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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Showing posts with label British modernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British modernism. Show all posts

Thursday, April 24, 2025

BOOK REVIEW: Is the Welfare State a Hegelian Legacy?

 


By Philip Tsang, Colorado State University

Benjamin Kohlmann. British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States. Oxford UP, 2022. 268 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $87.99 e-book.

 

Benjamin Kohlmann’s new book British Literature and the Life of Institutions enriches the bourgeoning scholarship on the welfare state in two distinct ways. First, it reassesses British literature from 1880 to 1910. For Kohlmann, this period is not one of crisis or decadence, a mere prelude to the high modernism of the 20s and 30s. Rather, the literature of this period evinces a sustained reformist aesthetic that imagines the state as a vital force in social life. Questioning the critical fixation on revolutionary rupture in modernist studies, Kohlmann attends instead to the “slow politics of reform” (2), a shared effort among late Victorian and Edwardian writers to rework and improve state institutions. As such, “the reformist literary mode is Hegelian rather than Marxist insofar as it imagines the gradual transformation of existing social conditions” (5). This is no casual observation, for Kohlmann proceeds to investigate the British reception of Hegel around 1900. His account of how British writers adapted Hegel’s speculative philosophy to reformist ends is his book’s second major contribution. His goal is not simply to trace Hegel’s influence on British literature; rather, he shows how literary texts take Hegel’s philosophy one step further by giving “abstract concepts a degree of experiential concreteness unattainable to philosophical thought alone” (5). For Kohlmann, speculation is no mere conjecture, but an effort of concretization.

British Hegelianism provides the theoretical groundwork for Kohlmann’s book. While previous studies of this loosely formed movement, such as those by Robert Stern and Peter Robbins, have explored British writers’ engagement with Hegel’s metaphysics, what distinguishes Kohlmann’s account is his focus on late Hegel. For Victorian readers, Hegel’s most influential work was neither the Phenomenology of Spirit nor the Science of Logic, but the Philosophy of Right, a book concerned with the role of state institutions. Kohlmann sees the selective reception of Hegel among British intellectuals as an advantage rather than a drawback because it allowed them to articulate a concrete vision of the state without the burden of metaphysics. The Philosophy of Right led those intellectuals, most notably Thomas Hill Green, David George Ritchie, Bernard Bosanquet, and Ernest Belfort Bax, to regard state institutions not as externally imposed structures but as shared forms of life that facilitate the thriving of individuals. Green, for instance, disputes Locke’s theory of individual freedom and instead argues for active citizenship and the common good to counter capitalist fragmentation. Similarly, Ritchie calls for the redistribution of property rights and for more state regulations of the economy. Kohlmann thus offers an important corrective to scholarly accounts of Hegelian philosophy as teleological and totalitarian. Those accounts are reductive because they have ignored how “Hegelianism attracted a wide range of ideological positions to itself, and that it managed to transform these positions in its turn” (36). This variety also characterizes Kohlmann’s literary case studies. In the remainder of his book, he explores how novelists and poets from a broad ideological continuum enfold Hegelian speculation into their responses to such diverse issues as the settlement movement, land ownership, taxation, and national insurance.

Given his investment in speculative thinking, it comes as no surprise that one of the key writers in the book is H. G. Wells. Kohlmann focuses, however, less on Wells’s early works of science fiction than on his lesser-known Edwardian novels, in which the author scales back his futuristic imagination to explore more local, gradualist possibilities of change. In particular, Kohlmann highlights Wells’s engagement with the tax reforms in the 1900s. His 1905 novel A Modern Utopia envisions a distant planet that shares many similarities with Edwardian Britain. The continuity between the two worlds allows for a critique and reimagination of existing governmental systems. Through this Hegelian style of “non-revolutionary reformist thinking,” Wells defends private property but also sees it as fluid and kinetic, amenable to public use through progressive taxation (168). The novel thus redefines utopia as a reformist rather than revolutionary genre: “Wells’s future-directed legislative utopianism entails the aspirational repurposing of the resources of the present, rather than a projection of radical revolutionary alterity” (165). Contrary to his earlier works, A Modern Utopia represents Wells’s “aspirational realism,” which entails a reworking rather than rejection of the status quo (176).

