Modern Literature

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Modern Literature
Downloaded from http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Novi Sad on March 15, 2013
AARON JAFFE, ANDREW RADFORD, MARY GROVER, SAM SLOTE, ANDREW HARRISON, BRYONY RANDALL, NICK BENTLEY, REBECCA DMONTE, GRAHAM SAUNDERS, MATTHEW CREASY AND MARIA JOHNSTON
This chapter has seven sections 1. General; 2 Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945 Fiction; 4 Pre-1950 Drama; 5 Post-1950 Drama; 6. Pre-1950 Poetry. 7. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Aaron Jaffe; section 2(a) is by Andrew Radford; section 2(b) is by Mary Grover; section 2(c) is by Sam Slote; section 2(d) is by Andrew Harrison; section 2(e) is by Bryony Randall; section 3 is by Nick Bentley; section 4 is by Rebecca DMonte; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6 is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Maria Johnston. 1. General The modern takes one of the greediest slices of The Years Work in English Studies. Because it telescopes into the contemporaryat least in this publicationthe purview encompasses a century-plus spree of eventful and open-ended literary and cultural history with ever-expanding reference. English studies is already a capacious, elastic category, corroborated by a peek at the offerings in university English departments these days, where all sorts of literary and non-literary, Anglo and non-Anglo things are being read and studied. The work of scholars of English, it seems, is now more a matter of addition (more regions, more texts) than subtraction. Consequently, this reviewer has favoured books that try to reflect this expansive framework while attempting to shed some light on the conceptual conditions that define it. This section continues, of course, to emphasize the British Isles as a geographical locus for scholarship as well to give special attention to literature as a particular object of study, but it also recognizes that the force of much recent work in the discipline has been to challenge any self-evident equation between English literature and English studies. Outside the reference shelves, its a rare book that takes on a task as monumental as engaging the range of
Years Work in English Studies, Volume 89 (2010) The English Association; all rights reserved doi:10.1093/ywes/maq015
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anglophone twentieth-century literature with any claim to diachronic comprehensiveness. Century-spanning, literary-historical arguments are infrequent, overshadowed by an ongoing critical renaissance concerning the centurys first decadesthe so-called new modernist studiesand its multitude of heady, albeit largely synchronic, concerns. Nevertheless, if the early part of the century anamorphically distorts the image of the rest, there has been a palpable shift within modernist studies towards pressuring the category itself as it gives way to periodizing questions of lateness, post-ness, the contemporary, and the present. Here, the continued actuality and productivity of the disciplinary parameters of modernist studies as such should be noted despite the recent protestations to the contrary by Susan Stanford Freidman in her 2009 keynote address to the Modernist Studies Association. The two most obvious areas of general interestthe main ways for modern scholarship to go bigcontinue to be found, first, in the turn to material culture and the archive, and, second, in attention to geopolitical and global-sociological factors. These tendencies themselves can be seen as impulses of temporal and spatial maximalisman infinite archival regression and a literary canon expanded world-wide. In E.H. Gombrichs recently translated A Little History of the World [2005]a book written for children in the 1930she suggests a fanciful image: the historical archive as a deep well with walls made of stacked documents, lit by falling embers of burning paper: Does all this looking down make you dizzy? [L]ets light a scrap of paper, and drop it down into that well. It will fall slowly, deeper and deeper. And as it burns it will light up the sides of the well. Can you see it? Its going down and down. Now its so far down its like a tiny star in the dark depths. its getting smaller and smaller . . . and now its gone (p. 2). The moral is as unmistakable as it is ambivalent. Gombrich invites all would-be historicists to make a wish but the counsel of fairy tales is also not far from view: beware of bottomless pits. More recently, in Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty the late Andrew John Miller has also cautioned us that utopian desires for an expanded critical frameworka postnational world-wide archivemay be a side-effect of the vertiginous unravelling of community and location through globalization (pp. xxxxi). These tendencies necessarily underscore the urgency of criticism and commentary foregrounding scrutiny into their own interpretative conditions. In addition to the utopian desire for a pluralist, post-national world-wide archive, three other vectors of interest inform this years work, which may pull in various directions: first, a continued injunction to return to the aesthetic and a renewed interest in form, especially involving modernist vernaculars, to evoke Miriam Hansens term; second, a broader stake in comprehensive forms of media studies and examining the systemic workings of cultural value; and, third, a kind of post post-theory laying down of arms, moving beyond the critical impasses of the much-discussed end of (poststructuralist) theory announced a few years back into new questions, debates and themes. Theory is finally dead; let the theorizing begin anew, without all the baggage (and resistances) of its uneven 1980s and 1990s reception. Stephen Rosss edited collection Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate [2008] (Routledge), for example, registers the important and timely propositions that modernism and
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theory must be thought together and that theory is modernisms key continuation (pp. 23). Theoretical thinking and speculative writing not only have decided preoccupations with and orientations to modernist texts; they also follow distinctively modernist histories. In so far as English studies has been lately dominated by a certain pluralizing, historicist strain, it has often been leveraged on constraining or submerging this discourse. Andrew John Millers Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty provides an excellent example of an ambitious book at the forefront of these several concerns. Among other things, the book tries to push back on overly sanguine versions of global literature, pluralistic visions of a literature without boundaries. Informed by Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, it examines W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot as postnational writers, who, faced with the proliferation of multiple social imaginaries, come to conceive of their respective geopolitical situations by means of provisional strategies rather than by means of an essentializing vision of national unity centered on the state apparatus (p. 167). As the author puts it, the modernists were haunted by the contradictions of affiliation and association in a political situation defined by a continuous state of emergency that developed during the First World War. Firm demarcations between war and peace (and between interiority and exteriority) no longer worked; integrity of identity and territory became at once superfluous and unremitting; and, Yeats, Woolf, Eliot and other modernists (whom Miller understands in terms of their complexly mediated textual and institutional afterlives) were enmeshed in a perpetual, cosmopolitical crisis of sovereign power, from which we have not yet emerged. The thoughtful discussion of the importance of recognizing situations in which, in Dominick LaCapras words, the interpreter is implicated in the temporal processes interpreted is worth a look for anyone trying to understand the problems of modern literary history (pp. 715). Among the numerous smart things found in this book, two strong chapters on Yeats stand out in particular. Here, Miller provides a visionary reformulation of Yeatss politics and poetics that asks us to reconsider his investment in the invention of the Irish nation in the light of Irelands anomalous geopolitical situation (recalling Seamus Deane), where he found himself compelled to negotiate the permeable boundaries of state and individual sovereignty (p. 153). Even though the book centres on three well-established literary monuments, Millers argument usefully maps a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between modernism and politics. This innovative scholar died young in 2009, and will be missed. David Willss Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minnesota) also pursues an inventive, complex, and theoretically attuned project, again drawing significantly on a second look at the theory corpus. Following through on Rosss insistence that modernism and theory be read co-extensively and in mutually illuminating ways, Wills draws together striking vinas, Joyce, Broch, juxtapositions of writers and philosophers (Heidegger, Le Schmitt, Derrida, Benjamin, Sade and Nietzsche) and themes (houses, oceans, walking, throwaway lines, castaways) paying off on the books Heideggerian sense of poetry doubling back on thinking. From each of these figures, he isolates an arresting, inventive instance of dorsality, an embodied reflex
