BOOK NEWS: Tracing the arbitrary or frivolous whims of four modernist authors

Modernism’s Whims

By Beci Carver

Oxford UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780198950721

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780198950721

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that skeptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavor to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalized spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.

• Offers hundreds of original close readings of poems and prose passages, which in their turn contribute to a new take on the history of literary whims
• Offers a new lens on modernism, via a hitherto unknown modernist author, Elsie Elizabeth Phare
• The first extended and in-depth treatment of the debt to geometry in William Empson's poems

Beci Carver is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She earned her BA, MPhil, and PhD at Cambridge University,  and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. She took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2016, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter. Her first book is Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014).