Moonlighting

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ludwig Van Beethoven ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Many

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven’s compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven’s music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven’s music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to profit from it.

Writing Modernist Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Dynamic Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
May Sinclair

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

scholarly journals Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Many

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

scholarly journals Tracing the lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Mykola Verbovyi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Quantitative Composition ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Lexical Composition

The article analyzes the most important lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works of art. The researcher concludes that the playwright in his texts used words or individual forms characteristic of the steppe subdialects of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The analysis of words is made with the involvement of a wide range of factual material extracted from various lexicographical, ethnographic sources, as well as artistic texts of other authors. It has been established that the lexical composition of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works reveals organic connections with the vocabulary of the adjacent Poltava and Podil dialects, and more broadly with the eastern and western dialects of the Ukrainian language. It is also noted that the analyzed words show a significant influence on the steppe subdialects and on the Ukrainian language in general Polish, Russian and Romanian. Thus, the study suggests that the playwright’s literary texts recorded and preserved the original local phonetic, word-forming or semantic derivatives that complement and deepen our knowledge of general trends in the lexical systems of Eastern Ukrainian dialects and the Ukrainian literary language. Consideration of only a small number of words (approximately 20 nouns) that function in the works of Marko Kropyvnytskyi, determines the prospects for further research to establish the quantitative composition of such names and a systematic description of phonetic, word-forming or semantic features in connection with other dialects and literary language. It follows from the above that the texts of M. Kropyvnytskyi are an important source for the study of linguistic features and steppe subdialects, and the Ukrainian literary language of the early twentieth century.

A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Davison-Pégon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Strategic Marketing ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Mediator

This article examines S. S. Koteliansky as cultural mediator involved not only in the translation of Russian classics, but in strategic marketing ploys and post-revolutionary activism, shaping the cultural attitudes of early twentieth-century London. It starts from his networks in Whitehall, Westminster, and Bloomsbury, before appraising the tactics of enjoining writers to translate and publish the texts he was bringing to Britain. It then turns to the poetics of co-authored translations. Brief extracts from ‘Stavrogin's Confession’, the suppressed chapters of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, translated in 1922 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf, reveal a distinctly modernist attention to voice.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Sound Perception ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Geographical Scope ◽  
Century Literature

The introduction begins with a close reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” in order to clarify the influence of auditory technology on turn-of-the-century literature. While explaining the geographical scope and limitations of the project, the Introduction situates the modernist shift toward sound perception as one of the many breaks with tradition that characterized the period. It also surveys recent scholarship that begins to consider how the soundscape, auditory technologies, and music of the early twentieth century influenced modernist literature.

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