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leading to speculation about what lies behind the relation between humanity and technology: The turn would be the deviation that occursnaturally as it werewithin the seemingly automatic advance of ambulation or locomotion. It turns as it walks. Technology as mechanicity is locatednot for the first time but in a particularly explicit way, that is to say, as fundamental relation to the earth as exteriorityin the step. . . . The particular importance of the privilege I am giving to the turn resides . . . in its sense of a departure that is also a detour, a deviation, a divergence into difference. We will imagine the human turning as it walks, deviating from its forward path in order, precisely to move forward, advancing necessarily askew. To repeat: the turn is the deviation from itself by means of which the human, in being or moving simply human, is understood to become technological. (p. 4) The aphoristic, gnomic style Wills employs may not be everyones cup of tea, but it leads him to some striking claims. As one reviewer noted, the force of his book is that he win[s], perhaps for good, the race backwards to decide when we first became posthuman by pinning it to our first steps as bipeds (<http:// reconstruction.eserver.org/092/willisreview.shtml>). For Wills, this primal lurch as a kind of natural technology points to the paradox that we are most essentially human as we fall back on technologies. Technologyand perhaps, modernity, too, though he does not say thisthus stands not before humanity, but always behind it, over its shoulder, so to speak. Reading Joyces Ulysses alongside Brochs Death of Virgil leads Wills to an engrossing discussion of literature and the ethics of exile and homecoming. The throwawayelement and operation of signification within a work of fictionis, he writes, like the castaway, in exile, at a loss for home and country (p. 88). It is, he explains, less about narrative origin and control than about the far more complex and vexed question of the destination and limits of textual signification in general, but it demonstrates how in Ulysses . . . those two effects become intertwined. We no longer have a coherent or homogenous narrative voice directing the outflow of signifying elements; indeed, narratorial effects get caught up within the vagaries of signification in general. Thus when Bloom flings away his wooden pen after writing I am a, the reader is cast back to the Bloom who, about to throw away his newspaper, has it intercepted by Bantam Lyons . . . Narratorial voice, and finally signification in general, are thrown away in Ulysses to the extent of being cast s Throw of the Dice, shipwrecked, like away, castaways as in Mallarme Ulysses or Odysseus, far from home. (p. 86) At another point in Dorsality, he ties the dorsal turn to this peculiar enterprise of literary criticism itself: Commentary comes from after or from behind to put a new face on the work it refers to; it rewrites the natural or creative function as a techno-rhetorical one; and it ruptures the self-identity of the work, exposing it to oceanic drift (p. 104). Commentary (criticism, analysis, interpretation) serves as a natural technology of the literary, an
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oceanic drift which lands Bloomian flotsam on our beachheads, whereas current historicist approaches to literature inasmuch as they presume a nonliterary literal before and after the textual . . . cross the ocean to better ignore it (p. 104). In Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal, Carrie Rohman comes at post-humanities themes differently from Wills but from an approach similarly obliquenamely, animal studies. Rohman identifies animal studies as a new discipline surrounding the cultural and discursive significance of animality and its relationship to Western metaphysics and humanist discourses (p. 1). Animals are more than another trendy literary theme (standing somewhere in queue with other uncanny subjects like cyborgs, ghosts, cannibals, pirates, zombies, and so on) for literary historicists to contemplate changes in human assumptions and anxieties, because, according to Rohman, they bring immanent methodological and theoretical matters to the fore, developed elsewhere by Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Elizabeth Grosz and Cary Wolfe. [A]nimal studies, she writes, emerges from the legacy of poststructuralism and its attendant analysis of subject-formation, at the same time as its interest in the radically other pushes the recent turn to ethics in literary studies beyond the familiar boundaries of the human (pp. 89). Following suit, whats strong about her approach is a willingness to interpret literary texts (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes) not merely as ideological dress-upsymptoms of repressed and marginalized animalitybut as canny, theoretical collaborators, as it were, in rewriting or de-sublimating the discourse of species. The framing of the books argument in the context of early British modernism is welcome, if largely underexamined. It has something to do with the literary reception of Darwinian science in England and thus the importance of Wells. In his The Island of Dr. Moreau, he was among the first . . . to thematize clearly the post-Darwinian uncertainty [about] the human subjects stability in relation to its species status (p. 64). Strange things happen to the formation of the subject in the early twentieth century, and, by implication, literary history of this period does not hold with accounts of subject formation that end things unproblematically in the nineteenth century or earlier. New dilemmas about animality are one place in which evidence for this can be seen. Another is in a new prominence for eccentricities of public life, as Justus Nieland puts it in the subtitle to his excellent book Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, vehicles for minimal subjectivity, mass-mediated expressions of oddballism, and quirky and cranky behaviour launched into the erratic, queer and eccentric orbits of modern public space (or, publicness, as he prefers to call it). Nielands is the last of the four books in this years work that bear witness to a continued centrality of theory to the ambitions of literary studies. Like several of the others, it engages significantly with Agamben, as it U-turns from many received commonplaces about subjectivity and personhood. Borrowing also from Benjamin, Arendt and Kracauer, the book serves up a heady and surprisingly potable stew of literary and film studies and some really smart revisionist cultural excavation. How did modernism understand the demands placed on emotional life by the new, and increasingly mediated, forms of
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early-twentieth-century public life? Nieland asks (p. 2). For answers he looks to modernist eccentrics like Wyndham Lewis, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes and E.E. Cummings; film icons like Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein; and visual artists like Joseph Cornell and Marsden Hartleydiscussing their responses to such lively arts as vaudeville, cartoons, dance and music hall, and slapstick. From this material, these figures fashioned an alternative language of affect, a curious marriage of intimate feeling and impersonality, for coping with the privations of exposed creaturely life (p. 25). In a sense, Nieland addresses much the same landscape as Millerthe state of exception and the fate of the subject of modernist artbut does so employing a far more thoroughgoing account of the scope of modernisms manifold cultural investments. These motives remain idealist to the last. In popular forms, modernism found a way to lead public life to a reparative higher ground based on sentimentalism, sympathy and intimacy. Perhaps, he overplays his hand somewhat when indicting the materialist turn in modernist studies, though: modernisms sublunary relocation has seemed particularly pressing to critics and has rewarded them amply with the tasty ironies attending this rebirth into telluric context (p. 5). Implicated in these sublunary tendencies, Feeling Modern shows how sedulously attending to the affective textures of the sublunary arts seriously jacks up their legitimacy. Tasty ironies, indeed. The conceptual heavy lifting needed to