A more surprising choice for Kohlmann’s study is E. M. Forster, who seems to favor the spontaneity of interpersonal connection over any kind of state-level supervision. His 1909 tale “The Machine Stops” attests to his deep skepticism about centralized governance. Yet his 1910 novel Howards End, written in the midst of public debates that would eventually lead to the passing of the National Insurance Act in 1911, is more receptive to the benefits of institutional reform. For Kohlmann, the fact that Leonard Bast initially works as an insurance clerk and later becomes unemployed is not accidental; rather, it “raises broader questions about the social allocation of economic vulnerability and about the promise of publicly funded mechanisms of institutionalized care” (200). Howards End presents a world full of risk and uncertainty, epitomized by the novel’s pivotal event: Mrs. Wilcox’s sudden death. That misfortune teaches Margaret Schlegel that one cannot prepare for every danger and should instead embrace risk in order to live life to the full. Kohlmann, however, detects an irony in Margaret’s warning about the “tragedy of preparedness”—namely, that to live life unplanned and unprepared requires a safety net that provides material assistance during hard times. The Wilcoxes can lead an exciting and reckless life only because they have private insurance. Contrary to Margaret’s suggestion, the real tragedy here is the “tragedy of unpreparedness,” which “shows that life cannot be fully enjoyed unless it is cushioned against the worst kinds of socio-economic risk” (216). This reading exemplifies Kohlmann’s central argument: personal freedom and well-being are not threatened but rather protected and enriched by institutional mediation. Or, to drive home the Hegelian point, individual potential can be actualized only through the state. Kohlmann goes so far as to call Howards End a “welfare state novel” (191), reading its famous epigraph “Only connect…” not as some abstract ideal of interpersonal or interclass connection, but as a concrete reformist proposal for institutionalized care and economic redistribution. 

Throughout Kohlmann’s book, speculation is an ethos, a perspective, and a style that describes not only the literary works in question but also Kohlmann’s reading method. This style, as he puts it succinctly in relation to Ernest Belfort Bax, discloses “how substantive contradictions unfold from within—how they are ‘opened up’ for us by—a given situation” (55). Kohlmann’s speculative style allows for a wide interpretative latitude. In his reading of George Gissing’s 1887 novel Thyrza, he concludes that the protagonist’s uncompromising idealism prevents him from recognizing the possibility of institutional reform. That failure, however, becomes in turn “the very medium through which reformist hopes must be realized” (83). Kohlmann’s speculative reading recasts Gissing’s uneven novel as a polyphonic work in which a wide range of political positions are tested and negated. In a distinctly Hegelian fashion, he patiently shows how contradictions and instabilities within a text can lead to positive and generative outcomes. In the end, it does not matter what positions the authors take regarding taxation or insurance. Whether by supporting, critiquing, or decrying efforts at institutional reform, those writers engage in an act of speculation that is at once diagnostic, aspirational, and reparative. Kohlmann shows us that literary reading, too, can be a speculative act in itself.

I want to close with two questions. One is simply why British literature’s reformist imagination was so short-lived. According to Kohlmann, Edward Carpenter’s preoccupation with land reform in the 1880s gave way to an immersion in Hindu philosophy in the next decade; Wells’s ambitious agenda for redistributive taxation in A Modern Utopia gave way to a “claustrophobic vision of parliamentary infighting” in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (187); Forster followed Howards End with Arctic Summer, his “most sustained attempt to enter imaginatively into the reformist literary mode,” but he eventually abandoned the project (217). Like Wells’s A Modern Utopia, the reformist aesthetic’s all-too-short trajectory seems to be a narrative of “undeveloped possibilities” cut short by the advent of modernism. In Kohlmann’s account, interwar modernism signals a decisive break with the reformist aesthetic (69). Yet, in light of his speculative method, one wonders whether high modernism, despite its longstanding association with rupture and novelty, might share more continuity with the reformist imagination than Kohlmann presents here. Might war, revolution, and imperial decline have invigorated new styles of speculative institutionalism from Bloomsbury to Bengal?

