Modernist Dante

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.

Conclusion

Returning to Synge’s first completed play, the Conclusion shows that despite its clunky construction and heavy-handed didacticism, When the Moon Has Set (1900–3) contains the kernels of many of the concerns traced throughout this book. When the Moon Has Set illustrates Synge’s basic values before they were politicized, and thus acts in this Conclusion as an apt comparison by which to judge the increasing modernism of Synge’s work after his pantheism, mysticism, and socialism were mobilized and ironized by the Revival and its concomitant pressures. Touching on Synge’s final uncompleted play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, the conclusion suggests that the trajectory traced in this book does not find a satisfactory conclusion in this work, which Synge himself admitted might be too removed from real social and political concerns to be successful. It was, for him, both his final play and a new departure, and suffered from the pressure of the adverse reaction to The Playboy of the Western World. Finally, by tracing the afterlives of Synge in writers such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Flann O’Brien, the book closes by suggesting the new ways in which our understanding of modernism and Revivalism (and the relationship between the two) can be reconfigured in the light of Synge’s work, positing Synge not only as an early leftist modernist but also as a writer of radical literary and political potential.

From Eggbeaters and Alcohol to Gryphons, Dolls, and Puppets

For modernists like Djuna Barnes, objects mark, but also frequently mobilize, the very conflict that exists between the characters who are depersonalized by their sense of racial, cultural, class, and gender difference, but who also desperately seek some magical reconnection with the prelapsarian—be it through their relationships and object-attachments or through their nomadic positionality. This chapter explores Barnes’s use of objects not only as the markers of the impersonal, but also as affective spaces upon which the characters various desires and socio-political, ethical, gender, and racial conflicts are projected and (re)negotiated. Although the essay’s focus is primarily on Barnes’s Nightwood, her novel is also discussed in relation to her early work, as well as her last and frequently underestimated play, The Antiphon. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, the essay examines the ways in which Barnes deploys objects as “affective economies of difference” that mobilize the characters’ sense of displacement while simultaneously providing a temporary respite from its very realities.

Modernist Objects

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of objects. It places objects, how they emerge or withdraw, how they fashion us, and what status they hold, at the heart of what constitutes modernism. Three processes are consistently to be observed in modernist object experiments: objecting to realism, fashioning the human, and performing the ornamental. The cumbersome bourgeois semiotics of material possessions was itself taken on by writers as diverse as Beckett or Djuna Barnes as a material to be chipped away at, given new life or hollowed out. Writers and creators embraced the object in a way that culminated in such intimate extensions of the mind and body as constructivist clothing, literary magazines, musical instruments, and restorative sculptures. The most skin-deep artifice is shown here to have epoch-changing potentialities. Can a lost brooch define the feminine through an aesthetics of absence? Can the ever-accelerating succession of hats on the head of a lonely alien in Paris,or of manufactured appliances on the dress of a German baroness, loosen the maddening grip of consumer society? Can the bourgeoisie be placed in a position to camp gender (Boscagli) through the use of Japanese lacquer on the outer surfaces of a recliner? This book is characterized by attentiveness to works hitherto considered as minor alongside canonical ones, a careful reclaiming of women’s writing and fine art, and a methodological habitof extending transnational probes outside the realm of the English language.

Poetry, Publishing, and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the Twenty-first Century

This book examines why it is important to appreciate cultural artefacts such as poems, sculptures, and buildings not as static, perfected objects, but as meshworks of entangled, mutable, and trans-personal forces. Offering six such case studies across the long twentieth century, the book focuses on how poetic works activate closer appreciation of literature’s hybridity. The book analyses how such texts are collaborative, emergent, and between-categories, and shows why this matters. It focuses, first, on how printed poetry is often produced collaboratively, in dialogue with the visual and plastic arts; and second, how it comes about through entangled and emergent agencies. Both have been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. Although this proposal makes some trouble for established disciplinary modes of reception and literary classification, for this reason, it also paves the way for new critical responses. Chiefly, Fugitive Pieces encourages the development of modes of literary critical engagement which acknowledge their uncertainty, vulnerability, and provisionality. Such reading involves encountering poems as co-constituted through materials that have frequently been treated as extra-literary, and in some cases extra-human. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, David Jones, F.T. Prince, Ted Hughes, Denise Riley, and Paul Muldoon, Fugitive Pieces fosters closer attention to how literary works operate beyond the boundaries of artistic categorization and agency. It examines the politics of disciplinary criticism, and the tensions between anthropocentric understandings of value and intra-agential collaborative practices. Its purpose is to stimulate much-needed analysis of printed works as combinatorial and hybrid, passing between published versions and artforms, persons and practices.