teach modernism to come to terms with how it feels requires no less than re-legitimating modern public space. Yet the discovery by modernist studies of material culturemodernisms sublunary relocationcontinues apace. If Nielands book shows the unceasing scholarly potential of studying modernist subjects and subjectivities, Elizabeth Outkas Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Aesthetic shows further possibilities when attending to modernist objects and commodities. Outka, like Nieland, is worried about overcoming the stubbornly entrenched moral agonistics of high and low. Or, as she has it, the dynamics of authenticity and artifice: [W]e are adept at (and often smug about) unmasking the commerce behind the facade: the distressed furniture is not really old, the soft-lit reproduction of the villagers house hides the economic hardships that were found there, and at the very least, that new soft sweater is unlikely to deliver the sophisticated atmosphere from the catalogue. Such exposure is important and ongoing critical work, but the rush to condemn (or at least ironically smirk) has limited a critical investigation of either the history of such marketing or its powerful allures. (p. 5) Focusing on E.M. Forster, Henry James, H.G. Wells, early Virginia Woolf and other Literature in Transition authors, Outka tries to do aesthetic justice to the pervasiveness of the modern allure of authenticity, heritage and nostalgiaespecially the way in which these cultural values encode gender trouble and class aspirationwithout being smug or smirking, building in this regard on the exemplary work of Jennifer Wicke and Rachel Bowlby. The chapter on Selfridges stands out, a really stellar mixture of cultural history and literary criticism. Outkas interest is both the urge to construct, buy, reproduce,
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package, and sell a range of images and ideas clustered around authenticity and the new literary works that recognized, critiqued, and exploited the phenomenon for innovative literary ends (p. 5). The paradox, which she dusts off through analysis of department store windows, model towns, ideal homes and suburban sprawl, lies in a message to Purchase the right object, build the right building, preserve the right relic, and one might possess an appealing aura of the past, maintain a sense of authentic tradition, and, by ones very participation in the novel production of such spaces and things, simultaneously be new, up-to-date, fashionable (p. 7). Both Nieland and Outka in their own ways are keen to formulate new syntheses about modern problems of style and matter, but it makes sense to this reviewer to think about both projects sharing in new efforts to understand the relation between the aesthetic artefact and emerging audience structures, networks which were often expressly non-literary, such as music-hall spectatorship and shop-window gazing. Continuing along these lines brings us to The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, a pioneering collection edited by a research collective of University of Washington professors in the humanities and social sciences (the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group). In this case, the editors pursue a highly original method of cultural phenomenology in order to explore a particularly world-spanning form of the commodity aesthetic: the simultaneous invention and manifold meaning of the modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s. Pursuing two research questions about this modernist vernacular form over a period of yearsHow was the Modern Girl global? And what made her so?the editors treat the Modern Girl as a heuristic device, a means of serving to find out or discover many things about aesthetic culture, globalism, globalization, nationalist and post-nationalist politics, micro- and macro-history, colonialism and postcolonialism, power, gender, modernity and cultural and sociological method itself (pp. 23). The topic, and the books status as a collaboratively edited project, allow for the uncommon combination of detailed analysis and comprehensive claims about what the editors call the multidirectional citation of this vernacular form of modernity, which simultaneously produces actual historical agents all over the globe and conveys ways and means for the consumption of their representations. Under the rubric of audience structure and communication networks, two other notable books appeared: Ned Schantzs Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandals of Female Networks in Film and Literature and Stefan Collinis Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics. Schantzs clever monograph is more modestly sized, but, thematically speaking, it pairs surprisingly well with The Modern Girl Around the World. Picture an old girls network, he writes: Picture women using whatever resources they have at their disposal to support and promote each othernot in any Utopia or sheltered enclave, but in the modern world as it developed since the eighteenth century (p. 3). One wonders what kind of historical continuities exist between this old girls network convincingly linked to the hidden narrative circuitry of private life, sympathy, gossip and identification wired into the British noveland the post-literary, global boom of it girl culture discussed by the Modern Girl collective and even more recently in Judith Browns Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism
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and the Radiance of Form (Cornell [2009]). Can one make the case for the latter being leveraged over the ruins of the former? Schantz, for one, wont say, leaping from the aged chestnuts of the English novel canon (Clarissa, Emma, Middlemarch) to popular narrative films of more recent provenance (Pillow Talk, Youve Got Mail, The Terminator, Bound). Here finally, pace Friedmans call to arms, is an example of that vaunted modernism without modernism, although Schantzs engagement with Friedrich Kittler, the important theorist of modernism, suggests where one might go to begin connecting the dots about when and where the rhythm of modernity bounces its female subject back and forth between the typewriter and the cinema (pp. 556). Stefan Collinis Common Reading is the only book included here that actually covers the purported historical span of this section: the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from, roughly, the early nineteenth century to the present (p. 1). That Collini is an eminent intellectual historian trying to write in a hybrid of academic and non-academic styles is telling; his interests and tone usefully avoid the sticky patches and constitutive myopia of practical criticism. Thus you wont find too many close readings of literary texts. Instead, the author narrows his subject by turning again and again on a single problem: how do writer-intellectuals contribute to the invention of their readership? The book, he explains, could be thought of as recounting the journey of the person (formerly man) of letters in the twentieth century, producing non-academic non-fiction written seriously and thoughtfully for a readership of non-academics. It necessarily touches on, in Collinis words, the fate of general periodicals, the history of reading, the role of criticism, changing conceptions of culture, the limitation of biography, and the function of universities (p. 1). Indeed, form follows function, as Collini himself tries to sail a course between the rocks of journalistic superficiality and academic unreadability in his essays (p. 2). He writes compellingly about the pressing need for legitimate terra firma somewhere between the punchy opinionatedness of the newspaper column and the rigorous austerities of the scholarly article (p. 5). In fact, the book collects a prodigious amount of just this sort of writing, which he has written over the last few years in a variety of reviews and occasional pieces. In an odd way, the bookthe first half, at leastprovides a nice companion to Alain Badious similarly assembled Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (Verso [2009]), refracting twentieth-century intellectual life from another nation. Instead of French public intellectuals like Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, we get British ones like Connolly, Empson, Rebecca West, Orwell, A.L. Rowse, E.H. Carr, E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. Not that we couldnt find British philosophers and psychoanalysts or French literary critics and historians if we had to, but the contrast between the respective elitesthe kind of intellectuals which Badiou and Collini pursue respectivelyspeaks volumes. Above all, for Collini, scribbling critics and historians represent heroic ideal readers who have landed on terra firmawith occasional help from independent means or academic appointments in the US. One finds a 2001 review of Jonathan Roses The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes among the topical essays that comprise the second
