Browse by Subject: Modernist Literature

A Curious Peril examines the prose penned by modernist writer H.D. in the aftermath of World War II, a little-known body of work that has been neglected by scholars, and argues that the trauma H.D. experienced in London during the war profoundly changed her writing. Lara Vetter reveals a shift in these writings from classical "escapist" settings to politically aware explorations of gender, spirituality, nation, and imperialism.

This book offers a fresh look at the modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of their writings and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.

In Up to Maughty London, Eleni Loukopoulou offers the first sustained account of Joyce's engagement with the imperial metropolis. She considers both London's status as a matrix for political and cultural formations and how the city is imaginatively represented in Joyce's work.

H.D. called By Avon River "the first book that really made me happy." In this annotated edition, Lara Vetter argues that the volume represented a turning point in H.D.’s career, a major shift from lyric poetry to the experimental forms of writing that would dominate her later works.

Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century.

Here, Shaw's long-recognized influence on feminism is reexamined through the lens of twenty-first-century feminist thought as well as previously unpublished primary sources. New links appear between Shaw's writings and his gendered notions of physicality, pain, performance, nationalism, authorship, and politics.

In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf's diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer's life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929.

In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron.

This book fills the need for a systematic study of setting as significant to the playwright’s work as a whole.