Read more
Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors' chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.
List of contents
Introduction: Alternatives to Modernism: Dissonant Voices and Multiple Modernities 1890-1939
Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson, Mark Sandy
PART 1
Unsettled Voices: Imaginative and Cultural Encounters
- Rhetoric and Feeling in Rupert Brooke
Andrew Hodgson
- Strange Truths: Romantic Reimaginings in Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
Mark Sandy
- ‘Now I Climb Alone’: Poetic Subjectivity in Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Stephen Spender
Michael O’Neill
PART 2
Dissenting Voices: Aestheticism, Gender, and the Art of Identity
- Pamela Colman Smith, Anansi and the Child: From The Green Sheaf (1903) to The Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1912)
Katharine Cockin
- Maverick Modernists: Sapphic Trajectories from Vernon Lee to D. H. Lawrence
Sondeep Kandola
- ‘Modernistic Shone the Lamplight’: Arthur Symons among the Moderns
Kostas Boyiopoulos
- Richard Le Gallienne: A Jongleur Strayed into the Modern World
Margaret D. Stetz
PART 3
Double Voices: Central and Peripheral Transactions
- ‘If I’m Not Very Careful, Something of This Kind May Happen To Me!’: The Preordained Role of the Reader in M.R. James’s Ghost Stories
Luke Seaber
- A Large Mouth Shown to a Dentist: G. K. Chesterton’s Surgical Parodying of T. S. Eliot
Michael Shallcross
- Modernist or Realist?: The Double Vision of E. M. Forster
Kate Symondson
- The Amateur Modernist: C. L. R. James in Bloomsbury
Saikat Majumdar
PART 4
Popular Voices: Questions of Realism, Politics, and Modernity
- The Iconoclasm of H. G. Wells and the Modernist Canon
Carey Snyder
- Writing for a New Age: Arnold Bennett and the Avant-Garde
Anthony Patterson
- Parade’s End and the Modernist Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Literary Toryism
Koenraad Claes
About the author
Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies at Durham University
Anthony Patterson is Assistant Professor of English at Celal Bayar University in Manisa, Turkey.
Mark Sandyis Reader in English and Deputy Head of the Department of English Studies at Durham University.
Summary
Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture.
