English Language and Literature Commons^™

Understanding Proust, Rio Turnbull

Modernist Short Story Project

French author Marcel Proust was at the forefront of exploring the literary device “stream of consciousness” as its usage began to rise in the early 1900s. He seemed particularly interested in using “stream of consciousness” to delve into memory. What may be the most articulate statement of Proust about his philosophy of memory, according to O’Brien, is as follows: “Yes, if memory, thanks to oblivion, could not contract any link, throw any chain between it and the present minute, if it stayed in its place, on its date, if it kept its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a …

Francis Gregg And Horror Feminism, Sarah Jensen

Modernist Short Story Project

For centuries, humankind has been fascinated with horror. From the cruel arenas where gladiators fought to the death in Ancient Rome, to todays Halloween blockbusters, there is no short history for a genre that can creep into any particular story, with just a few ingredients. I believe that horror captures attention through the storytelling mode of relatability. Horror asks of its readers and viewers “what would you do?” Horror is inherently scary because it triggers human empathy and fear for the characters. Experiencing a horror movie or listening to a true crime podcast today can be a validating experience as …

Modernism In Postwar Times: Life Through The Short Story, Daniel Sowards

Modernist Short Story Project

“The Mole” by Gerald Bullett, is a literary text that comments on postwar life and events that are ahead of its time. It was published in the British periodical, The London Mercury, in May of 1923 and was written post WWI in a time when literature was still reflecting the effects of the war. During the short story “The Mole,” there are many connections surrounding the Gubbins’ and war. In Voyant, where the mole is mentioned, Mrs. Gubbins is also mentioned. This reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Gubbins’ marriage is a war and her mole is a constant reminder …

Grief And Color In A. E. Coppard’S “The Princess Of Kingdom Gone”, Sydney Sterrett

Modernist Short Story Project

Only about a year after the horrors of World War I, England was doing its best to reestablish itself as a seat of cultural and artistic value. Many journals and magazines ran new poetry and stories that were meant to relive war time or move on from it, but nearly everything seemed to be colored by the sights that the surviving young men had seen in the trenches. In November of 1919, A. E. Coppard published a short story in the Voices of Poetry and Prose magazine—a magazine that was meant to help readers recover from the war through new, …

Apples And Orchards, Exteriority And Interiority: An Examination Of The Agency Of Objects In “In The Orchard”, Natalia Green

Modernist Short Story Project

“In the Orchard” is a short story written by Virginia Woolf and published in the Criterion in April 1923. The Criterion was a journal that focused on publishing high-brow literature; it contained works from authors such as T.S. Eliot (who also edited the journal), George Saintsbury, and, of course, Virginia Woolf. Eliot created the Criterion with the purpose of publishing writing that contained the unconventional practices seen in modernist writing. Banerjee notes this motive when he states, “He [Eliot] also believed that it was through the journalistic channel that he could promote the kind of revolutionary poetry that he and …

All Is Fair In Love In “War”, Sabrina Thomas

Modernist Short Story Project

Love has always been a complicated concept. The battlefield of love is difficult, and heartbreaking to navigate. Members of the Bloomsbury Circle in the 1900s would have felt the complications that come along with love. The Bloomsbury Circle was a literary group known for its promiscuity along with some of its well-known members such as Virginia Woolf (Shone). Mary Hutchinson was an honorary part of the Bloomsbury Circle and entered into an affair with Clive Bell (Beechey). Her short story “War,” published in a 1917 edition of The Egoist follows a woman named Jane who is taking part in an …

Individual Femininity And The Modernist Epiphany, Megan Davies

Modernist Short Story Project

The 20^th century author Frank Swinnerton was well respected for writing “excellent, credible stories about contemporary people, usually living in or near London, [people who were] intelligent and aware of the times they were living in but concerned above all with their relationships as friends, enemies, lovers, or rivals in love” (Times). Despite Swinnerton’s relative renown, his biographies do not mention that he wrote short stories, so the discovery of his short stories in at least two 20^th century periodicals, The Open Window and Rhythm, sheds light on a largely ignored aspect of the author’s …

Middle Class Anxiety In “Wang-Ho And The Burial Robe”, Malcolm Lamb

Modernist Short Story Project

“Wang-Ho and the Burial Robe” was published by The London Mercury in 1918 and would later be included as the seventh story in Ernest Bramah’s 1922 fantasy anthology, Kai Lung’s Golden Hours. Though published in a well-respected journal alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon, “Wang-Ho and the Burial Robe” has little in common with the modernist trends of the early twentieth century. The story features no stream of consciousness, experimentation in new styles, epiphany, commentary on sexuality or gender, evocative imagery, reference to the Great War, or religious symbolism. In fact, it seems safe to suppose that …

Predicting The Future For A Victorian World: A Digital Exploration Of “Domestic Studies In The Year 2000 A.D.”, Kimberly Plater

Modernist Short Story Project

While “Domestic Studies in the Year 2000 A. D.” may be E. S. P. Haynes’s only piece of fiction, it captures two of his main ideologies in two very short stories. The stories adopt a dystopian view toward the future, looking ahead 87 years with two scenarios depicting average life in the year 2000. Both stories tackle decidedly controversial topics for the early twentieth century: individual freedoms and gender roles. The story found an appropriate home in the progressive periodical The New Freewoman, which heavily promoted the advancement of women, taking progressive stances on equality and feminism. Part one …

Hg Wells’ Anticipations : More “Perishable” Feminism, Kacey Sorenson

Modernist Short Story Project

In researching H.G. Wells’ evolving views on eugenics, race, anti-Semitism, and women, there was a noticeable absence of scholars referring to his last chapter of Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. Regardless of why it has been overlooked, the aim of this study is to use the last chapter of Anticipations specifically to emphasize and confirm what feminist scholars have extracted as Wells’ view of women: what he proudly owned as feminism was dismissed by his contemporaries as “very perishable” (Kirchwey 308).