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half of the book. Collini worries about the methodological difficulties in writing the history of reading in general: How much could we ever know about the practice of this form of solitary vice on a mass scale? (p. 248). Although he is moved by Roses accounts of autodidacticism extracted from working-class autobiographies, he is sceptical about the enterprise of representing and generalizing about ordinary readers. [I]n this age of access, he writes, Jude would not have to scrawl on the walls of Christminster. And now: Somewhere, out there, someone is at this moment picking up a book. They may be about to change their life forever, or they may be about to escape from it for a while. The book may be one of the hundreds that are mentioned in [Roses book], or it may be one of the millions that are not. Who knows: perhaps in another valley someone is even reading Mrs Dalloway (p. 256). Its far more likely, of course, that he or she is reading Dan Brown. To make this point doesnt mean making it smugly thinking of Outkas warning. It only suggests that reading on a mass scale is a game of numbers and probabilities, and all forms of cultural commentary, particularly as we approach the sheer numinosity of cultural material available from the contemporary context, imply questions of specificity, administration, selection and value. Can you talk about readers and not talk about what they read? And, if you talk about what they read, are you really talking at all about them? One way to think about consumption is to examine what consumers say about what they consume (Collini, Rose); the other is to examine the ways texts themselves thematize acts of cultural consumption (Nieland, Outka, Schantz, the Modern Girl group). Collini touches on some carry-overs from the modernist era (Aldous Huxley, Edmund Wilson and Rebecca West, for example), but the strength of Common Reading lies in its many discussions of the mid-century transition to the contemporary: there have certainly been fundamental changes in [education, culture and knowledge] in the last half-century or so: contemporary working-class readers generally have more formal schooling than their predecessors; they have access to vastly more sources of information and entertainment . . . We live in a less didactic society, auto- or otherwise (p. 256). It is exceedingly difficult for literary critics and historians not to read this transition elegiacally, with apologies to Larkin, everyone young going down the long slide to information and entertainment, endlessly. Yet, Collini, for one, does not hold with those who rail against the alleged sorry state of the present (p. 6). Last year, this section featured several books foregrounding the mid-century (Peter Kalliney and Marina MacKay). This year, the section will close by highlighting two compelling attempts to write contemporary literary history: Dominic Heads The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond and David Jamess Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. Published in the Blackwell Manifestos series, Heads polemical book is simultaneously concerned with discussing promising signs of life in serious literary fiction today and what he sees as the troubles of academic criticism and its deepening insularity (p. 1). The analysis is lively and particularly sharp about the shortcomings of the death of the novel thesis (p. 9) and the methodological problems of contemporaneity (chapter 1).
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At times, he is a bit too ready to adopt the blame-theory-first line, as if interest in non-genre literature written by serious novelists was reduced because of a few stylistic excesses committed by and for a few people in English departments (pp. 258). If rumours about the death of the novel are premature, surely the death of theory is also frequently exaggerated. Theres something of a Goldilocks effect going on here, too, when Head defines what counts as serious as existing somewhere between Bridget Joness Diary and Boundary 2. The Eng. Lit. faculty, above all, is not to be trusted with making critical judgements, it seems: What is meant by [the serious literary novel] is the kind of book that is shortlisted for literary prizes; which is to saylooking at the evidence accrueda narrative written in an ongoing humanist tradition that enlarges readers social, historical or philosophical perceptions by means of the fictional projection of character and circumstance (usually), and/or through linguistic or formal innovation (not usually overtly). (p. 12) Heads novelists include Ian McEwan, Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, J.G. Ballard and John Updike, and topics of general (as opposed to merely academic) interest such as 9/11, transatlanticism, globalism and multiculturalism, literary prize culture, and tourism. Ironicallyand Head might agreed with this claimhis book is really an effort to reform the practices of university teachers of post-war fiction. Echoing Collinis call for a stylistic third way, he wants to release this in-group from straitjacket of academic professionalism (p. 27).Head calls for more literary criticism and history addressing mixed audiences of specialists and non-specialists: I do think that criticism of the novel is a secondary form of writing, in that it responds to aesthetic objects of attention that can very well exist without being analysed; but the analysis uncovers an alternative and complementary insight, of particular value if it can be brought to bear on concerns that have a general social application (p. 6). Contrast Heads words with David Willss sentiment cited above, about commentary coming from after or from behind to put a new face on the work. Jamess Contemporary British Fiction follows the same conviction to write about contemporary fiction rather than contemporary theory (p. vi) that animates Head. The sleight of hand he has in mind is familiarand sometimes its not the word theory but film or popular culture that stands in for the contemporary literary scene in literary criticism. James argues that one way to talk critics down from this disciplinary ledge is to attend to the particular aesthetic spaces of and the particularity of space in contemporary fiction. His third chapter, on Ballard and Sinclair and the impossibilities of navigating urban London, shows the merits of this approach. The illuminating extended analysis of such individual practitioners of the novelistic art include J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Caryl Phillips, Pat Barker, Adam Thorpe, Trezza Azzopardi and A.L. Kennedy. Such discussion aims to communicate something of the vivacity of narrative space as an event for reading itself, by which settings become scenes of process and reciprocity, rather than as an aspect of fiction to be described in inert, topographical
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terms (p. 7). Grand theory is dead, long live small theory that does justice to the singularity of individual practitioners (p. 6). Thinking of the various crises of commentary explored in the books of this years section, Archimedean predicaments abound. Multiple crises of legitimacy are the mainstay of its negative dialectics, as are multiple modernist and neo-modernist hendiadys: war and peace, global and local, present and future, front and back, human and animal, style and matter, subject and object, production and consumption, academic and non-academic, literary and non-literary. It seems these are the most fruitful starting points for contemporary literary critics and scholars. As a closing note, Jonathan Eburnes Surrealism and the Art of Crime merits mentioning here, because this book precisely models an argument-driven book that is theoretically and historically rigorous and yet also reworks a synthetic literary history of the century in useful ways. The links to the British framework are admittedly highly tendentious. Certainly surrealism had British exponents such as David Gascoyne, but Eburnes focus is mostly French (there is a discussion of Chester Himes). The book has a fine first sentence: The path of surrealism through the twentieth century is littered with corpses (p. 1). Curating its own archive of irrational European literature and thoughtdetective mysteries, crime films, sensationalist journalism, and documents of clinical opinion which stimulated, provoked and preoccupied them (p. 8)surrealism was, in Eburnes formulation, a synthesis, drawing from avant-garde poetics and aesthetics as from popular literature, from psychoanalysis and criminology, and from journalism and political philosophy (p. 4). It would be congenial to this reviewer to find more alternative histories in the literature and culture of the twentieth century written along these linesmore of the synthetic, and, thinking of The Modern Girl Around the World, more heuristic devices.
