Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

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 …

You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason

ETD Archive

Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England’s aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh’s critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who …

Detachment: An Analysis Of Nugent Barker’S “Mrs. Sayce’S Guy”, Caroline Bressler

Modernist Short Story Project

“Mrs. Sayce’s Guy,” by Nugent Barker is an inconclusive, mysterious ghost story centered around the events of the British national holiday, “Guy Fawkes Night,” which takes place on November 5^th. In particular, the story focuses on Mrs. Sayce as the main character; a sickly woman who finds herself in a conflicted family situation. Nugent Barker uses unlikely characters, such as the face, to give depth and mystery to his story. As a personified actor, the face is a performative aspect of what is happening psychologically, resulting in a story about consciousness, interiority, and a distrust of humanity and …

Steven Acroyd Goes To War: Expressions Of The War Experience In “The Victim”, Sydney Squires

Modernist Short Story Project

While “the image of the ‘shell-shocked soldier’ remains one of the most enduring of the First World War” (Keown, “Statements”), it is nearly impossible to find information about women’s trauma from World War I. While women were noncombatants, they were still heavily involved in warfare: they built the machines, drove the ambulances, and tried to keep their city from being bombed. However, after the war, their psychological trauma was not taken seriously. However, these war experiences still carried significant psychological weight for those who bore them. May Sinclair is one example of this: she was on the Belgian warfront for …

“A Perfect Stranger”: The Domestic Power Struggle In “Samson And Delilah”, Shelby Shipley

Modernist Short Story Project

D.H Lawrence's short story “Samson and Delilah” was first published in vol. 21 no. 100 of The English Review, a modernist magazine that ran from 1908 to 1923 before it was absorbed into The National Review. According to the Modernist Journals Project, the magazine is described as “being more "modernist" than it actually was” however it was still “a major literary journal of the transitional period” (Modernist Journals Project). The English Review’s first editor, Ford Madox Hueffer, played an instrumental role in D.H Lawrence's literary career. In 1909, Impressed with Lawrence's talent, Heuffer published some of his poems in …

Books Have Their Destinies, Calvin Carpenter

Modernist Short Story Project

Books Have Their Destinies

Habent Sua Fata Libelli by Maurice Baring was a fascinating work of literature from an author who specialized in Drama, and this work was no exception. Found in the London Mercury, the title can be translated from Latin as, “Books have their Destinies” which hints at the important role books will play for our main characters. Maurice Baring, who’s work saw only limited success, is far from a household name, although his contributions are still perhaps worth mentioning. His life had a rich history, as he served in the Royal Air Force during WWI. After his …

Meaninglessness In Tomlinson’S “The Fog”, Tate Wright

Modernist Short Story Project

As an aesthetic movement in British literature, modernism was marked by an unanticipated departure from traditional ways of interacting with the world. Modernism was composed of a series of virtues that emphasized individualism and experimentation as a way of subverting traditional expectations in literature, and the often discouraged stress on the individual sunk only deeper into the armature of modernist thinking with the outbreak of the Great War. World War I laid the grounds for the modernist intelligentsia to shift artistic focus to the self and inner consciousness, deliberately choosing to see the decay and alienation of the individual undergirding …

“The Experience Of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” As Proto-Baudrillardian Parable, Kyler Merrill

Modernist Short Story Project

Morley Roberts’s “The Experience of Mrs. Patterson-Grundy” is an inferior potboiler, all too fit for The Strand, a middlebrow general interest periodical (Willis). It is repetitive, its characters are underdeveloped, and its jokes usually fall flat. Even the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates that “[c]ritics agree that he [Roberts] wrote far too much and too quickly, his popularity with the average reader being acquired at the cost of quality” (Coustillas). The present story exemplifies Roberts’s populism, but it warrants closer consideration for two special reasons: it mocks Victorian priggishness while extolling adventurous albeit patriarchal romanticism (unsurprising, given Morley …

Paralysis And Patriarchy: Moult’S “Stucco” And The Burden Of Responsibility, Elena Arana

Modernist Short Story Project

“Stucco” is a story about paralysis. A single man, around 50 years old, lives with and provides for his aging mother and spinster-sister. He is a blue collar factory employee who works six days a week, from dawn until dusk, humoring his family’s gossip around the dinner table each night in return for his weekend escapes to the country. When he finally gets the chance to retire, he pleads with his mother and sister to leave the city and move to the little cottage that he has always dreamed of owning. They refuse. He drops the subject. The end. “Stucco” …

Social Alienation And Expatriate Fiction, Courtney Larkin

Modernist Short Story Project

“The Velvet Glove,” a short story written by Henry James, was first published in The English Review in March 1909. At this time, the editor of The English Review was Ford Madox Hueffer, whose purpose in running the periodical was to seek out and spotlight the finest writers of the era and to showcase literary excellence. Indeed, Hueffer saw much potential in James, as well as in other writers whose works appeared in The English Review throughout the years: D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, William Butler Yeats, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound. …

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

E.M Forster: Discovering Connection In “Mr. Andrews”, Janelle A. Benny

Modernist Short Story Project

E.M. Forster was well accomplished in his career for his novels and their accomplishments. His writing career started early in life and found great success, yet, often his short stories went unnoticed. Dominic Head explains that critics found his stories to be “lack luster” in comparison to his novels (Head 77). However, this exact quality is what makes Forster’s stories memorable. Head argues that Forster’s short stories approach modernism different from his novels and other writers of the time (77). One such forgotten story is called “Mr. Andrews.” Found in the illustrated magazine The Open Window, Forster’s short story …

