Day One | April 09th Panel 1a | Short Fiction Amy Hurle (Queen’s University Belfast) ‘There is no reason in tangible things’: Creative Education and the Individual in Stella Benson’s Early [Middlebrow] Fiction. Middlebrow fiction, with its apparent affirmation of stylistic and genre conventions, and largely feminine domestic setting, is a space in which Victorian aesthetics and ideologies appear to have persisted in to the age of modernism, despite the socio-cultural background of unprecedented change. It stands in contrast with high modernism, which is commonly equated with the works of the avant-garde, with its aesthetic experimentation, the dismantling of genre conventions, and its challenge to dominant ideologies. Yet as Christopher Ehland and Cornelia Wächter point out in the introduction to Middlebrow and Gender, 1890-1945, ‘the stability of the dividing line between the avant-garde, or the highbrow, and the middlebrow’ needs reconsideration. The dominance of the perception that middlebrow fiction remained the bulwark of Victorianism, ignores the many areas of intersection between highbrow modernism and the conservative middlebrow. Education was an area in the early twentieth century that did not see much in the way of change or progress, certainly not practically; middle-class women’s education in particular, seemed to remain firmly rooted in its conventional Victorian past, and representations of ideologies and practices of female pedagogy in middlebrow fiction often appeared to reinforce traditional ideologies. Yet, considering that the middlebrow was in fact – as Ehland and Wächter propose - a space which explored issues of stability and disintegration, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the novelist, Stella Benson (1892-1933), negotiated the modernist preoccupation with ontological and epistemological uncertainty in her middlebrow fiction, appearing to advocate a form of creative self-education as a means of negotiating notions of individuality and selfhood. Despite contemporary popularity during her lifetime, Benson has since fallen into obscurity, but writing in 1937, Robin Hyde situated Benson’s books ‘in a world of their own’, identifying her as neither ‘highbrow’ nor ‘lowbrow’ (a statement that calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s unsent letter to the New Statesman). Hyde’s comment is not a derogatory one, indeed she suggests that Benson ‘had an insight into the fatal flaw of twentieth- century construction – its dehumanizing character - and she knew how to reveal it’. Benson idiosyncratically juxtaposes fantasy and reality, creating in her fiction a space in which ‘Secret Worlds’ and ‘Secret Friends’ exist alongside the banalities of everyday life and the posturing of ‘Real People’. Her thematic preoccupation with lost, isolated, and alienated individuals is one she shares with Woolf’s highbrow coterie. Proposing that Benson used the imagination as a way out of the mundanity of real life - and a way of negotiating modern selfhood - this paper will examine Benson’s privileging of creative education as a tool of/in self-knowledge. In doing so, it seeks to situate Benson within current criticism of the middlebrow and intermodernism, demonstrating how her fiction can be seen to bridge the divide been Victorianism and Modernism. Panel 1a | Short Fiction Emanuela Ettorre (University of Chieti-Pescara) Between Naturalism and Aestheticism: Hubert Crackanthorpe and the Emergence of the Modernist Short Story. The aim of this paper is to investigate the work of Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870-1896), a writer who was central to the fin de siècle British debate about realism and naturalism, the status of fiction, and questions of taste in literary representation. Crackanthorpe’s collections of short stories combine a pronounced naturalism in the bleak subject matter of his “documents of hell” (as one critic put it), with a conscious aestheticism, most obviously apparent in his deliberately dispassionate handling of the human predicament his writing opens up. As such, and despite his very brief life – he committed suicide at the age of twenty-six – he becomes a significant figure in the evolution of the modernist short story in Britain. In his essay “Reticence in Literature”, published on The Yellow Book in July 1894, Crackanthorpe addresses topics such as the significance of realism and naturalism, the claims of art versus morality, and the role of the artist in an age of commodification. Here he discusses the impossibility of separating “the jealous worship of beauty” from the “jealous worship of truth”. By undermining the basis of realism (“Realism as a creed, is as ridiculous as any other literary creed”), Crackanthorpe rejects the theory of art as a scientific mechanism and, in