Books in the Historicizing Modernism series

This book uses Ezra Pound's The Cantos as a lens to understand modernism's ambition to revolutionize literature through mythical and scientific methods. Homer's Odyssey plays a unique methodological and structural role in The Cantos. The Cantos translates, interprets, abridges, adapts, critiques, parodies, trivializes, allegorizes, and "ritualizes" the Odyssey. Partly inspired by Joyce's use of different literary styles or "technics" in Ulysses, and partly inspired by medieval classicism and 19th century philology, Pound uses a plethora of methods to translate Homer and other classical texts. This book argues that The Cantos is a modernist vision of the Matter of Troy, a term used by medieval authors to designate the cycle of texts based on the Trojan war and its aftereffects, including the nostoi (returns) of the Greek heroes.This is the first study to explore how medieval classicism and translation informs Pound's mythical method and to systematically outline the variety and evolution of Pound's Odyssey translations in The Cantos.

Focussing upon both canonical figures such as Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Stein and emergent themes such as Christian modernism, intermedial modernism, queer Harlem Renaissance, this volume brings together previously unseen materials, from various archives, to bear upon cutting-edge interpretation of modernism. It provides an overview of approaches to modernism via the employment of various types of primary source material: correspondence, manuscripts and drafts, memoirs and production notes, reading notes and marginalia, and all manner of useful contextualising sources like news reports or judicial records. While having much to say to literary criticism more broadly, this volume is closely focused upon key modernist figures and emergent themes in light of the discipline's 'archival turn' - termed in a unifying introduction 'achivalism'. An essential ingredient separating the above, recent tendency from a much older and better-established new historicism, in modernist studies at least, is that 'the literary canon' remains an important starting point. Whereas new historicism 'is interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents' and tends toward a 'parallel study of literature and non-literary texts', archival criticism tends toward recognised, oftentimes canonical or critically-lauded, writers, presented in Part 1. Sidestepping the vicissitudes of canon formation, manuscript scholars tend to gravitate toward leading modernist authors: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Part of the reason is obvious: known authors frequently leave behind sizeable literary estates, which are then acquired by research centres. A second section then applies the same empirical methodology to key or emergent themes in the study of modernism, including queer modernism; spatial modernism; little magazines (and online finding aids structuring them); and the role of faith and/or emotions in the construction of 'modernism' as we know it.

James Joyce and Photography is the first book to explore in-depth James Joyce's personal and professional engagement with photography. Photographs, photographic devices and photographically-inspired techniques appear throughout Joyce's work, from his narrator's furtive proto-photographic framing in Silhouettes (c. 1897), to the aggressively-minded 'Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak' in Finnegans Wake (1939).Through an exploration of Joyce's manuscripts and photographic and newspaper archival material, as well as the full range of his major works, this book sheds new light on his sustained interest in this visual medium. This project takes Joyce's intention in Dubliners (1914) to 'betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city' as key to his interaction with photography, which in his literature occupies a dual position between stasis and innovation.

Exploring the collaborative, consumer-oriented Modernism that developed out of both planned and fortuitous groupings in periodicals, this book traces the serialization and advertisement of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw in Collier's (1898), Rudyard Kipling's Kim in McClure's and Cassell's (1900-1901), James Joyce's Ulysses in the Little Review (1918-1920), and Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" in the Dial (1923).These periodicals-whether mass-market journals or literary magazines-adjust our perceptions of authors elsewhere known to be "in charge" and reveal the central role that compromise and chance played in the emergence of Modernism.Bringing to light new research from multiple archives, Sigler pieces together original records of journals' advertising strategies, previously unpublished editorial correspondence, and long-buried letters to unearth the forgotten stories behind the texts we think we know so well.

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics.Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.

Provides a new sense of the historical specificity of W.B. Yeats's writings over a wide range of genres, leading to innovative readings of classic texts. >

Presents a study of Ezra Pound's poetic innovations and treatment of American history in "The Cantos". This title explores the extent to which Pound's poetry changed in response to his reading of seventeenth-century American History and the social climate of the pre-war period.