Finding A Foreign Home In Katherine Mansfield’S “The Daughters Of The Late Colonel”, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

The latter end of Katherine Mansfield’s life (1915-1923), a time considered by many to be the most fruitful years of her career, also marked a period of self-examination and introspection for the author. Much of this self-reflection focused on Mansfield’s long-standing frustration with her New Zealand heritage—which she had abandoned in favor of a bohemian life of writing and creativity—with an emerging desire for a more traditional sense of home and domestic life. Two letters written by Mansfield during this time reflect the dissonance caused by these desires. The first letter, written in 1915 to her husband, John Middleton Murray, …

Cynical Indictment Or Genuine Elevation? Ethel Smyth’S “An Adventure In A Train”, Chad Kang

Modernist Short Story Project

Ethel Smyth’s short story, “An Adventure in a Train,” was featured in the London Mercury in 1920. As the journal tried to “help bridge the gap in discussion of literary criticism that was made during the first world war… reconnecting the learned public to literary spheres,” anyone acquainted with the periodical would assume that Smyth’s “An Adventure” would contain literary richness and social commentary (Hipol). Interestingly, however, the plot of “An Adventure” is quite straightforward and lacks any vivid action that is usually associated with any “adventure” story. Indeed, the narrator gets on a train, talks to a middle-aged woman, …

H.M. Tomlinson’S “Barbarism” As Post-War Ptsd, Jessica Hogge

Modernist Short Story Project

On its surface, “Barbarism” by H.M. Tomlinson describes an English adventurer in the jungles of Malaysia. He returns to England to find it more barbaric than the uncivilized jungles he just left. However, by examining the story in light of H.M. Tomlinson’s history of anti-war sentiment, I see “Barbarism” as commentary on World War I. Specifically, I believe that the short story describes the consequences of war that a soldier experiences personally—PTSD (or “shell-shock”), guilt, and isolation. In “Barbarism” Tomlinson creates a tone of anxiety through his word choice, brings to light the complications of differentiating between cowardice and shell-shock, …

“The Price Of An Inspiration” And Feminism, Hana Buhler

Modernist Short Story Project

There is the saying, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” During the Victorian period, this saying could be considered the theme as women were supporting their husbands and children from within the home. Eventually though, women no longer wanted to be behind. Instead they wanted to be more involved with society by being alongside men. The short story “The Price of an Inspiration” by Ellen A. Smith published in The Argosy May 1900 volume demonstrates this eagerness through a woman named Kathleen Hayes alongside her classmate Carl Brenner. The two come to learn throughout the story that as …

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 4, 2019, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Questioning The Question: Review Of Modernism And The Harlem Renaissance, Destiny Cornelison

The Corinthian

Through my book review of Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, I examine how well Baker ingeniously transforms the question defining Harlem Renaissance scholarship from “Why did the Harlem Renaissance fail?” to “How did the Harlem Renaissance marshal black aesthetic tradition to develop a form of modernism for the New Negro?” Baker’s bold refusal to limit scholarship to the question being asked engages current readers in a previously unreachable aspect of this momentous movement.

Reviewed Work: Christianizing Egypt. Syncretism And Local Worlds In Late Antiquity By David Frankfurter, Dana Robinson

Faculty Publications - Department of History and Politics

David Frankfurter’s newest work takes a fresh look at the landscape of local religious activity in late antique Egypt. Frankfurter expands on the theoretical model he offered in Religion in Roman Egypt (Princeton, 1998), which conceptualized the late antique transformations of Egyptian religion as a shift in idiom and social location, from large temple centers to households and local experts, rather than a decline in traditional piety. Here he changes his perspective from the continuity of traditional religion into the Christian era, to examine the creation of a local and regional Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries.

La Maraca Perdida, Holly Beber

Open Access Books

La maraca perdida was written and illustrated in 2019 by Holly Beber. The original text was edited and translated by Mackensy Asbell and Madeline Strelec. New, original illustrations were created by Rina Sato.

What’S In A Name? Rhetorical And Political Naming In Toni Morrison’S Song Of Solomon, Kristen V. Edwards

Theses

This thesis aims to examine the usage and history of the various racial labels attributed to Black Americans and how the cyclical usage of Negro, Black, Colored, and African American are a haunting that Black people will most likely face again. As these terms do not fulfill a nationalistic identity, the quest for a satisfactory term still exists. To illustrate this journey, examining the novel Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison will expose how her text subtly charges the reader to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Not only is the reader charged to “know thy self”, but they are …

Patricia Akhimie. Shakespeare And The Cultivation Of Difference: Race And Conduct In The Early Modern World. Routledge, 2018. 220 Pp., Deborah Uman

English Faculty/Staff Publications

In lieu of an abstract, here is the review's first paragraph:

In Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, Patricia Akhimie sets an ambitious goal: in addition to exploring how race, class, conduct, and drama are intertwined in the early modern period, Akhimie seeks to show readers how to recognize the pain of racism, which she reads as “a persistent and particular kind of injustice, the signs of which are as fluid as they are injurious” (9). Despite the variability of signs of human differences and despite the promise of self-improvement offered by conduct literature, Akhimie argues that social immobility …