Ruth Alison Clemens

Bio

Ruth Alison Clemens is currently a Dutch Research Council-funded postdoctoral researcher of the literary and media history of the player-piano at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Her work has been published in Comparative Critical Studies, Modernist Cultures, and Feminist Modernist Studies, and she has contributed to the books Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, More Posthuman Glossary, and Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, among others. Ruth’s research interests include multilingualism, posthumanism, technology, media materialities, and modernism and the avant-garde, and with Eret Talviste she co-organised the 2024 conference “Borders, Margins, Cartographies: Transnational Modernist Women’s Writin” at the University of Tartu.

Contributions

A Cartography of Hope: Mirrlees and the Poetics of New Materialism

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

The preface to Hope Mirrlees’s 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists sets forth a statement of aesthetics and reads like a seminal text of modernism. However, the novel was published in a limited run in 1919 and has never been reprinted. In the brief paratext, Mirrlees outlines a distinctively modernist and materialist conception of literature, the threads of which can be traced throughout her oeuvre. The preface begins: Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point...

Tags:

poetry material culture