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Affective Materialities reads modernist literature for the ways in which bodies come to matter physically, socially, and juridically using two recent turns in literary studies—one to affect studies and the other to ecocriticism. Each chapter in the collection delves into a multifold body, investigating how body-forms come to matter. Chapters reveal what the modernist body represents in a way that also addresses the most urgent contemporary concerns of modernity today. In other words, chapters address how a body signifies, becomes legible, writes, is written, touches, constitutes, merges, and encounters through various representations in a peculiarly modernist fashion. In turn, the collection sets the stakes for how bodies merge with their surroundings or are re-created by them, into an amalgam of self and place, as ethical concern for social justice. We aim to address the way the body and animate matter become a lens for grasping the fluidities of race, gender, sexuality, anthropocentrism, individualism, and ultimately, the promise and limits of creativity itself.

Approaching the period of 1880 to 1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly “new” works of art, this collection treats the century’s long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values—those of past, present, and the imagined future. Navigating established literary modes as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the “modern,” turn-of-the-century authors continually negotiated ideological boundaries, treating the century’s long turn as a period ripe for experimentation. Essays in the collection, which range across topics such as canonicity, advice literature, Native American education, companionate marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, and the Harlem Renaissance, stress the hybridity born of multiple historical investments. As the authors of this collection demonstrate, the literature from the century’s turn is irreducible to the characteristics either of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries; rather, it is literature of dual practices and multiple values that embodies elastic qualities of historical plurality – a true literature in transition.

At Fault: James Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University argues that American universities have lost their way and that the works of James Joyce will put them back on the scent. In American university education today, an excess of caution has led to a serious error in our education system. To be “at fault” is to have lost one’s path: the university’s current crisis in confidence can be addressed by attending to the lessons that Joyce teaches us. Joyce models risk-taking in all three areas of the academic enterprise: research, teaching, and service. His texts go out of bounds, resisting the end, pushing beyond themselves. Joyce writes in an outlaw language, and the acknowledgment of failure is written into every right action. At stake is the enterprise of humanism: without an appreciation of error, and an understanding of infinite possibility, the university will calcify and lose its right to lead the nations of the world. The book draws upon the author’s thirty years of teaching experience to demonstrate what works in the classroom when teaching Joyce and makes a powerful contribution to debates on interdisciplinarity and university teaching. There are chapters on centrifugal motion, gramophones, elephants, fox-hunting, philately, brain mapping, and baseball: a compendium of approaches befitting the ever-expanding world of James Joyce.

Becoming Virginia Woolf is the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s early diaries. Her first 12 diary books are explored in depth and her development as a diarist traced. The book offers close readings of each of the 12 diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other early diaries; and (3) as it intersects with her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) This method lays bare, not only Woolf’s development as a diarist, but also—an extra dividend—as a public writer. It shows how she becomes the writer so widely revered today. Becoming Virginia Woolf offers a new approach to Woolf biography as well: her life as she marked it in her diary from age 14 to 36. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. As Woolf’s first two decades as a diarist unfold, interwoven as she read them are 15 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary and her public prose.

“After the Race” registers James Joyce's personal anxieties and rivalries on the verge of his emigration from Dublin. In the figure of Villona, the detached and gifted musician, Joyce sketches his first self-portrait, heralding the dawn of his own literary career as “the poet of my nation.” The story reflects the radical nationalist perception articulated by Arthur Griffith that the staging the Gordon Bennett Cup Race and King Edward VII's visit in July 1903 were both designed to upstage the centennial celebration of Robert Emmet's rebellion. The story allegorizes these Anglo-Irish tensions within the Great Game of global politics. The technique of the story—its design, use of free indirect discourse, multivalent language, significant silences, and cunning allusions—assimilates elements from its author's rhetorical education and invokes precedents from Ovid, Villon, Dumas, Dolmetsch, and the Irish oral tradition. The story therefore documents Joyce's multiple affinities with the mainstream of European literature and with the popular movement to revive native cultural practices. On the moral and philosophical planes, the story invokes the Pauline criticism of pagan materialism while brilliantly parodying the vacuous calculations of Theosophy. This apprentice exercise exhibits many of Joyce's permanent themes and is demonstrably a sophisticated political and philosophic work written in the shadow of Dante's Divine Comedy.

