalMac.[2018] pp. 223. £63.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 9085.


Dow


ic.oup.com/yw



XIV Modern Literature - DiVA Portal

Documents