2. Pre-1945 Fiction (a) British Fiction 19001930 In 2008 some of the most nuanced research continues to prioritize those writers whose fiction has hitherto been ignored by commentators committed to keeping the canon of Anglo-American literary modernism high and narrow. It is heartening to see more detailed scrutiny of Ford Madox Fords long and varied literary career, not only as a prolific, experimental novelist but also as an endearingly wayward patron, editor and forthright champion of a younger generation of authors. Moreover, there are searching and stringent reassessments of the politics and aesthetics of gender, focusing specifically on women writers such as May Sinclair, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Butts. This is attested by the fully updated and revised second edition of Peter Childss Modernism, as part of the New Critical Idiom series, which constructively complicates our perception of this literary period by charting the modern movement in its regional, national and global contexts. Childs, like Jane Garrity in Found and Lost: The Politics of Modernist Recovery (Mo/Mo 15[2008] 80312),
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canvasses Mary Butts as one of those interwar women writers who had almost vanished through the cracks of literary history, given the strident and hectoring celebration of maleness in established modernist criticism (p. 24). Like Pericles Lewis in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism [2007], Childs crystallizes the principal concepts, influences and patterns of thought with emphatic assurance and without lapsing into obfuscating jargon. He methodically surveys the competing techniques and drives (p. 4) which dominate and structure the diverse writings of both acclaimed figures such as Joseph Conrad, who has generated a vast cottage industry in academic circles, and overshadowed or unfashionable writers, for instance Arthur Machen and Arnold Bennett. Childss lucid overview recognizes that since the publication of Jed Estys A Shrinking Island [2004], Diana Wallaces The Womans Historical Novel [2005 hb, 2008 pb], Bonnie Kime Scotts Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections [2007] and Kitty Hausers Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape 19271955 [2008], critics have sought to privilege a broader and more inclusive comprehension of international modernism. Mary Buttss fiction and autobiographical writings showcase a lifelong and keen fascination with the findings of feminist classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, who features prominently in Kolocotroni and Mitsi, eds., Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel, which gauges representations of the Hellenic world and interrogates the complex role of gender in travel and cultural mediation (p. 5). Martha Klironomoss essay British Women Travellers to Greece, 18801930 (pp. 13557) is persuasive in tracing motifs through Harrisons myriad archaeological and topographical texts. Excerpts from Harrisons Epilogomena to the Study of Greek Religion [1921] are especially welcome in the subsection on Religion and Belief in Matthews, ed., Modernism: A Sourcebook, a substantive anthology of documents which supplies key contextual background for Anglo-American literature between 1900 and 1930. Matthewss editorial acumen in this historically informed collection throws into bold relief how the field of modernist studies has witnessed a dizzying succession of critical revisions, re-mappings, and re-thinking across the past thirty years (p. 1). Matthews brings misconstrued archival material back into circulation, reflecting how recent scholarship has addressed patterns of consumer capital, technological inventions, visual culture, transnationalist feminism, emigration and global travel. David Matlesss A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts (CultGeo 15[2008] 33557) analyses Mary Buttss recondite and encrypted cartography of space and place in novels such as Armed with Madness [1928]. Thanks largely to Jane Garritys expert scholarship both in Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary [2003] and Doan and Garrity, eds., Sapphic Modernities [2006], Mary Buttss oeuvre has been situated in complex interwar debates about racial purity, the imperial consciousness, nationalistic individualism and bitterly contested ideologies of Englishness. Matless benefits from Garritys punctilious readings of Buttss occult narrative mappings to show that her fiction, with its stress on a haunted rustic hinterland, mobilizes an increasingly
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bellicose rhetoric that lauds discernible social differences and a deterministic credo of blood immune to comparative scrutiny or logical criticism. Joanna Grants Modernisms Middle East: Journeys to Barbary offers a radical re-mapping that explores how the ancient civilizations and contemporary existential dilemmas adumbrated by the Near and Middle East were a source of deep concern to anglophone authors in the early twentieth century. Grants analyses of Wyndham Lewis and Vita Sackville-West demonstrate that Orientalist fantasies were inextricably enmeshed with yearnings to reconfigure both the Western psyche and the generic models it emphasized to best represent itself (p. 8). Such a project, Grant avers, was construed as a core part of a more quixotic enterprise to save Anglo-American culture from neurasthenic torment and decadent excess (p. 15). Grant indicates with particular acuity how Sackville-Wests literary efforts to chart the comfortless grandeur of an exotic elsewhere fell victim to the crude and reductive Western stereotypes she sought so strenuously to circumvent. Like Vita Sackville-West and Mary Butts, Dorothy Richardson has become the beneficiary of sedulous and percipient scholarship in recent years, as attested by Scott McCrackens Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere [2007], which blends urban cultural history, gender studies and critical theory in its assessment of Richardson and the New Woman novelists. Deborah Parsonss modestly concise Theorists of the Modernist Novel deals with Painted Roofs, the first instalment of what would become Richardsons thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage, as a quasi-autobiographical account of the thwarted prospects, trauma, depression, hard work and creative determination that had epitomized Richardsons own life from the 1890s to 1912 (p. 8). Like Celena E. Kusch in Disorienting Modernism: National Boundaries and the Cosmopolis (JML 30:ii[2007] 3960), Parsons stresses the interlocking regimes of gender, empire and capital in Richardsons corpus, as well as its calibration of a temporality that erodes the concepts of a fully developed and coherent subjectivity, which also throws into sharper relief lesser-known novels such as Rosamond Lehmanns Dusty Answer [1927] and Rose Macaulays mordant satire Keeping Up Appearances [1928]. Parsons project raises core questions about how Richardsons protagonist seeks to become an agent of cultural transformation at a time when women were entering the public sphere as suffragists and socialists. Melinda Harveys essay, Dwelling, Poaching, Dreaming: Housebreaking and Homemaking in Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage (in Reus and Usandizaga, eds., Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, pp. 16788), scrutinizes the heroine Miriams tentative steps towards gaining access to urban spaces that had been commonly denied to respectable women (p. 26). Harvey canvasses two emblematic sites of female independence, the Bloomsbury bedsit and the (p. 27). Harvey contends that Richardson presents turn-of-the-century cafe both spaces as affording the heroine a redemptive sense of welcoming homeliness while freeing her from essentialized categories of identification and the stultifying routines of domestic existence (p. 27). Although the anonymous bed-sit (p. 27) vouchsafes Miriam a measure of liberation from culture the drab, unfinished uniformity of suburbia, it is cosmopolitan cafe