This book offers a new perspective on one of the most puzzling questions faced by Shaw scholars—how to reconcile the artist's individualist leanings with his socialist Fabian ideals. The book does this by viewing Shaw as a maverick whose approach was impossible to duplicate and grew out of his unique artistic temperament, his outlook, and his vocation. Shaw's activities in promoting the Fabians' goals of advancing social democracy were highly distinctive. He effectively used calculated irritation as an attention-getting tactic; he relied on devices that he had formulated as a creative rhetorician, rather than on the academic principles that were second nature to most of his fellow Fabians; and he devised and championed the use of indirect means to “persuade the world to take our ideas into account in reforming itself.”

June 16, 2004, was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. To celebrate the occasion, thousands took to the streets in Dublin, following in the footsteps of protagonist Leopold Bloom. The event also was marked by the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, where world-renowned scholars discussed Joyce's seminal work. This volume contains readings of Ulysses presented at the conference. The contributors to this volume urge a close engagement with the novel. They offer readings that focus variously on the materialist, historical, and political dimensions of Ulysses. The diversity of topics covered include nineteenth-century psychology, military history, Catholic theology, the influence of early film and music hall songs on Joyce, the post-Ulysses evolution of the one-day novel, and the challenge of discussing such a complex work amongst the sea of extant criticism.

The author of this book uses the concept of cannibalism (what he calls “dismemberment, ingestion, and reprocessing”) to describe Joyce's incorporation of so many literary and cultural allusions, both “high” and “popular.” Beginning with examples of actual and symbolic cannibalism that fascinated Joyce — the Donner party, the Catholic Eucharist — the author moves on to the ways Joyce appropriated language and elements of material culture into his work. This book offers a wide range of connections and insights. A look at Berlitz's approach to teaching language leads to an examination of Joyce's aesthetic of disjunction in language. The author compares Joyce and Joseph Conrad in light of the difficulties of modernism for readers through a discussion of the condom. By focusing attention on colonial tales of cannibalism and Britain's treatment of the Irish, he provides a unique perspective on Joyce's politics.

Although numerous critics and scholars have considered the influence of Joyce's Catholicism on his works, most seem to have concluded that Joyce's intention was to subvert the church's power. This book argues, on the contrary, that the net result of Joyce's Catholic nostalgia is an entanglement in rather than a liberation from the labyrinthine ways of theological exposition and Catholic ritual and politics, which has inspired in his readers an enduring admiration for institutional Catholicism. The author explores the ways in which specific Catholic rituals and devotions vigorously promoted by the Catholic Church during the “Crisis in Modernism” (1850–1960) caused a nostalgic reaction in Joyce that informs and permeates his work. She also traces the subtle and direct influence Joyce had on the Catholic thinking of a diverse group of subsequent writers. She demonstrates that Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald seem to effect this nostalgia in their work in spite of themselves, while Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton purposely elicit it. The book also discusses Joyce's enduring belief in the immortal soul and the religious faith and doubt of Merton.

This book tells the story of the relationship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, one of the twentieth century's most intriguing and complicated literary friendships. The two writers met in the 1940s, when each woman was at the height of her creativity and success. The book's focus is, first, on what brought the two authors together—their personal affinities and artistic similarities—and, second, on their parallel creative development as they moved away from the communities—Eatonville and Cross Creek, Florida—that had originally inspired their greatest work, and their subsequent search for a new way to define themselves as writers and as human beings. Race was initially a barrier to the authors' understanding of each other; Rawlings, certainly, had to wrestle with her own deeply ingrained prejudices in order to create a connection with Hurston. They succeeded in working through these racial issues to find common ground in their devotion to literature, and grew to depend on one another for support and encouragement in the difficult task of authorship. In an era when it was difficult for women to be treated on a par with men, both authors sought solidarity in each other as they aspired to reach the same level of recognition their modernist male counterparts had attained. Their goal was not to achieve attention as women writers or regionalists, but to be acknowledged as national authors who rightfully belonged to the canon of American literature.

Immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Havana fostered an important transnational intellectual and cultural scene. Later, Fidel Castro would strictly impose his vision of Cuban culture on the populace and the United States would bar its citizens from traveling to the island, but for these few fleeting years the Cuban capital was steeped in many liberal and revolutionary ideologies and influences. Some of the most prominent figures in the Beat Movement, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Amiri Baraka, were attracted to the new Cuba as a place where people would be racially equal, sexually free, and politically enfranchised. What they experienced had resounding and lasting literary effects both on their work and on the many writers and artists they encountered and fostered. This book documents the multiple ways in which the Beat poets engaged with the scene in Havana. The book also demonstrates that even in these early years the Beat movement expounded a diverse but identifiable politics.

When World War II appeared imminent, the modernist writer known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declined offers of refuge and chose to remain in London. As devastating as this noncombatant experience was, as a Londoner during the Great War H.D. had learned how prolific she could be during periods of war. A Curious Peril attends to the critically ignored fiction and nonfiction she penned in the aftermath of the Second World War, arguing that our neglect of the narrative prose of this period of her career has bolstered an incomplete portrait of her oeuvre. Though H.D. is not typically considered a “political” thinker, this postwar work brings her interest in the otherworldly to bear on the material, political world—the world of imperialism, nationalism, and perpetual war. Abandoning for a short period the ancient classical settings for which she is best known, H.D. is seemingly impelled by the experiences of the early 1940s to produce a spate of writings in which the history of modern Europe takes center stage, writings that are molded into and by innovative and hybrid forms and genres that ultimately critique the ethical paradigms that had guided her before the war. Her postwar work marks a definitive shift from the modernist to the late modernist, gesturing at crucial points to the postmodern. As such, this experimental body of work—born in the trauma of world war, composed by a writer with acutely ambivalent national ties—constitutes a vital case study for current theorizing of late modernism.

The goal of this book is nothing less than to turn scholarship on gender and modernism on its head. The book focuses on the way some early twentieth-century writers portray masculinity as theatrical performance, and examines why scholars have generally overlooked that fact. It argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence—often viewed as misogynist—actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays, rhetorical in the sense that these characters, and the very narrative form of the works in which they appear, render masculinity a kind of persuasive argument readers can and should debate. Perhaps most interesting is the book's contention that scholarship has obscured the fact that often these writers were quite critical of masculinity. The book invokes the Schwarzeneggarian “girly man” and borrows from the theories of Judith Butler and Bertolt Brecht to fashion a critical method with which to explore the ways in which scholars gender texts by the very act of reading.

Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism explores Edith Wharton’s relation to the concept of cosmopolitanism, as it extended toward her politics, her aesthetics, and her vision of cultural differences. Essays explore Wharton’s cosmopolitan ideas and ideals, influences such as American art historian Charles Eliot Norton; her attitudes toward transatlanticism and globalization; and her art-historical discoveries in Europe. This book also calls significant attention to Wharton’s lesser-known works, including her travel writing on Europe, war writing, and other nonfiction, as well as her first novel, The Valley of Decision. It demonstrates how Wharton struggled to balance her ideas about national and local identity with cosmopolitan values throughout her career.

