Book Review: Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities

6 September 2023

Anna Dijkstra, Huygens Institute

Rachel Fountain Eames, Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

The sense of epistemological crisis that haunts much of modernist literature is often considered in philosophical terms.^[1] Rachel Fountain Eames’s new book valuably complements such analyses by conducting a historicist reading of the relation between modernism and physics. Specifically, she explores the varied engagements of various modernist authors with the developments in physics that held the early twentieth century in their grips: relativity theory and quantum mechanics. These developments mark a significant turn to abstraction. Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde (2023) explores how modernist art responds to and incorporates this turn, focusing on poets occupying the New York avant-garde arts scene of the 1920s. By using this socio-cultural environment as common ground between her chapters, Eames manages to consider the interaction between physics and art more broadly, taking into account various artistic practices and movements. Her original choice of authors, consisting of William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Wallace Stevens, rather than the usual modernist suspects, allows this work to trace new interactions between modernism and physics, guided by the particular imaginations of these poets.

Book Review: Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities

4 July 2023

James Green, University of Manchester

Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

Arguably the emphasis in the title of ‘Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities’ is on its final word. This essay collection has a productively broad, ambitious aim: to widen the remit of thought and discussion in the field of Irish modernism. The best moments in this collection directly relate to this mission, as the essays contained within resist critical complacency and celebrate intellectual daring.

Book Review: Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences

4 July 2023

Benjamin Bruce, University of Reading

Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences, edited by Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson and Mark Sandy (Routledge: Abingdon, 2019)

This is a collection of essays, many of which derive from papers delivered at the “We Speak a Different Tongue”: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890-1939 Conference of July 2013. The intention of the book is to highlight particular writers that modernism might have pushed to the periphery of its discourse, whom the editors term ‘lone wolves and niche groups’.^[1] They include within this the work of Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, and Edward Thomas, and the novelists, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, and Ford Madox Ford.

Book Review: Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in Inventions of the March Hare

1 May 2023

Peter Lowe, Bader College

Jayme Stayer, Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in ‘Inventions of the March Hare’. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)

‘The more we know of Eliot, the better,’ wrote Ezra Pound on the 1971 publication of the manuscript and associated drafts of The Waste Land, and in recent years Eliot’s readers have certainly seen a great deal more material become available. The published edition of his letters has now reached 1941 while the eight-volume Complete Prose offers an immense archive of previously unavailable material to sit alongside both halves of Robert Crawford’s biography. And, of course, there are the letters to Emily Hale, laying bare as they do the complex relationship revived in the 1930s when Eliot found himself once again close to the woman who embodied the American milieu from which he had found himself, by accident or design, separated by what Jayme Stayer calls “his hasty marriage and permanent expatriation.”

Book Review: Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting

30 January 2023

Henry Martin, National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Ireland

Weill, Berthe, William Rodarmor, Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, and Julie Saul. Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022)

‘I’m stiff-necked, forbidding, and I have a difficult personality’, writes the art dealer Berthe Weill (1865–1951) in her 1933 memoir, published in English this year for the first time in a translation by William Rodarmor for Chicago University Press. [1] Weill’s bark may be worse than her bite, however, for this spritely chronicle also reveals someone sensitive, humble, generous-to-a-fault and humorous. Like the Cubist portraits Weill hoped to sell, this art dealer had many sides and layers.

Exhibition Review: Making Modernism

30 January 2023

Alyson Lai, University of York

Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, curated by Dorothy Price and Sarah Lea; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 12 November – 12 February 2022

Making Modernism was inaugurated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in November 2022. For the first time, the exhibition brought to the British public the work of four women modernists working in early 1900s Germany: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, alongside key pictures by their contemporaries, Erma Bossi, Ottilie Reylaender, and Jacoba van Heemskerck. The exhibition is the latest iteration in a chain of efforts to “rediscover” women artists; it goes hand in hand with Katy Hessel’s highly successful The Story of Art Without Men, published not long before the exhibition opened. Sixty-eight works in three rooms are organised around themes of intimacy, city life, still life, childhood, and identity.

