Modernism and Nostalgia

Transcription

1 Modernism and Nostalgia

2 Also by Tammy Clewell MOURNING, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM

3 Modernism and Nostalgia Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics Edited by Tammy Clewell palgrave macmillan

4 Introduction, selection and editorial matter Tammy Clewell Remaining chapters Contributors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

5 Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vii viii Introduction: Past Perfect and Present Tense : The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia 1 Tammy Clewell Part I Bodies 1 Modernism and the Referendum on Nostalgia in Rebecca West s The Return of the Soldier 25 Bernard Schweizer 2 Nostalgia, Trauma, and the Aftermath of War: Siegfried Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers 36 Robert Hemmings 3 You Can t Go Home Again: Ambivalent Nostalgia in T. S. Eliot s Poetry 54 Gabrielle McIntire 4 Matricide and the End of Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen 71 Maren Linett Part II Locations 5 Permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation : The Country House, Preservation, and Nostalgia in Vita Sackville-West s The Edwardians and Virginia Woolf s Orlando 93 Sarah Edwards 6 Modernist Urban Nostalgia and British Metropolitan Writing, Barry J. Faulk 7 Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and Imperialist Nostalgia 131 Carey Snyder v

6 vi Contents 8 There ll be no more fishing this side the grave : Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell s Coming Up for Air 149 Patricia Rae 9 Dissolving Landscapes: W. H. Auden s Protean Nostalgia 166 Eve Sorum Part III Aesthetics 10 Rupert Brooke s Ambivalent Mourning, Ezra Pound s Anticipatory Nostalgia 183 Meredith Martin 11 The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia and the Political Aesthetic of E. M. Forster 198 John J. Su 12 Nostalgia, Mourning, and Désistance in James Joyce s Ulysses 216 Christy L. Burns 13 Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism: Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh 237 Marina MacKay Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety 252 Elizabeth Outka Index 262

7 Acknowledgements I wish to thank first and foremost the fourteen contributors to this book. I am grateful for their good humour and patience in seeing this collection through to print, as well as the intellectual rigor of their work. An editor could not have hoped to work with a better group of scholars. Special thanks go to Marina MacKay for her early enthusiasm for this project, and to Elizabeth Outka for her groundbreaking work on nostalgia in the modernist period and for a number of inspiring conversations that led to this book. This anthology was enriched by the insights of participants in a seminar on modernist nostalgia at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Montreal in The most difficult task I faced as the editor was limiting the size and scope of the collection in light of many fine submissions. I can only hope the essays not included here have appeared in print elsewhere. I also wish to acknowledge Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan, and the anonymous readers who provided insightful feedback on each chapter. Finally, I thank Mark Bracher for his insightful response to the Introduction and, especially, for helping me put nostalgia into perspective. vii

8 Notes on Contributors Christy L. Burns is Associate Professor of English at the College of William & Mary, USA, also serving interdisciplinary studies in Gender, Sexuality, Women s Studies and Film Studies. Previous publications include Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (2000), and numerous articles on modernism, postmodernism, film and media studies. Her current book project addresses the role of sensate experience in modern to new millennial fiction. Tammy Clewell is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University, USA where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British literature and contemporary critical theory. She is the author of Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Angelaki, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Postmodern Culture. She is currently at work on a book project, Virginia Woolf and Literary Studies in the Age of the Neurosciences. Sarah Edwards is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Her previous publications include articles in Women s Writing, Journal of Gender Studies, Life Writing, Journal of Popular Culture, Review of English Studies as well as Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity (2011; co-edited with Jonathan Charley). She was the leader of an Economic and Social Research Council seminar series, Nostalgia in the 21st Century ( ) and of a special journal issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture on the series (2013). Barry J. Faulk is Professor of Victorian Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Music Hall and Modernity (2004) and British Rock Modernism (2010). Robert Hemmings is Assistant Professor in Arts & Culture and English Studies at Nipissing University s Muskoka Campus, Canada. Previous publications include Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War (2008) in addition to essays on Sassoon, Rivers, Edmund Blunden, war poetry and material culture as well as nostalgia in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children s literature. Maren Linett is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University, USA. Previous publications include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness viii

