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A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.

This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.

The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.

This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.

This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors, and translators. This book shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For this purpose, the exchanges between anglophone and Czech poetry are examined; the latter stood on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which anglophone poetry are usually considered, this book provides original readings of such figures as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, and shows the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

In his 1934 book After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot declared blasphemy “obsolescent” as a viable literary or artistic mode. There could be no blasphemy worth the name, he reasoned, in a world that had lost its faith in God: a verdict that has gone curiously uncontested by literary scholarship. For while critics have long described modernism as “heretical” or “iconoclastic,” little attention has been paid to the profound ways in which modernism was shaped by blasphemy in the fully religious sense of that term. Far from obsolete, such blasphemy flourished in the writings of Eliot’s contemporaries and inheritors, recurring not only as theme and trope but as a signally modernist mode of writing. Profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their literary practice, writers such as Mina Loy, James Joyce, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes evolved richly embodied aesthetic practices that aspired to the condition of “words made flesh.” In doing so they belied Eliot’s premise of an inherently godless modernity, their poems and fictions revealing the extent to which religion endured as a cultural force in the twentieth century. More, these writers’ profanations spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas, including secular ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality.

This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices that connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relation both to propaganda and to Peoples' War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, prisoners of war, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.

This book offers a new understanding of the politicized literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism. It reclaims a central body of literary and critical works for modernist studies, offering in-depth readings of texts by T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards as well as by key left-wing authors including William Empson, David Gascoyne, Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Edward Upward. Building on substantial new archival research, the study explores the deep tensions between modernist experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of these works. Taking as its focus the work of these writers, the book argues that the close interactions between literary production, critical reflection, and political activism in the decade shaped the influential view of modernism as fundamentally apolitical. Intervening in debates about the long life of modernism, it contends that we need to take seriously the anti-modernist impulse of 1930s left-wing literature even when attention is paid to the formal complexity of these ‘committed’ works. The tonal ambiguities which run through the politicized literature of the 1930s thus effect not a disengagement from but a more thorough immersion in the profoundly conflicted political commitments of the decade. At the same time, the study shows that debates about the politics of writing in the 1930s continue to inform current debates about the relationship between literature and political commitment.

Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

This book is a critical study of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, and a cultural biography. From the early stories, to the great popular triumphs of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Professor Challenger adventures, the ambitious historical fiction, the campaigns against injustice, and the Spiritualist writings of his later years, Conan Doyle produced a wealth of narratives. He had a worldwide reputation and was one of the most popular authors of the age. This is a book for students of literary and cultural history, and Conan Doyle enthusiasts. It is a full account of all of his writing, and an investigation of the role of the author as he practised it, as witness, critic, and interpreter of his times. His work was widely read and enjoyed, but it is far from being a simple endorsement of the masculine, imperialist, bourgeois, scientific world he so often portrayed. The subject of this study is what Conan Doyle knew—the knowledge of his own culture, its institutions and values and ways of life, its beliefs and anxieties, which is created and shared by his writing. The book is organized according to a number of cultural domains—sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and the spiritual life. At a time when literature had become a profession, in a society where literacy was more widespread than ever before or since, Conan Doyle emerges as a maker of culture, offering his readers an image of themselves, their past, and their future.

This work examines the philosophy of history and the subject of the nation in the literature of Joseph Conrad. It explores the importance of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic philosophy in Conrad's literary development, arguing that the Polish response to Hegelian traditions of historiography in nineteenth-century Europe influenced Conrad's interpretation of history. After investigating Conrad's early career in the context of the philosophy of history, the book analyses Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) in light of Conrad's writing about Poland and his sustained interest in the subject of national identity. These novels treat the question of the nation and history, with Conrad juxtaposing his belief in an inherited Polish national identity, derived from Herder and Rousseau, with a sceptical questioning of modern nationalism in European and Latin American contexts. Nostromo presents the creation of the modern nation state of Sulaco; The Secret Agent explores the subject of ‘foreigners’ and nationality in England; while Under Western Eyes constitutes a systematic attempt to undermine Russian national identity. Conrad emerges as an author who examines critically the forces of nationalism and national identity that troubled Europe throughout the nineteenth century and in the period before the First World War. This leads to a consideration of Conrad's work during the Great War. In his fiction and newspaper articles, Conrad found a way of dealing with a conflict that made him acutely aware of being sidelined at a turning point in both modern Polish and modern European history. Finally, this book re-evaluates Conrad's late novels The Rover (1923) and Suspense (1925), a long-neglected part of his career, investigating Conrad's sustained treatment of French history in his last years alongside his life-long fascination with the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Supported by an enduring critical paradigm, the traditional account of Conrad's career privileges his public image as man of the sea, addressing himself to a male audience and male concerns. This book challenges received assumptions by recovering Conrad's relationship to women not only in his life but in his fiction and among his readers. The existing interplay of criticism, biography, and marketing has contributed to a masculinist image associated with a narrow body of modernist texts. Instead, this book reinstates the female influences arising from his early Polish life and culture; his friendship with the French writer Marguerite Poradowska; his engagement with popular women's writing; and his experimentation with visuality as his later works appear in the visual contexts of women's pages of popular journals. By foregrounding less familiar novels such as Chance (1913) and the neglected Suspense (unfinished and published posthumously, 1925), the book emphasizes the range and continuity of Conrad's concerns, showing that his later discussions of gender and genre often originate in the period of the great sea tales. Conrad also emerges as an acute reader and critic of popular forms, while his unexpected entry into important contemporary debates about female identity invites us to rethink the nature of his contribution to modernism.