London

This chapter considers how London developed as a modernist city, from the late nineteenth century to the period after World War Two. It analyses the geographical emotions produced by particular locations within London, such as the London Underground and Metro-Land suburbs; the cultural institutions of Bloomsbury and Fleet Street; the bohemia of Soho and the nightlife of Piccadilly Circus; and the Notting Hill area settled by postwar immigrants to the city. It considers the affective responses of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James to the material restructuring of the city, before turning to the role of publishers, bookshops, and literary networks in helping establish modernism in the city, in the shape of poetic movements such as the Rhymers and the Imagists. The final part of the chapter analyses texts by two important outsiders in London: Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent and Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners.

Vienna

This chapter explores the cultural history of Vienna as a story of modernity, space, and power, from the late nineteenth century construction of the Ringstrasse to the postwar building of Red Vienna. It traces the city’s particular version of the geographical emotions of modernism, concentrating upon how the city’s architectural spaces helped shape an ‘inward turn’ in the mood or stimmung (Heidegger) of the modernism produced here, often producing notions of spatial phobias. It also analyses the importance of coffee houses as cultural spaces, and the ‘outsider’ figure of Jewish writers and thinkers in the city. After discussion of key Viennese figures such as Sigmund Freud and Robert Musil, it then traces how Anglophone visitors such as John Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison (in her Vienna Diary), Jean Rhys, and Stephen Spender (in his neglected long poem Vienna) represented the mood of the city in the interwar years. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man.

Afterword: Other Cities, Other Modernisms

This short afterword considers how modernism in other cities might be discussed, using the methodology of geographical emotions and literary geography.It also discusses the idea of a ‘modernism of the now’, by brief reference to a text by Teju Cole and the ideas of Marshall Berman.

Berlin

This chapter analyses how modernism in Berlin vacillates between utopian and dystopian modes and moods from the end of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Weimar years in 1933. It argues that the culture of modernism in the city is marked by the twin features of spaciousness and restlessness. It analyses the rise of Expressionism as a dominant form in the city, linking its particular mood to the technological modernity embraced by Berlin in the early twentieth century. It illustrates these arguments by considering how Expressionist artists (e.g. Ludwig Meidner) represented a particular space in the city (Potsdamer Platz), before discussing work by Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin, the expatriate Russian community (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky), and the American magazine, Broom. It then discusses cafés and queer spaces in work by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It concludes by analysing the geographical emotions prompted by Berlin in two important memoirs by English visitors to the city: Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Bryher’s The Heart to Artemis.

Introduction: Geographical Emotions and the Modernist City

This chapter introduces the overall methodology and theoretical approach taken in the book, explaining the significance of the idea of the outsider in modernism. It then outlines the idea of the geographical emotions of modernism (drawing upon a term first coined by the writer Bryher). This is articulated by combining theories of literary geography with work on affect theory, mood, and emotion. Theorists drawn upon here include Silvan Tomkins, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, and Martin Heidegger. It argues for an understanding of modernism in these four European cities in terms of a regional transnationalism, situating this approach within current debates on global modernism. The chapter illustrates these arguments by a reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury.

Paris

This chapter explores the affective pull that Paris exerted upon modernist writers and artists, attracting outsiders from around the globe to experience its cultural institutions and openness to creative experimentation. The chapter first discusses the writers T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars as ‘outsider-insiders’ (in Peter Gay’s terms), figures who come to the city as outsiders but who, by virtue of status or identity, are able to function as insiders within its cultural geography. The second group of writers discusses include Hope Mirrlees (in her poem Paris), Jean Rhys (in novels such as After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight), and Gwendolyn Bennett (in her story ‘Wedding Day’), female modernists who remain marked as outsiders in the city. The chapter discusses how all of these writers engaged affectively with various aspects of the technological modernity of Paris, including features such as the Eiffel Tower, café culture, hotel rooms, and the Grands Boulevards.