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We Speak a Different Tongue We Speak a Different Tongue We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939 Edited by Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939 Edited by Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Patterson, Yoonjoung Choi and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7702-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7702-2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction ............................................................................................... ix Anthony Patterson and Yoonjoung Choi Part I: Contexts Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 “Destroying Natural Ties”: Radical Politics at the Margins of Modernism Cord-Christian Casper Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Literary Modernism and Philosophical Pragmatism: Convergence and Difference John Ryder Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Maverick Vices: Sexual Felicity and the Edwardian Sex Novel Anthony Patterson Part II: Victorian and Edwardian Modernists Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 52 May Sinclair’s Modernism and the Death of the Baby Elizabeth Brunton Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 68 Last Attempt at Romance: Wells Reworking Stoker’s Gothic Romance Yoonjoung Choi Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 83 Charlotte Mew’s Castaway Modernism Antonio Jimenez-Munoz vi Table of Contents Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 99 “Accepting Winter Boon”: Edward Thomas, Walter Pater and the Rhetoric of Poetry Callum Zeff Part III: Maverick Encounters with Modernism and Modernity Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 116 A Home of One’s Own: Recollections of a Thwarted Artist in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent Elise Thornton Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 136 Mystical Mavericks: The Influence of Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson on Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur Helen Green Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 154 Neither/Nor: The Productive Frustration of Classification in Jean Toomer’s Cane Nissa Ren Cannon Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 168 Modernism in the Muck: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Margaret Cullen Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 185 Funny Old Fatty Bowling: Coming up for Air and George Orwell’s Comedic Common Man Calum Mechie Part IV: Maverick Voices within or on the Peripheries Modernism Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 202 “Extreme Consciousness”: D. H. Lawrence and America’s Challenge to European Modernism Brian Fox We Speak a Different Tongue vii Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 220 “What in the world is this all about?” Avant-Garde and Decadence: Djuna Barnes’s Short Fiction Lucrecia Radyk Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 235 Opposing Modernismus: The Variant Modernisms of Wyndham Lewis and Sir Reginald Blomfield Nathan O’Donnell Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 254 “I Have To Touch, As Another Man Will Look”: The (Un)seeing Gaze in Rayner Heppenstall’s The Blaze of Noon Hannah Van Hove Notes on Contributors .............................................................................. 268 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “We Speak a Different Tongue”: Maverick Voices and Modernity, 1890– 1939 was conceived from a conference with the same title held in July 2013, hosted by the English Department of Durham University. First of all, we wish to express our gratitude to the American University of Ras Al Khaimah for the timely financial help. We would like to thank co- organisers, Dr Mark Sandy and Dr Kostas Boyiopoulos, for the successful conference and more importantly for their insights and input into the current volume. In addition, our special thanks go to Dr Boyiopoulos who allowed us to use his design for the cover image of this volume. We also would like to thank our keynote speakers, Professor Chris Baldick and Professor Michael O’Neill, and all the presenters. Finally, our warm thanks go to our contributors for their trust, support and help in putting this volume together. INTRODUCTION ANTHONY PATTERSON AND YOONJOUNG CHOI Brian Richardson has noted how the narrative of modern literary history can become an oversimplified tale of “dynastic successions” which narrates “a fairly smooth transition from Realism to Modernism and then on to Postmodernism.”1 Richardson points out the flaws in such a view of modern literary history: The main problem with the standard narrative of modern literary history is precisely its narrative features: a distinct origin, a series of causally connected events in a linear sequence, a teleological progression culminating in the present, the absence of unconnected or distracting subplots, the unspoken but uncontested male domination of narrative agency, and the unproblematic closure implied by this version of history. There is also the inevitable moral that this structure lends itself to, that postmodernism is a superior representation of human experience, more recent and therefore more appropriate, if not also more ideologically responsible.2 Thus while searches for origins, acceptance of causal relations and teleological views of history have been thoroughly scrutinised in a range of contemporary theoretical and critical approaches, such views as they relate reflexively to literary history often fall prey to these now highly contentious assumptions. Perhaps more significant for this collection of essays, such a history aesthetically privileges certain literary movements and developments over others. If the teleological view is that Postmodernism is “a superior representation of human experience”, then, Modernism is also similarly viewed as superior to Realism. This sense of superiority can often lead to texts that fall outside the modernist canon in 1Brian Richardson, “Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction,” Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 43, No. 3 (1997), pp. 291-309. 2 Ibid, p. 291. x Introduction terms of periodization, aesthetics, style, tone, genre and so forth being deemed inferior and concomitantly reflecting a more naive ontological understanding of the world than the texts of modernist writers. In such a view, pre-modernist or non-modernist texts are often seen as incapable of offering the richer psychological depth and more complex understanding of time and experience ascribed to modernist writing, the latter viewed as more akin to how people experience the world. This view is consonant with Virginia Woolf’s polemical distinction between an outmoded conventional material realism which concentrates on external details such as houses, clothes and salaries, and in which “life escapes”, and a fiction which seeks to capture the essence and complexity of experience.3 David Trotter has referred to “the evaluative function of modernism” and its “criterion of value” in which, Writers who didn’t respond to its promptings can be said to have blinded themselves not only to history, but to the sources of their own creativity. Writers who did can be seen as prophets, without honour in their own age, but the creators of our own… Unfortunately, however, the concept of Modernism is still used to evaluate rather than describe: to distinguish between those writers who are considered innovatory, and thus worthy of study, and those who aren’t. 4 This of course, is not to deny the existence of techniques and practices that can be labelled modernist or indeed to belittle the importance of many writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce who radically changed ideas of what fiction could do and say, but rather it is to challenge, as Trotter does, the privileging of Modernism over other kinds of writing, a privileging which tends to oversimplify the complex relations between texts and between writers, to devalue the work of those not considered modernist and to undervalue the experimentation of many writers and artists who confronted modernity in a range
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