9 Notes on Contributors ix (2007, 2011), Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers (2010). She has also published articles on a variety of modernist writers, focusing on topics such as Jewishness, trauma, and disability, and is currently at work on her second book, a disability studies approach to modernist fiction. Marina MacKay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham, UK. Previous publications include Modernism and World War II (2007), British Fiction after Modernism (2007; co-edited with Lyndsey Stonebridge), and The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (2011). Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University, USA. Previous publications include The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture (2012) as well as essays published in the edited collection Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (2012). Her articles have appeared in the journals Modernism/Modernity, Victorian Studies, Victorian Institutes Journal, Literature Compass, and entries in The Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry, The Blackwell s Companion to Modernist Literature, and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Gabrielle McIntire is Associate Professor of English at Queen s University, Canada. Previous publications include Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008). Her articles have appeared in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Callaloo, and Narrative, and she has published poetry in journals and collections such as The Literary Review of Canada, The Cortland Review, Van Gogh s Ear, and Kingston Poets Gallery. She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land and working on a book on modernism and the sacred. Elizabeth Outka is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond, UK, where she teaches courses on modernism and the twentieth-century novel. Previous publications have appeared in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL, and Contemporary Literature. Her book, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (2009), examines the creation and selling of authentic and nostalgic images in turn-of-the-century Britain, when writers, advertisers, and architects began to evoke an authentic cultural realm paradoxically considered outside the marketplace. Her current book project, Raising the Dead: War, Plague, Magic, Modernism, draws on magic shows, séances, early zombie literature, and modernist novels to explore how the twin

10 x Notes on Contributors disasters of WWI and the 1918 influenza pandemic radically shifted perceptions of the corpse. Patricia Rae is Professor of English at Queen s University in Ontario, Canada. Previous publications include The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens (1997) and Modernism and Mourning (2007). Her essays have appeared in collections on modernism and war literature and in journals including Comparative Literature, ELH, ELN, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Prose Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, Southern Review, Analecta Husserliana, The Journal of War and Culture Studies, Queen s Quarterly, and English Studies in Canada. She is completing a new monograph, Modernist Orwell, which explores the various facets of Orwell s engagement with literary modernism. Bernard Schweizer, Professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn, USA, specializes in feminist genre studies, ideologies of travel writing, and the literature of disbelief. Previous publications include Radicals on the Road: The Politics of Travel Writing in the 1930s (2001), Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (2002), and Hating God: the Untold Story of Misotheism (2010). Schweizer has further edited four collections (on the female epic; on the politics of travel; on quest narratives; and on Rebecca West). He has edited Rebecca West s previously unpublished paper titled Survivors in Mexico (2003) and produced a critical edition of West s first novel The Return of the Soldier (2010). Schweizer founded the International Rebecca West Society in 2003 and is the Society s second president. Currently, Schweizer is establishing a new sub-field of scholarship focusing on literary manifestations of heresy and blasphemy. Carey Snyder is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University, USA, specializing in British Modernism. Previous publications include British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (2008) as well as published articles in Modern Fiction Studies and The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Her current book project examines the works of colonial women writers Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice Hastings, and Jean Rhys in relation to metropolitan editors, coteries, and little magazines. Eve Sorum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, where she teaches courses on modernism, modern poetry, and the literature of World War I. Previous publications include articles on Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, the self-elegy, and World War I poetry in collections

11 Notes on Contributors xi including Studies in the Novel, Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Modernism and Mourning. She is currently working on a manuscript on modernist empathy and elegy. John J. Su is Professor of Contemporary Anglophone Literatures at Marquette University, USA. Previous publications include Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (2011) and Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (2005). His articles have appeared in journals including American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Drama, Modern Fiction Studies and Twentieth-Century Literature.