BOOK NEWS: Psychic connection and porous selves in British fiction

Psychic Connection and the Twentieth-Century British Novel: From Telepathy to the Network Novel

BY MARK TAYLOR

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399524483

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-psychic-connection-and-the-twentieth-century-british-novel.html

Criticism of the novel routinely starts with the assumption that characters must think, develop, and strive for self-fulfillment as individuals. This book challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium. It describes how major writers throughout the twentieth century—many convinced by the supposed findings of parapsychology—rejected the idea of the discrete character. Treating the self as porous, they offered novels structured around the development of communities and ideas rather than individuals. By focusing on D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and Doris Lessing, Mark Taylor demonstrates the need to broaden our approach to character when addressing the novel of the twentieth century and beyond.

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.

• Contends that the twentieth century novel’s approach to character fundamentally shifted in response to contemporaneous theories of psychic connection
• Challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium
• Charts an unmapped trajectory in the novel’s development away from individualism
• Accessibly outlines how psychic speculation informs the conception of character in major twentieth century novels
• Offers valuable tools for analyzing literature without treating the individuated character as a necessary unit

"Taylor’s book offers a fascinating alternative history of the twentieth-century British novel. While the novel form is often seen as the definitive narrative of individualism, Psychic Connection tracks a different path through telepathy, panpsychism, and visions of collective selves, working through D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, and ending with a generative reading of the contemporary ‘network novels’ of David Mitchell. A cogent and consistently compelling counter-narrative." —Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College

Mark Taylor is a specialist in twentieth-century British literature, most recently working as assistant professor in English Literature at HSE University, Moscow. His research focuses on notions of individual and collective selfhood in British literature of the previous century. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic and Science Fiction Studies.

JML 47.3 (Spring 2024) is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature 47.3 (Spring 2024), with a special guest-edited cluster “Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel,” and a cluster on “Ireland’s Modernists,” is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52819.

Content includes:

Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Doug Battersby

Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Kirsty Martin

D.H. Lawrence and Shyness

Doug Battersby

Elizabeth Bowen’s Equivocal Modernism

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Heart

Rick de Villiers

True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness 

Ulrika Maude

“Other kinds of emotions”: Ishiguro’s Late-Modernist Affect 

Derek Attridge

Joycean Form, Emotion, and Contemporary Modernism: Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Ireland’s Modernists

Katherine Franco

Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in “Circe” 

FREE

Karl O’Hanlon

Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Danielle N. Gilman

Elizabeth Bowen’s Critical “Scrap Screen” 

Jivitesh Vashisht

“He will now think he hears her”: Indirect Perception and the Return to Proust in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio

Mantra Mukim

Timbral Poetics: Samuel Beckett and the Impossible Voice

Book News: Women modernists' collaborations with men

 Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

BY RUSSELL MCDONALD

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009070973

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-literary-collaborations-between-women-and-men/

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed "cross-sex" collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to "make it new." 

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.

Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Russell McDonald is associate professor of English at Georgian Court University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Textual Cultures, Irish Studies Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, New Hibernia Review, and Comparative Literature Studies.

Book News: Modernist writers wrestle with Freud's legacy

Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis

BY JENNIFER SPITZER

Fordham UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781531502102

https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531502102/secret-sharers/

Secret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations.

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.

As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

If modernism was anything, it was a literature of consciousness. For that reason, Freud and psychoanalysis have long been seen as crucial context to the literary innovations of the early twentieth century. Secret Sharers, however, troubles received notions about the role of Freud within literary modernism, offering a new narrative in which modernism was shaped by an engagement that was both anxious and constitutive. Jennifer Spitzer’s book is a timely invitation to reexamine modernism’s fundamental concerns and their bearing on the work we do as literary critics.---Timothy Wientzen, author of Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex

Spitzer moves beyond standard accounts of literary modernism’s debt to Freud to show how practicing psychoanalysts and modernist writers worked in close proximity on the same terrain—narrating the minds of others, interpreting the meaning of texts, theorizing queer experience. Attuned to subtler forms of influence and reaction—and featuring an ensemble cast of secondary characters who practiced or wrote about Freudian psychoanalysis—Secret Sharers offers a revelatory account of the rise of modernist conceptions of literary autonomy.---Laura Heffernan, author of The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

Jennifer Spitzer is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Quarterly, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and other venues.

Book News: How D.H. Lawrence established a writing career

D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings

BY ANNALISE GRICE

Edinburgh UP, 2021

ISBN: 9781474458009

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-d-h-lawrence-and-the-literary-marketplace.html

Despite the materialist turn in modernist studies, the extent and depth of D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with the literary marketplace has not been considered. The labelling of him as a working class ‘genius’ has concealed the question of how he became a published writer. Analyzing the literary marketplace of the long Edwardian period, this book assesses the circumstances for becoming an author at this time, examining Lawrence’s changing conceptions of what kind of writer he wanted to be and who he wanted to write for. It reconsiders the significance of Lawrence’s literary mentors Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett and recovers several figures (including Violet Hunt and Ezra Pound) whose significance for Lawrence’s career has been underestimated. The book evaluates how Lawrence’s work was marketed and received by the reading public in Britain and America, examining publishing houses (including Heinemann, Duckworth, T. Fisher Unwin and Mitchell Kennerley) and literary journals and magazines (such as the New Age, the English Review, Madame and Forum).

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.

"Grice provides a finely-tuned assessment of how Lawrence shaped his identity as a writer early on, through strategies and negotiations, and assistance from professional and social networks. For a comprehensive account of how Lawrence developed his talents and attained legitimacy in the literary marketplace, this book is key." – Judith Ruderman, Duke University

Annalise Grice is senior lecturer in English literature at Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in the work of D. H. Lawrence and the literary marketplace during the long twentieth century; her research interests extend to the professionalization of women’s writing, the Edwardian and early modernist sex novel, literary censorship, May Sinclair and Violet Hunt, Marie Stopes and literary representations of women's reproductive rights.

Book News: The "still life spirit" in modernism

 Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

BY CLAUDIA TOBIN

Edinburgh UP, 2020

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-modernism-and-still-life.html

ISBN Hardback: 9781474455138

ISBN ePub: 9781474455169

ISBN PDF: 9781474455152

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterized as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.

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.

• Explores the ‘still life spirit’ in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetry
• Challenges the conventional positioning of still life as a ‘minor’ genre in art history
• Proposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual culture
• Provides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and dance
• Uncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace Stevens

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

– Frances Spalding, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Huntington Library, California. She has published commissioned articles, scholarly book chapters, and exhibition catalogues on interdisciplinary topics including Virginia Woolf and still life, modernism and colour, and on Vanessa Bell's abstract painting as part of Tate's 'In Focus' series. She is General Editor, with Julian Bell, of Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson (2019).