My second question concerns the role of literature in state institutions. If, as Kohlmann powerfully shows, literature was the medium through which to cultivate the ethos of sharing and caring, might one make a stronger case for literature as a fundamental aspect of the state on par with taxation and insurance? One might recall that Leonard Bast is not just an insurance clerk but also an avid reader, though his primary goal is self-improvement. Yet if the Wilcoxes’ private insurance can buttress Howards End’s advocacy for national insurance, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to regard the ostensibly private act of reading as serving an institutional function toward the common good. What modes, practices, and pedagogies of reading are best suited to that end? This might be Kohlmann’s biggest provocation yet.

 

Philip Tsang teaches modernist and postcolonial literature at Colorado State University. He is the author of The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature, which traces an aesthetic of frustrated attachment in the context of imperial decline.

 

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

BOOK NEWS: Unpacking Yeats's and Auden's conceptions of utopia

The Poetics of Utopia: Shadows of Futurity in Yeats and Auden 

BY STEWART COLE



Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350293861

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/poetics-of-utopia-9781350293861/ 


Focusing on the work of two of the twentieth-century's most politically engaged poets -- W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden -- this book unpacks how they directly confront the concept of “utopia,” how they engage with utopia as a literary genre, and how their work conceives of poetry as a utopian artform capable of uniquely embodying our social aspirations.

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.

Despite consistently projecting visions of more ideal futures through both its subject matter and its form, poetry is not often counted among the annals of utopian literature. Through an examination of these two great writers' poems, essays, reviews, and other writings, with a focus on many of their best-known poems, this book highlights both the pervasive presence of a utopian impulse in their work and the importance of their contributions to discussions of utopia's meaning and relevance in both their own politically fraught era and ours.

"A ludic, carefully argue and insightful reading of two of the towering figures of British poetic modernism that raises productive questions about issues rarely raise at all--most vitally about the relationship between poetics and the untopian impulse, as well as the often conflicting and complex relationship between modernist disenchantment and utopian desire." --Antonis Balasopoulos, University of Cypress


Stewart Cole is associate professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he teaches courses in modern British and Irish literature, literary criticism, and the environmental humanities. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Questions in Bed and Soft Power.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Woolf’s The Waves and tormented public-school boys: A Closer Look at JML 46.4




Patricia Morgne Cramer explains how Woolf indicts British public-school culture for harming gifted men through her depiction of Bernard, Louis, and Neville in The Waves. Read it HERE.

Her JML 46.4 essay is FREE for a limited time, linked in the post.

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Book News: Animals in the writings of the Bloomsbury group

 Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

BY DEREK RYAN



Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009182973

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/bloomsbury-beasts-and-british-modernist-literature


Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualization of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of the human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enriches our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.

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.

  • Offers sustained attention on the significance of animals in literary modernism's engagement with zoos, hunting, pets and insects, showing readers how literary animal studies and modernist studies can form a mutually enriching dialogue
  • Reassesses the Bloomsbury group's approach to questions of colonialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology through their engagement with human-animal relations
  • Provides original close readings informed by archival documents, newspapers, draft manuscripts, literary intertexts, zoological studies, natural history and animal theory


Derek Ryan is senior lecturer in modernist literature at the University of Kent. His previous publications include Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and the co-edited volumes The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (2019).

