Re/discoveries

If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith,

In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.

The bad side of books, Lawrence says, is “the beastly marketable chunk of published volume,” the “miserable tome” as an object, “the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works,” “a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me” that “delivers me to the vulgar mercies of the world.”

H.D.’s HERmione opens with a meditation on the past, courtesy of her daughter, Perdita Schaffner. In H.D.-like prose, Schaffner reprimands herself: “Don’t delve and dredge. Cut down on nostalgia, that too can be insidious.”

Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her lover Freda Ward rocked their well-to-do Memphis community and scandalized the nation. The masculine Mitchell slashed Ward’s throat in broad daylight when Ward decided not to marry Mitchell. Lisa Duggan has provided the richest account of the murder to date and has exhaustively detailed the way that it was sensationalized in the period press as “a Very Unnatural Crime,” representing “a new narrative-in-formation—a cultural marker of the emergence of a partially cross-gender-identified lesbian.”

In 1927, a disapproving Edith Wharton presciently pronounced Harry Crosby “a sort of half-crazy cad.” Ernest Hemingway, who spent the summer of 1927 in Pamplona with Crosby, once told Archibald MacLeish, “Harry has a great, great gift. He has a wonderful gift of carelessness” (Wolff, Black Sun, 171). Crosby is a liminal figure hovering in the background of modernist literature—a now largely forgotten poet whose work inspired MacLeish and an aesthetically sophisticated publisher whose Black Sun Press published Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge, Short Stories by Kay Boyle, and the first excerpts of James Joyce’s Work-in-Progress to appear in book form. Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems by Harry Crosby brings Crosby’s poetry out of the background of literary modernism and into the foreground for our examination.

For many interwar writers, the women’s suffrage movement was a force as powerful as the war itself in shaping modernity. In her undeservedly forgotten novel The Call (1924) , Edith Ayrton Zangwill takes up the history of both suffrage militancy and the war, chronicling their impact on women’s professional, political, and personal lives. The novel tells the story of a young chemist, Ursula Winfield, who is initially more absorbed in questions of science than in questions of women’s rights. She...

H. G. Wells may be most famous in modernist studies for Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that he doesn’t belong among the “moderns.” Yet Wells was vitally engaged with the features, futures, and controversies of early twentieth-century life, as his varied oeuvre makes clear. If his science fiction has kept Wells a household name, it is in his social romances that we see him at his most perceptive as an observer of modern everyday life. Socialists and suffragettes are among the characters of Ann Veronica: A Modern Romance (1909), a novel that grapples with roles for women in a time of rapid social change. Previously out of print in the US, and with no scholarly edition available anywhere, Ann Veronica was overdue for rediscovery. Carey J. Snyder’s edition of the novel provides an incisive introduction, illuminating notes, and judiciously chosen contemporary documents that enable readers to appreciate Wells’s contributions to the debates of his age and to our own.

In 2020, Penguin Classics reissued Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia (1949), which tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl from London sent to a French boarding school on the outskirts of Paris, Les Avons, where she falls passionately in love with one of her teachers, Mlle Julie. Olivia is an exceptional narrative in terms of its content, its composition, and its publication history. Strachey (1865-1960) was part of the prominent Strachey family, whose father played a key role in the development of the British Empire in India as a military engineer. Dorothy’s five siblings included Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians (1918); James Strachey, translator of Freud’s English Standard Edition; Pernel Strachey, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge; Pippa Strachey, who became Secretary of the London Society of Women’s Suffrage; and Marjorie Strachey, a writer and French teacher. Dorothy, not to be outdone, became the official English translator of the eminent French author, André Gide.

When it comes to writers’ lives, what remains is fragmentary and incomplete. In her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist Esther Greenwood refers to such remnants as “the tatty wreckage of my life.” The image of Plath in popular culture is linked to her poetry, but often emphasizes her suicide. Red Comet addresses these assumptions as it sheds new light on Plath’s cultural moment and relevance today. Any biography must confront the fact of an incomplete archive.

Spoiler alert. Just before Stan Emery, the tragic embodiment of youthful excess in John Dos Passos’ glittering Manhattan Transfer, dies in an apartment fire, he looks out onto the cityscape of Manhattan and says, “Kerist I wish I was a skyscraper!” (255). For each reader of the novel, the line will stand out. It hits the eye, a solitary line after a set of song lyrics and before a paragraph break.

If “expansion” has been the watchword of the past two decades of modernist studies, as Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao have it, we could be excused for identifying Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (2013) as a signal instance of this trend. [1] The operating principle of Kalliney’s monograph is one of extension: of the geographic edges of modernist cultural production; of the chronological boundaries of the movement; of the range of cultural forms that might be brought under scholarly scrutiny; and of the forms of attention that might be applied to systems of literary influence, promotion, distribution, and debate. Post-Bourdieusian, institutionally-focused, closely-read, globally-minded, belatedly-modernist: the approach signaled by Commonwealth of Letters appears at once invigorating and emblematic of recent shifts in the field. Not yet seven years old, this volume already seems ripe for a forum on “Re/discoveries” not only because it captures the energies of its expansive scholarly moment, but because it has already had a considerable impact on multiple branches of the literary-critical tree. Count my own sub-field of radio studies among those branches that felt the shake: Kalliney’s 2007 article in PMLA, “Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature” (which laid out some of the key arguments of Commonwealth of Letters and forms the core of its fourth chapter) has quickly become a touchstone for scholars working at the intersections of media and global anglophone literature, as evidenced by a surge of recent work in the field by Julie Cyzewski, Daniel Ryan Morse, James Procter, Leonie Thomas, myself, and many others.

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz has gone in and out of print since it was first published by Charles Scribner’s & Sons in 1932. It was brought back in 1967 by Southern Illinois Press, and it appeared later in the Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and with an introduction by Mary Gordon, from University of Alabama Press in 1991. Handheld Press’s reprint comes at just the right time, following a great flourishing of works—from biographies to a streaming...

However much we may agree or disagree with the modernist English literary critic, William Empson—or, at times, even scratch our heads at him—it is generally accepted that he was a marvel. He possessed a decidedly unbridled critical talent, one that emerged fully only once the globalization of modernist literary production and art intersected with a corresponding epistemological demand: th

Finally appearing in English translation twenty years after its first appearance in German, Gabriele Brandstetter’s Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes retains its groundbreaking force.

Is listening the constitutive act of modernity? It seems so. Thanks to a flood of scholarship on aural culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) , Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past (2003), and a 2011 special issue of American Quarterly (edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun) being just three examples—the act of listening has worked its way into the texture of cultural studies generally and modernist studies specifically.