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which helps her overcome earlier traumas and greatly sharpens her interpersonal and aesthetic capabilities. Like Darling and Whitworth, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 18701950 [2007], Scott and Keates, eds., Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere [2004], and Amy G. Richters Home on the Rails [2005], Inside Out debunks with intellectual verve the well-entrenched assumptions (p. 23) associated with separate spheres in the field of literary studies. This is nowhere better exemplified than in Laurel Forsters elegantly crafted essay Women and War Zones (pp. 22948), which appraises May Sinclairs little-known autobiographical text, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium [1915]. Sinclairs Impressions also features in Wendy Parkinss Mobility and Modernity in Womens Novels, 18501930: Women Moving Dangerously. Parkins demonstrates that interwar fiction delineates the rich opportunities as well as the grievous limitations on womens agency. The overwhelming bulk of previous assessments of female mobility in a context epitomized by seismic social and political ferment have focused disappointingly on urban contexts in which young women were compelled to self-commodify as a condition of their circulation. Parkins broadens and deepens this scholarly approach to gauge the movements of the female subject beyond the ambit of a metropolitan marketplace which fosters and channels desire. Elizabeth Robinss 1907 suffrage novel The Convert is a signal inclusion in this nimble and lively analysis of how women may be willing participants in the vanguard of change or rather swept along helplessly in the ceaseless flux of modern life (p. 3). Allan Hepburn has edited two new collections of Elizabeth Bowens writing for Edinburgh University Press. People, Places, Things assembles in one handy volume essays that were published in British, Irish and American periodicals during Bowens lifetime. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. The Bazaar and Other Stories also brings together some unfinished drafts of fairy tales, social dramas and existential parables. Some of the best short stories here concentrate on the young adult female as a figure of transition and radical indeterminacy entangled in familial or generational strife, or confronting for the first time a modern marketplace which simultaneously enforces and dissipates lopsided social designations. As Hepburn indicates, Bowens workas far back as The Hotel [1927] and The Last September [1929]scrupulously registers and dissects the encrypted or overt operations of power between generations. Hepburns excellent edition of the stories enables us to trace the ways in which Bowens fascination with interstitial cultural allegiances conditions not only her perception of English, Irish and Anglo-Irish national identities, but also her elliptical depictions of camaraderie and burgeoning or thwarted sexuality. A historical as well as a psychic past of trauma and dislocationso often the main theme of recent research on Richardson and Bowenalso imbues Vernon Lees short stories, according to Patricia Pulhams Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lees Supernatural Tales. Pulham merges psychoanalytic theory with subtle socio-historical scholarship to weigh a selection of Lees fantastic tales and how they articulate the overlapping and uncannyeconomies of sex, gender, class and national designation.
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Pulhams elegantly structured study benefits from the signal revival of critical interest in this transitional figure of literary modernism, as evidenced by Vineta Colbys Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography [2003], Christa Zorns Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual [2003] and Mary Patricia Keanes Spurious Ghosts: The Fantastic Tales of Vernon Lee [2004]. More recently, a fine collection of critical essays, Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics [2006] and the first annotated edition of selected supernatural stories, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales [2006] have been published. Pulham affirms Lees tendency to embed in the layers of these uncanny narratives oppositional, arcane or radically ambivalent forms of female subjectivity. Pulhams discerning account should be scrutinized alongside Catherine Clays British Women Writers 19141945: Professional Work and Friendship [2007], and especially Jill R. Ehnenns Womens Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture, which canvasses the myriad histories and functions of womens literary partnerships, such as that of Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson. Steve Pinkertons Trauma and Cure in Rebecca Wests The Return of the Soldier (JML 32:i[2008] 112) notes that two critical trends have persisted with surprising resilience in scholarship on Wests most acclaimed novel: first, the magisterial dismissal, for psychoanalytic as well as purely literary reasons, of amnesiac Chris Baldrys climatic cure (pp. 12), and, second, the underestimation of Chriss sweetheart, Margaret Allington. Pinkerton contends that the soldiers cure in fact emerges as a convincing transferential encounter in light of recent advancements in trauma theory, and that Margaretan intuitive analyst and therapistis key to Chriss transformation, for better or worse. Pinkerton asks us to reappraise an unduly slighted character, recognizing Margarets robust agency in the text. This year also saw the publication of the fifth and final volume of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Vincent OSullivan and Margaret Scott, which covers the almost thirteen months during which she sought more effectual treatment for the tuberculosis that would kill her. Those Mansfield commentators who have queried the apparently freakish resolve which led her to ignore orthodox medical wisdom, as well as the wishes of her spouse and wide circle of friends, for the choice of Gurdjieffs Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, will find in this correspondence a fascinating insight into the thinking and fierce determination behind her decision. Paul Newlands The Cultural Construction of Londons East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness, like Phillips, ed., A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke [2007] and David L. Pikes Metropolis on the Styx [2007], explores how the image of metropolitan space, developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to operate in the twenty-first century as an imaginative zone in which to confront and process biting anxieties concerning the ideology of progressive enlightenment, cool rationality, ethnicity and exotic Otherness. Like Nicholas Freemans Conceiving the City [2007], Newlands breadth of attention is melded with probing, discipline-specific close reading of narrative techniques. Newland brings a welcome focus to Arthur Morrisons novels of working-class struggle in the
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East End, such as The Hole in the Wall [1902]. He also scrutinizes Ford Madox Fords representation of the city in the impressionistic 1905 essay The Soul of London as a profoundly modern enclave that stubbornly resists totalization. The twelve new essays collected in Gasiorek and Moore, eds., Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, project Ford as an inveterate chronicler of his life and times (p. 13), not just in his narrative prose fiction but also in the numerous memoirs and works of literary and cultural commentary. The contributors are highly distinguished in their specialities and each documents with limpid clarity Fords involvement in and promulgation of various coteries, cliques and artistic movements, such as his dealings with Wyndham Lewis, Fords complex editorial function at the English Review, his distinctive brand of Impressionism, and collaboration with disciples. As Gasiorek and Moore demonstrate in their incisive introduction to this collection, Fords quest for continuities, while a notable facet of his thought and authorial practice, should not deflect readers from canvassing his need to identify historical and literary divisions, fractures or conflicts (p. 22). These essays project Ford not just as a partial and canny observer of the seismic socio-political convulsions which define the modern movement, but also as a tireless and heterodox participant in it. The English Review, launched in 1908, was an integral part of Fords effort to refresh literary culture, a focal point for organised artistic activity (p. 24). John Attridges essay (pp. 2941) brings out with panache the complex irony of the English Reviews efforts to resist insular atavisms and constricting ideologies of Englishness by welcoming contributions from writers of a more cosmopolitan background. As with Max Saunderss incisive essay on Ford and Impressionism (pp. 15166) there is a strong sense of Fords belief that literary nuclei were of signal importance to the health of the republic of letters because they