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Book News: The poetry of lost modernist Joseph Macleod

Hidden Sun: The Poetry of Joseph Macleod (1903 – 1984)

BY JAMES FOUNTAIN



Waterloo Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-915241-01-6

https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/joseph-macleod/


Hidden Sun is the first ever complete critical volume on the work of neglected British poet Joseph Macleod.

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.

Macleod was a vital British modernist poet in the same circles as Basil Bunting and Ezra Pound who became famous behind the microphone at the BBC as WW2 wartime newsreader. Bunting thought Macleod's The Ecliptic, published by TS Eliot at Faber in 1930 at Ezra Pound’s insistence,  was the greatest poem since The Wasteland. Macleod wrote many other volumes of poetry as well as several books on Soviet theatre history. His best friends were Graham Greene, Adrian Stokes, Compton Mackenzie, Aldous Huxley and WS Graham. He corresponded with Pound for 40 years.

James Fountain explores the development of Macleod's poetic style from his high modernist long poem, The Ecliptic (1930), through to the five books of poetry written under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’; significant critical chapters by Andrew Duncan complete the text.


James Fountain’s fine monograph about Joseph Macleod is welcome news to admirers of Macleod’s poetry, which includes not only the fascinating modernist long poem The Ecliptic but the very different and better-known poems he published as Adam Drinan. Macleod’s poetry deserves more readers, and this book should help his work find them. --Keith Tuma, Miami University

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) explore why such a gifted poet has almost vanished from the story of British Modernism, and confidently reclaim his place. Based on original archival research, this book opens a new and exciting vista on a gifted poet and his troubled times. --James McGonigal, University of Glasgow

…this excellent account of Macleod should place him back into the public arena as a key modernist voice… James Fountain brings this forgotten voice alive, and offers us the chance to take up the challenge as the 21st century readership this poet so deserves. --Adam Piette, University of Sheffield

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) offer here an admirably lucid and companionable commentary on his works, drawing out the extraordinarily diverse elements that constituted his singular voice: by turns mythical, modernist, anthropological, socialist, populist, Scots. A poet who was regarded by writers as various as Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and W.S. Graham is here handsomely recovered for a modern readership.  --Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Book News: Literary modernism and the environment

Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism

EDITED BY JEREMY DIAPER



Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97985-5

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54594/


This volume of critical essays provides the first major guide to ecology, environment and nature in literary modernism. It explores the environmental turn and green consciousness in modernist criticism and broadens the boundaries and scope of current ecocritical enquiry. In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism. In the rapidly burgeoning field of environmental studies, it will serve as a vital touchstone for scholars and students alike to explore the major areas and crucial themes in ecocritical modernism.

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.


CONTENTS

“Ecocriticism and Modernism”
    Jeremy Diaper
       
        “Modernism and the Rural Novel”
          Dominic Head

              “Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalisation of Nature Poetry”
                Elizabeth Black
                   
                    “‘No poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy”
                      Elizabeth O’Connor
                         
                          “‘Has it begun to sprout?’: The Ecological Life of Modernist Corpses”
                            Julia E. Daniel

                                “Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetics”
                                  Sharla Hutchinson
                                     
                                      “Modernism’s Insect Sense”
                                        Rachel Murray

                                            “Eco-consciousness and Eco-poetics in Modernist Writing”
                                              Fiona Becket
                                                 
                                                  “‘The Parched Eviscerate Soil’: Environmental Thought in Eliot’s Poetry and Prose”
                                                    Jeremy Diaper
                                                       
                                                        “The Law of Hoes and Rakes”: Wallace Stevens’s Agrarian Poetics
                                                          Jasmine McCrory
                                                             
                                                              “‘Grain by grain’: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene”
                                                                Caitlin McIntyre
                                                                   
                                                                    “‘There All The Time Without You’: Modernism and the Anthropocene”
                                                                      Peter Adkins


                                                                      Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles and chapters on T.S. Eliot's agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement. His essays have appeared in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, the Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society UK, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Literature & History. He recently edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on "Modernism and the Environment."