his reading of the moral degeneration of urban spaces at the turn of the century, he instead promotes the creativity of the author and the autonomy of the literary text. If, as Terry Eagleton maintains, “[n]aturalism and aestheticism couple in curious ways”, in Crackanthorpe’s writing the combination of naturalistic procedures and decadent impulses becomes the perfect means to penetrate the desolate land of human relationships, of desires, and negated love. For example, the world of Wreckage (1893) is filled with characters who build their life upon the illusions of a love that is doomed to die, and which degenerates in abject forms of manipulation, seduction, deceit and abandonment. The decadence of humankind is related to the degrading conditions of urban space: Crackanthorpe’s stories are mainly set in the slums, in that “territory of immanent breakdown” inhabited by a population that expresses its malaise pathologically, in sudden fits of rage, states of psycho-physical prostration, an isolation that verges on misanthropy, self-destructive life-choices and suicidal impulses, expressions whose cause seems to oscillate between biological determinism and socio- spatial contamination. As these examples underline, Crackanthorpe’s work clearly anticipates the modernist short story in its pitiless portrait of a society that relinquishes any chance of positivistic ‘redemption’, and that cannot defend itself from the vulgarity of the present. Panel 1a | Short Fiction Francesca Massarenti (Ca’Foscari University of Venice) Women’s Experimental Economies in W. Somerset Maugham’s Short Fiction. Somerset Maugham’s short stories allow for a comprehensive analysis of his approach to different forms of storytelling, their stylistic elements count as prototypical of SM’s work, especially when it comes to balancing characters’ exposition and, consequently, the amount of information made available to readers. SM’s narrators seldom blend in their tale: the most noticeable and frequent narrative devices employed are framed narratives and witnesses’ tales, although different techniques alternate and intersect, such as a propensity to shift focalisation multiple times during a single narrative, as well as an inverse tendency to set a static narrative point of view. Although maintaining, overall, a simple and traditionally structured layout, SM still manages to engage, content-wise, with experimentalism in the arts, double standards in a misogynistic society and the idea of women as fully-fledged artists, as well as legitimate political agents. SM’s scope encompasses the evolving role of women at the turn of the century and seeks to chart their attempts to partake in the cycle of production and consumption of art: his female characters become striking interpreters of the failures and achievements, pains, visions, limitations and rejections that SM’s fiction so eagerly explores. This paper will analyse a brief selection of short stories – Daisy (1896), The Colonel’s Lady (1946), The Creative Impulse (1926) – drafted and published at different stages of SM’s career, so as to give evidence of his consistent attention towards the life of women throughout his production. SM’s short prose is a shared repository of deeply held Victorian values merged with cultural trends of the early 20th century, it is steeped in commonly held historical notions (e.g. novel-writing as a big 18th and 19th century feminine “breadwinning” activity), but seems to work on an apparent paradox. In the selected short stories, for instance, wage-earning domestic labour is not menial or family- focussed, but has cultural value: SM’s women, in fact, write experimental poetry and work as performers. It is through such characters that SM develops themes that are recurring in his fiction: the many ways in which women are socially abused, how gossip and slander are used to control women’s bodies and sexuality, how social alienation is a result of the exclusion of women from money-making activities or from managing their own finances. Openly feminist readings of SM are, indeed, jeopardised by the short stories’ biased stream of information. The paper will argue, however, that SM’s deviated and insufficient narratives might read as tentative, but (crucially) non-disruptive suggestions regarding what innovative ways to read the world might look like. It might, at first, seem counterintuitive, but the male privilege embedded in these narratives, along with their equally male-focused modes of narration, seem precisely the features that allow SM to edge past the fin-de-siècle suspicion towards the so-called New Woman, while simultaneously channelling an anti-Victorian streak in his sympathetic descriptions of women’s crushed rights and denied public and political action. Through a subversive exercise and rewriting