Wastepaper Modernism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Junk Mail ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
Novelistic Form

At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. From Henry James’s fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz, from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov, modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. Having its roots in the late nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, “wastepaper modernism” arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book’s own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature’s dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Elizabeth Bowen: Surrealist

2019 ◽  
pp. 28-47
Author(s):  
Keri Walsh
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Novel Of Manners

This chapter approaches the emerging notion of Irish surrealism in a seemingly unlikely corner: Bowen’s fiction. Seldom considered in the context of a modernist avant-garde, Bowen's work has been read within the history of the novel of manners, and as a chronicler of Anglo-Irish anxiety and ambivalence. Underrepresented until recently, however, are the specifically modernist commitments of her art. Bowen's career-long attention to the effects of new technologies on consciousness; her willingness to revise older forms of fiction and to experiment with techniques influenced by painting, cinema, and radio; as well as her depictions of women struggling to resist inherited Victorian roles and fulfil their desires for autonomy, education, travel, and love align her with a modernist tradition. Yet rather than classifying her with such innovators, even those critics attending to her modernist style and technique figure such experiments as idiosyncrasies. Where her prose subverts expectations of realist fiction, Bowen is more often described as an eccentric writer than one participating in modernism. Uncovering Bowen's dialogue with surrealism allows us to see her ‘strangeness’ in a new light, as part of her intermodernist (drawing on Kristin Bluemel’s term) engagement with avant-garde, continental discourses.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Piper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Book History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Technological Capabilities ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Publishing Strategy ◽  
Opening Up

This essay combines a consideration of the two-decades-long publishing strategy of Goethe's last major prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1808–29), with a reading of specific formal features unique to the final version of the novel. In doing so, it argues that Goethe's use of print and narrative work in concert to form what we might call a particular media imaginary–to reimagine the printed book not according to emerging nineteenth-century criteria of sovereignty, nationality, and permanence but instead according to values more in keeping with the technological capabilities of print media, such as transformation, diffusion, and connectivity. In his vigorous engagement with the material manifestations of his work as a key site of literary work, Goethe offers us an ideal place to explore the productive intersections that the disciplines of book history and literary history are opening up today. (AP)

Hypertextuality and the Economic Novel in Zimbabwe

Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-415
Author(s):  
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Great Ease ◽  
New Type ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
Source Of Information

Abstract Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down boundaries of dependence on television, newspapers, and novels, the traditional forms of communication. It is now possible to upload a novel onto an iPad and read it as one moves from place to place. The burden of carrying hard copies is relieved but not eradicated; in most African countries, including Zimbabwe (the centre of focus in the present article), the creative work of art or hard copy of a novel is still relied upon as source of information. There are creative, experimental innovations in the novel form in Zimbabwe which to some extent can justify one’s speaking of a hypertextual novel. This new type of novel incorporates multiple narratives, and sometimes deliberately uses genres such as the email form as a constitutive narrative style that confirms as well as destabilizes previous assumptions of single coherent stories told from one point of view. Using the concepts of hypertextuality, intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s notions of carnivalesque and heteroglossia in speech and written utterances, this article reconsiders the implications of the presence of ideologies of hypertextuality in one novel from Zimbabwe, Nyaradzo Mtizira’s The Chimurenga Protocol (2008). The article argues that the multiplicity of narratives constitutes the hypertextual dimension of the novelistic form.

Yemen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the development of the novel genre in Yemen. The novelistic form has taken a relatively long time to emerge in Yemen, but since 1992 Yemeni writers have produced a number of remarkable novels and the pace of publishing has increased. In addition, scholarly criticism of Yemeni fiction as a distinctive regional tradition has gotten well underway within the last decade. This chapter begins with an overview of the beginnings of the Yemeni novel before turning to works published from the revolution to unification (1962–1990), including historical novels. It also considers novels published from unification to the present, noting that Yemeni authors through the years have tackled a range of themes, including emigration, exile, racism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and cultural pluralism.

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