The Real Captivity In Graham’S “The Captive”, Amanda Breck

Modernist Short Story Project

There are so many fascinating things about R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s short story entitled “The Captive,” and indeed about the author himself. Graham was born in London in 1852 to Scottish parents. After attending private schools in London and Brussels, Graham left for South America when he was seventeen, where he was a cattle rancher, a horse dealer, and an explorer (Watts). He married a woman in 1878 who claimed to be from Chile but was actually from Yorkshire. His travels and adventures in South America and other places around the globe had a heavy influence on his writing, which …

Anti-Feminism In Modernist Literature, Maddie Holbrook

Modernist Short Story Project

After the stifling conventions of the Victorian era, the modernist movement cast a new and surprising light on issues that had previously been ignored or approached only a single way. The rigidity of moral standards was fading, and many authors sought to start conversations about topics that had previously been taboo. Modernism is often credited with progressive attitudes toward issues such as feminism, independence, and homosexuality, but there may not have been as radical a change as there appears. Some modernist works carried the appearance of progressive thinking, but a closer inspection reveals attitudes more similar to their Victorian ancestors. …

Language As Communication Vs. Language As Art: J.R.R. Tolkien And Early 20th-Century Radical Linguistic Experimentation, Dimitra Fimi

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article situates Tolkien’s “A Secret Vice” (and its accompanying notes and papers) within the cultural and intellectual milieu of the early 20th century. It claims that at the heart of Tolkien’s exploration in this material is the question of language as communication vs. language as art. It argues that Tolkien’s language invention navigates the (perceived) binary between a utilitarian aim for language invention (contemporary International Auxiliary Languages) vs. an aesthetic linguistic pursuit (contemporary Modernist and other avant-garde linguistic experimentation), by choosing a third (middle) way. It examines Tolkien's linguistic invention alongside the work of Sapir, Jespersen, Joyce, Stein, and …

Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward A Phenomenology Of The Moving Body In Joyce And Woolf, Lauren Nicole Benke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body's significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is …

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

Something Is Rotten In The Unreal City: Hamlet In The Waste Land, Aimee Valentine

The Hilltop Review

T.S. Eliot’s poem of 1922, “The Waste Land,” lays philosophical and stylistic ground for the Modern literary movement in which human experience takes the performative shape of inner dialog (or soliloquy) for the benefit of the reader/audience. This essay will argue that Eliot’s poem is an existentialist work that is not merely informed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the earliest example of British existentialism), but is directly modeled after it, in Eliot’s attempt to rectify the play’s perceived failings. Existentialism as a key to unlocking the mood of Modern literature is overlooked by those critics who relegate existentialist literature to the …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

Poetic Labor: Meaning And Matter In Robert Frost's Poetry., Lina Pan

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will …

At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound And The Poetics Of Banishment, Andy Kay Trevathan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ezra Pound is one of the most important poets, critics, and writers of the 20th century. Through his literary efforts, and his work on behalf of many other writers, Pound changed the way we read and write poetry today. His cultivation and support of other writers and poets like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, etc. created the basis for what we refer to as Imagism, Modernism, and other important literary movements of the early 20th century. Pound’s use of fragmentation, pastiche, and bricolage laid the foundation for post-modern writers of the latter half of the 20th century, …

The Peace Of The Waste Land And Understanding Eliot’S Two Readings, Luke J. Chambers

The Hilltop Review

There are two recordings of T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land in existence today, one made in 1946 for the Library of Congress, and another from 1935, recorded at Columbia University. The later 1946 recording, being the only one published, is by far the more well known. The 1935 recording is of much inferior sound quality and is difficult to find. The younger Eliot recites at times with greater energy, a quicker tempo, and with markedly different phrasing and intonation. However, quite often Eliot’s recitation is nearly indistinguishable between the two recordings. The specific moments of difference reveal a great …

Digital Expressionism And Christopher Wheeldon’S Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland: What Contemporary Choreographers Can Learn From Early Twentieth-Century Modernism, Kelly Oden

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

How can classical ballet adapt to a world that is in an ever more rapid state of flux? By uncovering an example of the kind of interdisciplinary artistic collaboration that contributed to the thriving artistic environment of the early twentieth century, a model for artistic success emerges. By examining modernism and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in relation to Christopher Wheeldon’s groundbreaking 2011 ballet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a correlation between the success of the Ballets Russes and the success of Wheeldon is exposed. I argue that by applying the modernist practice of interdisciplinary interaction to his own productions, Wheeldon …

Death Defied: James Joyce's Naturalistic Evolution, Cody D. Jarman

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Death, as a thematic and narrative motif, is of particular import to the Naturalistic literary approach. This is extremely evident in the work of James Joyce, on whom the Naturalist movement had a notable influence. Throughout his career Joyce utilized the subtext surrounding death in the father-son relationship to criticize Irish culture as it appears in his works. However, Joyce was not content to simply recreate a textbook interpretation of Naturalism. Joyce developed the core principles of the Naturalistic approach, starting with a basic and purely Naturalistic approach in his early writing; Joyce eventually managed to subvert and reinterpret the …

Modernism's Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies From The Modernist Wars, Jean Ashley Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Modernism's Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies from the Modernist Wars" begins the process of recuperating the lost history of Spanish Civil War pacifism. It studies the ways in which writers and artists employ the aesthetic techniques of modernism, so often ensconced in violence and militarism, to articulate a program of peace. By approaching the Spanish Civil War as a pivotal site of production and inspiration for an international network of writers and artists, this project reworks what is generally accepted as the very center of modernism. "Modernism's Impossible Witness" explores the connections among art, violence, war, and peace in the twentieth …