Modernist Resource Collection: We Need You!

As postgraduate representatives, the main inquiries we receive from BAMS members are about accessing information: How do I write a conference abstract? Which journal should I submit to? Do you know anyone who could help me with my postdoc application? These questions can be difficult to field, because the answers are various and slippery.

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BAMS Postgraduate Representative Update.

With the BAMS Elections held in February 2019, we welcome four new and one returning committee members to the team: postgraduate representatives Cécile Varry (Université Paris Diderot) and Polly Hember (Royal Holloway), and board members Claire Warden (Loughborough University), Andrew Frayn (Edinburgh Napier) and Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (University of Bristol). Here, our current postgraduate representatives Séan Richardson (Nottingham Trent) and Gareth Mills (University of Reading) reflect on the last year, while Cécile and Polly look forward to the new projects they hope to put in place.

The Modernist Podcast: Creating an International Scholarly Conversation for Public Consumption

Sean Richardson, Nottingham Trent University

The podcast is currently experiencing a golden era in popular culture. As of 2017, 112 million Americans have listened to a podcast, with listener rates having experienced an 11% growth since 2016. Overall, 40% of Americans age 12 or older have listened to a podcast, with 67 million Americans listening to podcasts monthly and 42 million Americans listening to podcasts weekly[i].

Review: A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic by James Gifford

Hailey Maxwell, University of Glasgow

A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic by James Gifford (ELS Editions 201)

A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic (2018) is essentially a continuation and expansion of the metacritical project established by Gifford’s previous volume, Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (2014) which takes the blind spots of materialist analyses in New Modernist Studies as its true object. In the present study, Gifford approaches the entanglement of two definitionally unstable domains traditionally forsaken by the dominant Marxist perspective towards late modernism; anti-authoritarianism and mass media genre fantasy.

Book Review: Rethinking G. K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture

Noreen Masud, University of Durham

Shallcross, Michael. Rethinking G. K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018. pp. xii + 295. £105. ISBN 9 7811 3867 8736.

What single-author criticism can do so well – despite the New Modernist Studies’ shift towards an emphasis on expansion, networks and juxtaposition – is to look closely and carefully at one thing, until the broader field begins to look different in unexpected ways. [1] Michael Shallcross’s monograph reads Chesterton through the lens of literary modernism, focusing particularly on the way that modernists constructed identities and relationships. From this perspective, literary modernism itself starts to seem, at times, convincingly Chestertonian. In Shallcross’s analysis, Chesterton slips from his long-held position as a reactionary, in implacable opposition to an emerging avant-garde, with no cogent relationship to modernism, and instead joins Eliot, Joyce, Lewis and Pound as ‘participants in a cross-pollinating dialogue’ (14). The Enemy must puppeteer his own enemies. Chesterton becomes indispensable to Lewis and Pound.

Review: Virginia Woolf in Richmond, by Peter Fullagar

Stanislava Dikova, University of Essex

Peter Fullagar, Virginia Woolf in Richmond (London: Aurora Metro Books, 2018)

Most dedicated Woolf readers shiver with disdain at the mention of Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, which features a gratuitous portrayal of the modernist writer, played by Nicole Kidman with a giant plastic nose in tow. Peter Fullagar takes a specific issue with a ‘fictitious quote’ attributed to Woolf in a scene from the movie about her relationship with Richmond: ‘if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death’ (30). According to Fullagar, this presents a false picture of Woolf’s relationship with the London suburb. His aim in Virginia Woolf in Richmond is to re-evaluate this perception and provide a detailed account of the writer’s life there during the decade Virginia and Leonard lived and worked in the neighbourhood.

‘Some obscure poet of the town’: Winesburg, Ohio and the Small Town as Modernist

Will Carroll, University of Birmingham

Open any edition of Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and you’ll be greeted by a print of a hand-drawn local map. Studying it, it becomes clear that Winesburg is an archetypal Midwestern small town. It is bisected by ‘Main Street’, a central thoroughfare of both commercial and social importance, around which sit traditional, timeless institutions that remain firmly impressed on the contemporary small-town blueprint. ‘Hern’s Grocery’ and ‘Sinning’s hardware’, easily located courtesy of the map’s legend, sit opposite one another on Main Street, whilst the town’s fairgrounds are reached by turning left off the main drag onto Buckeye Street.

BAMS Elections Open.

Today the BAMS Elections open. As postgraduate representatives, this is a particularly exciting time for us. We know that in a few short weeks we will be welcoming new team members on board to work with us, challenge us and invigorate our ideas. When we came on board in 2018, Helen Saunders and Stephanie Boland were finishing their tenure and Ruth Clemens was in the position we are today, right in the middle of her role. Together, we continued the hard work of Stephanie and Helen and built on the foundations they laid, relaunching the Modernist Review, undertaking a new BAMS Postgraduate Survey and organising a bevy of training days to help members get to grips with modernist studies today. We are further excited by the positions open on the Executive Steering Committee of BAMS and wish everyone running the best of luck.

From PhD to Postdoc: An Interview with Freya Gowrley

Dr Freya Gowrley is a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh’s History of Art department. Her research focuses on visual and material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. Her monograph, Domestic Space in Britain, c.1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability & Emotion is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic, and she has had articles published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Journal 18. She has held fellowships at Yale Centre for British Art, the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. We recently interviewed her to find out more about her journey after completing the PhD.