XV Modern Literature

XV Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article-abstract/97/1/889/5146379 by Maynooth University user on 13 May 2020 Modern Literature MATTHEW LEVAY, ANDREW RADFORD, CAROLINE KRZAKOWSKI, ANDREW KEESE, MARIA-DANIELLA DICK, CATRIONA LIVINGSTONE, HANNAH TWEED, GUSTAVO A. RODRI´GUEZ MARTI´N, GRAHAM SAUNDERS, WILLIAM BAKER, MATTHEW CREASY, KARL O’HANLON, AND ADAM HANNA This chapter has 8 sections: 1. General; 2 Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945 Fiction; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7 British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Matthew Levay; section 2(a) is by Andrew Radford; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Maria-Daniella Dick; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Catriona Livingstone; section 3(a) is by Hannah Tweed; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper and William Baker; section 4 is by Gustavo A. Rodrı´guez Martı´n; section 5 is by Graham Saunders and William Baker; section 6 is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Karl O’Hanlon; section 8 is by Adam Hanna. 1. General Since the arrival of the New Modernist Studies roughly two decades ago, scholarship in modernism has been reliably eclectic, founded on a combination of interdisciplinarity and historicism that equally attends to global and local phenomena in constructing a robust cultural history of the period. Modernism, according to contemporary critics, flourishes across continents, time periods, and the arts, its boundaries moving in a constant yet welcome state of flux. While the emphasis of any single critical account can fall more heavily on some of these characteristics than others, and while scholars are increasingly taking greater care to situate their versions of modernism within a tighter conceptual framework, the field has proven remarkably consistent in producing work that imagines the idea of ‘modernism’ as a far-reaching, often The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 97 (2018) ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/may015 890 MODERN LITERATURE conflicted enterprise that one can view from any number of perspectives. Not surprisingly, then, the books in modernist studies published in 2016 are Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article-abstract/97/1/889/5146379 by Maynooth University user on 13 May 2020 extraordinarily diverse in style and subject, and demonstrate how an essentially restless field continues to redefine itself even as that gesture has become familiar. One of the most notable trends in 2016 was a steady focus on modernist print culture, as critics mined the archives in an effort to reveal the publishing and authorial networks that brought modernism into being and disseminated it to readers. Perhaps the most comprehensive book in this area is Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey’s Modernism’s Print Cultures, part of Bloomsbury’s series in ‘New Modernisms’, which offers detailed surveys of significant issues in the history of modernism and modernist criticism. Serving as a guide to students and researchers, Hammill and Hussey’s book casts a wide net over the various cultures of print that dominated the period, from periodical and fine book publishing to book clubs and political journals. They begin with a chapter on ‘Sensuous Print’, which addresses the materiality of modernist print cultures—typography, design, and the physical dimensions of a printed text—and then turn to chapters on ‘Print in Circulation’ and ‘Purposeful Print’, which deliver helpful, clearly articulated overviews of how various publications made their way through the public sphere, and of how those works aimed to address specific kinds of audiences, respectively. The range of publications under discussion gives a solid impression of the period while still leaving room for readers to explore other areas and contexts, and the volume’s back matter—which includes a substantial bibliography, a list of societies and associations devoted to the subject, and a compendium of databases and digital archives—makes the book an invaluable resource for beginning and advanced scholars alike. As Hammill and Hussey note at the outset, the ‘networks that produced and sustained modernism are being reconstructed from [publishers’ and magazines’] archives, and this work is having a profound effect on our conceptions of the literary, requiring us to acknowledge that a modernist book, magazine, poem or novel is simultan- eously a defamiliarizing art object and a commodity’ (p. 35). Their book is a welcome and well-timed contribution to these efforts at reconstruction, taking stock of where modernist studies has been and where it might turn as it continues to probe an abundance of heretofore untapped archival materials in order to understand the origins and contributions of the period. Similarly, Patrick Collier’s Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s is a rigorous account of how various textual forms from the modernist period negotiate conflicting systems and arbiters of literary value in ways that exceed and, necessarily, revise the conventional narrative of twentieth-century art. Turning his attention to newspapers, magazines, anthologies and mass-market books, Collier outlines a vast network of overlapping publishing ecosystems that permeated the lives of everyday British readers, and within which the formal properties of material objects could make claims about how the content of those objects should be understood and accorded various degrees of value. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its author’s considerable work in periodical studies, Modern Print Artefacts is especially rich in its account of early MODERN LITERATURE 891 twentieth-century newspapers and magazines, offering up impressive and thickly historicized interpretations of the Illustrated London News, John Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article-abstract/97/1/889/5146379 by Maynooth University user on 13 May 2020 O’London’s Weekly and the London Mercury. Each of the book’s chapters provides a compelling analysis of these periodicals, and demonstrates how we can more fully grasp the debates over literature, culture and society that shaped the contours of the century’s opening decades by examining publications like these, given their prominence among British readers, the material forms in which they presented information to those readers and the value they were granted or denied as print artefacts. The book’s most provocative section, however, is its conclusion, in which Collier makes a passionate yet precise case against ‘modernism’ as a totalizing descriptor of early twentieth-century literary culture. He argues that the New Modernist Studies’ tendency to situate any aesthetic object produced during the period in relation to modernism has led not only to a necessary expansion of the modernist canon, but also to a more worrying tendency to ignore those objects that do not fit into it. As Collier notes, some of the best-known modernist authors were undeniably against ‘ordinary print culture: the world of popular periodicals, mainstream publishing houses, libraries, booksellers and other locations where a vast majority of the reading and writing in the period got done’ (p. 235). As a result, he maintains, we would do well to displace modernism from its position of critical prominence, if only to ensure that the literary history of the early twentieth century is appropriately inclusive. Whereas Modern Print Artefacts offers a meticulous assessment of print culture in early twentieth-century Britain, John Lurz’s The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading takes a more formalist approach to modernist novels’ unique investment in exchanges between the material form of the book and the phenomenological experience of reading. Through a detailed set of close readings of novels by Proust, Joyce and Woolf, Lurz shows how the book as object became a central conceit of modernist fiction. As he argues, each of these novelists represents within his or her narrative moments of textual engagement that can mirror our own experience of reading, drawing us into and out of the book in a heady give-and-take. For Lurz, these novels ‘plot their own readerly consumption’, taking special note of their embodiment within the pages of a particular kind of material artefact, and of the various ways in which readers might engage with them as objects (p. 2). The ‘death’ of Lurz’s title, meanwhile, refers to the overriding concern with temporality that permeates the novels under consideration. For instance, a chapter on Woolf’s Jacob’s Room ends with an account of that novel’s conclusion, in which the narrator alludes to the title character’s death during the Great War through a scene in which another character takes in the sight of Jacob’s letters spread haphazardly across the floor of his room. As Lurz explains, the pages littering Jacob’s room correspond to the pages of Jacob’s Room and, by extension, to the reader currently handling them, painfully aware of Jacob’s absence and thus of his or her own eventual demise. Here ‘we are given an impression of the way our own inanimate objecthood entails less a last-minute escape from than an ultimate accession to temporality’, an impression available to us through a representation of scattered pages that echoes the bounded set of sheets we hold in our hands (p. 134). Despite its 892 MODERN LITERATURE ominous title, The Death of the Book is a subtle, absorbing meditation on how modernist novels register their status as physical books as well as readers’ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article-abstract/97/1/889/5146379 by Maynooth University user on 13 May 2020 possibilities for engaging them.

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