fostered the type of spirited interchange that the arts needed if they were to prosper (p. 25). John Attridges Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology (Mo/Mo 15:ii[2008] 297315) indicates that social disintegration and cultural ferment have been perceived as trademark themes, among the defining processes of modernity. Employing Matthew Arnold as a touchstone, Attridge frames worries about wholeness and integrity as a complex Victorian bequest, and grounds the discussion of fragmentation concretely in Fords searching social criticism in The Soul of London. Attridge offers a sophisticated and compelling argument; indeed some of his most pointed interventions relate to Fords unjustly overlooked 1908 supernatural romance Mr Apollo, in light of Edwardian sociologys fascination with synthesis. Damon Marcel DeCostes A frank expression of personality? Sentimentality, Silence and Early Modernist Aesthetics in The Good Soldier (JML 31:i[2007] 10123) charts the novels engagement with emergent modernism (p. 101), gauging it not simply as radical in technique but more as a bracing expression of urgent pre-war debates about aesthetics, utility and ethics. Whereas Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy has contended that The Good Soldier doggedly defends Vorticism against the competing aesthetics of Bloomsbury, DeCoste argues that Fords novel actually subverts that very same Vorticist-Imagist strain of modernism with which he was conversant, and to which he so often pledged his literary allegiance (p. 102). DeCostes
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astute essay should be read alongside Rose De Angeliss Narrative Triangulations: Truth, Identity, and Desire in Ford Madox Fords The Good Soldier (ES 88:iv[2007] 42546) and Stephen E. Severns essay on Ford Madox Fords The Good Soldier, Creative Writing, and Teaching the Modernist Novel in the Introductory-Level Literature Classroom (in Irvine, ed., Teaching the Novel across the Curriculum, pp. 13043). Jennifer Meyers Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain, like Jon Stallworthys Survivors Songs: From Maldon to the Somme and Hammond and Towheed, eds., Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History [2007], illuminates how Ford Madox Ford sought to balance artistic integrity with a patriotic impulse to fashion effective pro-British propaganda. Meyer concentrates on five forms of personal narrative, including mens trench journals written, arranged and illustrated by British and Dominion soldiers for the purpose of fostering unit cohesion. She scrutinizes in particular how conceptualizations of extrovert virility and selfless courage were produced, interrogated and overturned by British Great War servicemen. Like Knights, ed., Masculinities in Text and Teaching and Christopher Forths Masculinity in the Modern West, Meyer is especially acute when exploring how specific situations as well as intended audience governed the ways in which masculine identities were declared and calibrated during this fraught era. The first chapter, Writing Home, adroitly situates individual constructions against a backdrop of cultural ideals of the fearless warrior hero and the disciplined spouse and father during and after the Great War. Meyer argues that letters home not only operated as conduits of news that kept the home front connected and informed but also as spaces in which men could inspect their own domestic responsibilities as well as the martial role of the soldier (p. 15). Like Robert Hemmingss Modern Nostalgia, Meyers book teases out the relationship between the elegiac backward-looking glance, traumatic loss and autobiographical practice. As a case study of modern nostalgia, Hemmings supplies a salutary alternative to the perception that Siegfried Sassoons historical and cultural relevance is restricted to the Great War and to the twilight of the British empire. Peter Havholms Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kiplings Fiction not only offers a sharpened awareness of Kiplings understanding of empire from evidence in Anglo-Indian newspapers and periodicals of the 1880s, but also provides a richly textured explanation for Kiplings post-1891 turn to fantasy, fable and stories written to be enjoyed by children. Havholm explores what has been construed as an increasingly strident tone after Kiplings settling permanently in England in 1899 (p. 137). Whereas the bulk of recent Kipling scholarship produces a view of the author as radically and enigmatically ambivalent towards imperialist politics, Havholm presents an author strikingly consistent in his aesthetic, cultural and ideological investments across a long career. Havholm prioritizes a writer of hidden simplicities (p. xi) whose artistic repertoire is devoted to refining an experience of wonder and delight (p. 91) at a world of profound, even exhilarating otherness. But many of Kiplings most memorable fictions, in addition to evoking awe, also trigger an accompanying feeling of deep unease at the racial politics which Havholm avers is only ancillary to our response. Kipling, as Angelia Poon posits in
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Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance, writes existential parables as well as ferocious parodies of imperialism (p. 135). Indeed the colonial encounter, as Gurminder K. Bhambra argues in Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination [2007], is constitutive of the very disciplines that articulate or strive to comprehend modernity (p. 16). William B. Dillinghams Being Kipling canvasses Kiplings identity and world-view, as Kipling perceived it, through a probing and unusual examination of Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Dillingham employs this collection, which is frequently belittled by critics and biographers alike, to afford rare insight into formative events from Kiplings adolescence that influenced his personality and the beliefs which resonate through his mature fiction and poetry. The eight stories, eight poems and three essays of Land and Sea Tales are all scrutinized closely both for what they disclose about the sensuous immediacy of Kiplings felt experience, and for their intrinsic aesthetic merit. Dillinghams book should be surveyed alongside Gavin and Humphries, eds., Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time, which is the first book-length scrutiny of the Edwardian fictional cult of childhood, and erodes glib assumptions that the Edwardian period was merely a smug continuation of the Victorian age (p. 4). McLean, ed., H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays shifts attention away from Wellss earlier scientific romances to focus on his neglected short stories, journalism and science textbooks published between 1900 and 1930, stressing his need for art to instigate meaningful, root-and-branch social reform (p. 2). Bernard Loings essay on Love and Mr Lewisham [1900] discusses how the composition of this unfairly overlooked novel functioned like a period of apprenticeship for Wells in his determination to write a penetrating novel of manners (pp. 7685). John R. Hammonds essay on Wells and the Discussion Novel (pp. 8698) argues persuasively that Wells in the later fiction is a far more experimental and formally adventurous novelist than he is typically given credit for (p. 86). For specialists in the life and work of E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad, 2008 offered a dizzying variety of book-length monographs, new annotated editions and inventive critical essays. As Tony Davies remarks in Humanism, it is Forsters strong preference for the dialogical and ironic over the solemnly monological, for scepticism over belief (p. 40) which appeals to a new generation of literary theorists and cultural commentators. Amar Acheraious Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers interrogates postcolonial discourse analysis and posits a new model of interpretation that resituates the historical and ideological resonance of the colonial concept. In chapters on Forster and Conrad he questions key issues, including hybridity, Otherness and territoriality. Acheraiou is convincing when showing that hybridity as both a theoretical tool and a historical construct is not a linear, flat narrative of cultural exchange but a twisted, multilayered imperial tale of forced encounters and unequal relationships (p. 2). However, Acheraious contention that Forster and Conrad each held an idealised image of Greece (p. 82) is counterbalanced by enigmatic ambivalence towards ancient Greek culture.
