Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide

Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide
Author: Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351333232

Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide contributes to a new phase in the Victorian-modern debate of traditional periodization through the perspective lens of literature and the visual arts. Breaking away from conventionally fixed discourses and dichotomies, this book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the existence of overlaps and unexplored continuities between the Victorians, the post-Victorians and the modernists, including the fields of music, architecture, design, science, and social life. Furthermore, the book remaps the cultural history of two critical meta-narratives and their interdependence – the myth of "high modernism" and the myth of "Victorianism" – by building on recent scholarly work and addressing the question of the "turn of the century break theory" with a new set of arguments and contributions. The essays presented within acknowledge the existence of a break-theory in modernism, but question this theory by re-contextualising it while uncovering long-masked continuities between artists, genres and forms across the divide. The collection offers a new approach to modernism, Edwardianism, and Victorianism; utilizing the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and by combining contributions that look forward from the Victorians with other contributions that look backward from the modernists. While literary modernism and its vexed relationships with the nineteenth century is a central subject of the book, further analysis includes artistic discourses and theories stemming from history, the visual arts, science, music and design. Each chapter offers a fresh interpretation of individual artists, navigating away from characteristic classifications of works, authors and cultural phenomena. Ultimately, the volume argues that though periodization and genre categories play substantial roles in this divide, it is also essential to be critically aware of the way cultural history has been, and continues to be, constructed.

Re-Reading the Age of Innovation

Re-Reading the Age of Innovation
Author: Louise Kane
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000587886

The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Frances White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide, but by collaboration and community.

Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories

Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories
Author: Anne Besnault
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2021-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000461882

Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories explores the interrelatedness of Woolf’s modernism, feminism and her understanding of history as a site of knowledge and a writing practice that enabled her to negotiate her heritage, to find her place among the moderns as a female artist and intellectual, and to elaborate her poetics of the "new": not as radical rupture but as the result of a process of unwriting and rewriting "traditional" historiographical orthodoxies. Its central argument is that unless we comprehend the genealogy of Woolf’s historical thought and the complexity of its lineage, we cannot fully grasp the innovative thrust of her attempt to "think back through our mothers." Bringing together canonical texts such as Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938) or Between the Acts (1941) and under-researched ones — among which stand Woolf’s essays on historians and reviews of history books and her pieces on literary history and nineteenth-century women’s literature — this book argues that Woolf’s textual "conversations" with nineteenth-century writers, historians and critics, many of which remain unexplored, are interwoven with her historiographical poiesis and constitute the groundwork for her alternative histories and literary histories: "unwritten," open-textured, unacademic and polemical counter-narratives that keep track of the past and engage politically with the future.

Maternal Modernism

Maternal Modernism
Author: Elizabeth Podnieks
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031089111

Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period. It shows how these writers challenged, resisted, adapted and negotiated traditional ideas with their own versions of new motherhood, with needs for identities and experiences beyond maternity. Tracing the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, this study explores how some of the numerous elements and forces we identify with modernism are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood. It investigates how historical personages and fictional protagonists used and were constructed within textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as institution, identity and practice, from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race and class. The matrifocal literatures examined in this book exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era and how rebellious New Woman mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history.

Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence

Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence
Author: Kristin Mahoney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107109744

In Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, Kristin Mahoney argues that the early twentieth century was a period in which the specters of the fin de siècle exercised a remarkable draw on the modern cultural imagination and troubled emergent avant-gardistes. These authors and artists refused to assimilate to the aesthetic and political ethos of the era, representing themselves instead as time travelers from the previous century for whom twentieth-century modernity was both baffling and disappointing. However, they did not turn entirely from the modern moment, but rather relied on decadent strategies to participate in conversations concerning the most highly-vexed issues of the period including war, the rise of the Labour Party, the question of women's sexual freedom, and changing conceptions of sexual and gender identities.

Freak to Chic

Freak to Chic
Author: Dominic Janes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2021-07-01
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350172626

In this unique intervention in the study of queer culture, Dominic Janes highlights that, under the gaze of social conservatism, 'gay' life was hiding in plain sight. Indeed, he argues that the worlds of glamour, fashion, art and countercultural style provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle in London. Inspired by the legacies of Oscar Wilde, interwar and later 20th-century men such as Cecil Beaton expressed transgressive desires in forms inspired by those labelled 'freaks' and, thereby, made major contributions to the histories of art, design, fashion, sexuality, and celebrity. Janes reinterprets the origins of gay and queer cultures by charting the interactions between marginalized freaks and chic fashionistas. He establishes a new framework for future analyses of other cities and media, and of the roles of women and diverse identities.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
Author: Adam Hammond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100934952X

This book explores the way that digital forms and methods are reconfiguring the foundational concepts of literary studies.

British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930

British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930
Author: Victoria Margree
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030271420

This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women’s changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications. Haunted house narratives by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed in Female Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the ‘Marriage Question’ migrates to colonial India, and psychoanalytically-informed stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt explore just how far gender relations have really progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of the woman’s short story productively problematises literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons
Author: Lisa Siraganian
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2020-11-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198868871

Exploring legal treatises, court decisions, political illustrations, photographs, and modernist literature, this volume reveals that the ambiguous status of corporate intention in the first half of the twentieth century provoked conflicting theories of meaning and interpretation still debated today.