Book Review: Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce

30 September 2022

Anna Dijkstra

David P. Rando, Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

100 years after the first publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), David P. Rando provides an analysis of Joyce’s oeuvre centring on a theme that has not just for a long time remained mostly neglected in Joyce scholarship, but even stands starkly at odds with its general tendency: the theme of hope. By providing innovative analyses of Joyce’s major works, Rando traces the various paths that hope takes in order to present a future-oriented understanding of Joyce that is grounded in ‘socioeconomic material conditions,’ significantly characterising hope by ‘restlessness’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ (p. 1). As such, Rando complements and recontextualises, rather than fully rejects, analyses focusing on hopelessness and pessimism, proposing a dialectical relationship between a capacity for change, and material conditions, in a way that understands Joyce’s work as one large project aimed at the conceptual development and eventual expression of hope. This angle results in a convincing argument for the relevance of hope both to interpreting Joyce, as well as to understanding the act of reading Joyce itself, conceptualising reading communities’ utopian impulses as responses to those seen within Joyce’s work.

Book Review: Making Liberalism New

30 September 2022

Aidan Watson-Morris, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Afflerbach, Ian. Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and
the Rewriting of a Political Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

When, and what, was liberalism? The question begets another: Which liberalism? Ian Afflerbach’s (University of North Georgia) study documents a midcentury interchange between modernist writers and liberal intellectuals, asking us to parse the genealogy of a modern—or even modernist—liberalism against its classical and neo- variants. If liberalism often plays the role of Big Other to both the academic Left and hegemonic Right as ‘the organizing political grammar of modernity’ (p. 1), an overlooked characteristic of liberal thought is its ‘self-critical intellectual enterprise’ (p. 17). To study this enterprise in its particularity, Afflerbach provides an intellectual history, bracketing the political institutions which put liberal ideas into practice.

Book Review: Modernists and the Theatre

2 June 2022

Annie Williams, Trinity College Dublin

James Moran, Modernists and the Theatre: The Drama of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf: often amassed as the ‘1922 core’ (p. 1) of Anglo-American and Irish literary modernism, these six writers are regularly credited with having defined the aesthetics of the period. However, scholarship on modernism’s six ‘obvious suspects’ (p. 1) tends to spotlight their poetry and their prose rather than their plays. James Moran’s Modernists and the Theatre (2022) seeks to redress this critical neglect by framing this central group as six writers who actively engaged with theatre throughout their lives. The result is an informative study in which Moran persuasively challenges the critical assumption that these writers’ engagement with the dramatic form was ever fleeting, insignificant, or non-existent.

Book Review: D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings

4 April 2022

Buxi Duan, University of Birmingham

Annalise Grice, D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

It is safe to say that D. H. Lawrence is a controversial figure in modernist criticism. Unlike his contemporaries, such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, Lawrence is often treated as a peripheral figure even though he was closely connected to English modernism. It is difficult to put labels on Lawrence because of his various literary personae. In 1913, when he was only 27 and had only just established his name in the literary marketplace, Lawrence wrote that ‘I seem to have had several lives, when I think back. This is all so different from anything I have known therefore. And now I feel a different person. […] Life unsaddles one so often’.^[1] Indeed, Lawrence has many faces as a novelist, poet, letter-writer, dramatist, literary reviewer, and arguably essayist and journalist. Despite the popularity of his risqué romantic novels, such as Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), criticism on how Lawrence became Lawrence has largely followed existing biographical research and portrayed his entering in the literary marketplace as a typical story of a working-class man ‘getting on’. Annalise Grice’s monograph D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings is a timely work that fills the gap of criticism on Lawrence’s early engagement with the literary marketplace, providing a new perspective on his formative years through detailed case studies. For readers interested in D. H. Lawrence and the development of his literary reputation and persona(e) on both sides of the Atlantic, this book is a must-read.