This project explores age-based obsessions of the modern era, situating the charting and interrogation of age among modernity’s central preoccupations, with particular attention to the gendering of old age and the creation of intergenerational conflicts. While chronological considerations privileged the young and tended to exclude those past adulthood, much of modern literature interrogated the age-based forms of standardization rooted in the era’s understanding of personal development. By focusing on the ways that age was constructed so as to uphold the ideal of a coherent, stable self, this literature interrogates theories of development that were believed to govern life trajectories, and with them, ideals about progress, often to the point of envisioning aging as a form of unwelcome dissolution. The era’s literary texts, however, complicated such views by adding to familiar figures of the flapper and the young generation a host of others that broke age thresholds: the mature youth, the youthful adult, the young middle-aged, the rejuvenate, the child bride, the aged, and the ghost. All such figures invited an interrogation of youth’s supposed ascendancy by suggesting that modernity’s age-based privileges were more varied and more widely dispersed than they seemed. If youth appeared dominant in terms of bodily forms and youthful energies, the more mature are revealed as possessing resources, experiences, and strategies that counter the assets of the young, leading to scenarios where the outcomes of intergenerational conflicts were both volatile and unexpected.

Though they were born a generation apart, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce shared similar life experiences and similar literary preoccupations. Both left their home countries at a relatively young age and remained lifelong expatriates. This book offers a fresh look at these two modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. Throughout, the book demonstrates the ways in which these authors grapple with the same issues—the grand narrative, paralysis, hegemonic practices, the individual's pilgrimage toward unencumbered self-definition—within the rigid bounds of imperial ideologies and myths. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of the writings of Conrad and Joyce and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.

This book presents, in a single collection, chapters in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field. Offering three chapters each on Joyce's four main works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake), the book provides a contextual general introduction, as well as short introductions to each section that describe the chapters that follow and their original contribution to the field.

This book examines the intersections between literary modernism and historical forms of geographical thinking from the late nineteenth century to the late 1940s. The central argument is that the dominant geographic paradigms in this period enabled and made legible for Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. outward-facing forms of global geography. Reconstructing the conditions of reading, influence, and intervention in which literary modernism and geographical knowledge co-evolved offers a new context for and vantage of global poetry produced by Americans. The interest in global connection and comparison found in academic and popular geography presented modernism with formal logics of spatial comparison, homology, and transitivity capable of bringing together disparate locales from distant global addresses. At the same time, modernism undermined the ontological fixity of space that geography held dear. Geography and modernism can thus be seen not only as structural analogues for each other but as multiple voices contributing to a common conversation about the nature of the relationship between society and the environment, how we navigate units of scale (region, nation, transnation, globe), and the cultural, national, and racial politics of how we orient ourselves on the globe. Poetic form in this sense becomes a global form—a form of geography—that destabilizes national distinctions and binaries such as West/non-West and imperial center/colonial periphery.

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism illuminates the idiosyncratic Jewish lexicon Gertrude Stein marshalled to associate modernism with Jewishness. Bridging modernist studies, Jewish studies, and the study of American literature, it establishes this inveterate experimenter as one of the premier Jewish modernists. Using archival research that radically changes our understanding of Stein’s oeuvre, Feinstein argues that an interest in Jewish nature was central to the many experiments in genre and style throughout Stein’s career. Although Stein explicitly discusses Jews in early scholastic writings and notebooks, she ceases to write openly about Jews in her first fictions and the epic novel The Making of Americans. Instead, melding tradition and innovation, her protagonists are figuratively Jewish and modern. Stein derived these solely metaphorical depictions of Jewish identity from Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hebraism and Hellenism, a debt never before recognized. Later, Stein returns to an explicit Jewish vocabulary in her enigmatic “voices” writings to examine marriage, diplomacy, and Zionism. Finally, in compositions written in Vichy France, where decrees were narrowly defining the parameters of French and Jewish identities, Stein rebelliously Judaizes the experience of occupation. The conclusion rebuts recent claims of Stein’s collaboration by examining her anti-Hitlerian writings and wartime contributions to journals of the intellectual resistance.