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The reading of Forsters 1903 story Albergo Empedocle presents ancient Greece as a rampart against modernitys discontents while at the same time pointing towards its impotence as a fund of aesthetic and ideological rehabilitation (p. 83). Carey J. Snyders British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographism from Wells to Woolf argues that British modernist writers such as Conrad and Forster read widely in comparative anthropology, conducted their own sporadic fieldwork and thematized the challenges of cultural confrontation in their fiction (p. 25). Snyder brings canonical and popular texts together with travelogues, diaries and ethnographic surveys to show in an interdisciplinary light how anthropological concepts and methods infused the generic and formal experiments of literary modernism. As Snyder avers, compartmentalizing the work of writers like Haggard and Wells as too popular, or Forster as too determinedly realist, hampers efforts to construe the periods pervasive engagement with ethnographic ideas and scenarios (p. 13). Only two book-length studies take up the connection between British modernism and ethnography per seMarc Manganaros Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept [2002] and Gregory Castles Modernism and the Celtic Revival [2001]but these focus exclusively on the modernism of Ireland among the British Isles. Whereas Castle undervalues the pervasiveness of the ethnographic imagination in the modern period (p. 15) Snyder adroitly demonstrates that it shapes an emerging global consciousness (p. 16). De Lange et al., eds., Literary Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism contains a perceptive essay by Gail Fincham on Space and Place in the Novels of E.M. Forster (pp. 3857) which raises questions about the function of imagination in the fashioning of regional topographies. Fincham contends that in Howards End and A Passage to India Forster disavows the belief in that unencumbered and free space celebrated by the earlier tales. In Forsters last two novels, the forces of capitalist commodification and imperialist rapacity crowd out the possibilities of the liberal humanist worldview and its construction of a site whose unkempt profusion offers a safe retreat from metropolitan malaise. Jeremy Hawthorns essay Travel as Incarceration: Jean Rhyss After Leaving Mr Mackenzie indicates how the geographical, social, cultural and historical markers that specify a space out of a neutral territory are always inflected by gender. Using Jean Rhyss novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie Hawthorn demonstrates that the site of Bohemia, a locale that is both spatial and metaphorical, is by no means an identical territory for men and women or for rich and poor (pp. 5874). For the penniless, deracinated, single woman it becomes a source of existential unease and biting estrangement. Andrea Zemgulyss Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage reads E.M. Forsters Howards End against the development of a growing heritage industry in England generally and London particularly. Zemgulys posits that Forster found himself in a city that was being fashioned as historic in ways incongruous with his own critical and cultural agenda. Douglas Maos Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860 1960 subjects Forsters Howards End to a rigorous critique, addressing, like
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H.G. Wellss Tono-Bungay and Aldous Huxleys Crome Yellow, what the great house nurtures and the material circumstances of the artist (p. 179). Lago et al., eds., The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster 19291960 details how Forsters radio broadcasts were a remarkable and multifaceted contribution to British cultural history, though they are only infrequently acknowledged by commentators on his life and work. Through these seventy annotated broadcasts, it becomes apparent that Forster used his public profile not only to address literary topics, but also to branch out into moments of incisive social commentary. Of particular note is his 1930 broadcast on the death of his one-time friend D.H. Lawrence, which irradiates Forsters assured grasp of the motifs woven into the verbal texture of The Plumed Serpent. As Mary Lago suggested in her 1995 biography, E.M. Forster: A Literary Life, the broadcasts provide a lens through which to magnify many of Forsters core aesthetic and sociological concerns. The BBC Talks complements Richard E. Zeikowitzs scrupulously annotated edition of Letters between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature, which supplies insight into Forsters long struggle to craft a satisfactory ending for his groundbreaking but yet unpublished novel, Maurice. Jay Dicksons vigorously expressed essay, E.M. Forsters The Longest Journey and the Legacy of Sentiment (in Hepburn ed., Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance, pp. 16390), chronicles the accretion of meanings which cluster around the term bequest in the Edwardian period, and especially how the language of legal entitlement functions to adumbrate complex emotional and cultural inheritances (p. 164). Dickson is astute in arguing for sudden death as a structural event in Forsters fiction and its centrality to ascertaining his novelistic project (p. 164). Indeed, Dickson demonstrates that Forsters obsession with plots of entailment and disturbed lines of transmission reaches beyond monetary bequests and tangible landed estates to the emotional and ethical legacies left after someones demise (p. 164). Dickson concludes that as much as [Forster] wanted to accept a literal and figurative patrimony he also desired to deviate from and probe the yearnings of the dead, especially in terms of how they themselves wished to be remembered (p. 164). Overall, Dicksons essay supplies a fresh and energetic appraisal of how concepts of tradition, loyalty and regional affiliation coming from the past imbue the restless redefinition of modern subjectivities. Jenny Sharpes essay, The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counterinsurgency (in Burke and Prochaska, eds., Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, pp. 21544), shows that A Passage to India revolves around a discourse of rape that Sharpe historicizes by sedulously tracing the crime from its provenance in the 1857 Mutiny to the 1919 Amritsar massacre. Sharpes shrewd analysis reminds us of a problem that continues to vex and divide feminist commentators: how do we pinpoint the real crime in this novel? Is it Adela Questeds accusation or Azizs alleged assault (p. 32)? John Stapes probing and eloquent biography The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad throws into high relief its subjects restless ability to retool his own aesthetic imperatives, in order to stay ahead of the times. Stape projects a
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Conrad grappling with a deep sense of otherness and multiple cultural identities, as well as a consummate professional writer eager to consolidate a profitable place in a crowded literary marketplace. Lothe et al., eds., Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, is a collection of twelve essays which construe a variety of Conrads fictions through the lens of multiple theoretical perspectives (p. 1). Essays by James Phelan ( I affirm nothing: Lord Jim and the Uses of Textual Recalcitrance, pp. 4159) and Gail Fincham ( To Make You See: Narration and Focalization in Under Western Eyes, pp. 60 80), also reveal Conrads tantalizingly complex development of the resources of voice which is at the core of his seemingly paradoxical capacity to engage and enthral the common reader while challenging the theorist with the artfulness of his narrative technique (p. 9). Indeed, one of the triumphs of this new collection is its confident ability to present Conrad himself as a major narrative theorist through the deployment of innovative temporalities and plots (p. 2). Allan H. Simmonss essay The Nigger of the Narcissus: History, Narrative, and Nationalism (pp. 14159) attests that Conrads practice as a writer provides a site both to apply and to text existing theory (p. 3). Paul Wakes Conrads Marlow: Narrative and Death in Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance follows on from Bernard J. Pariss recent monograph Conrads Charlie Marlow [2005] by taking as its object the four texts narrated by this figure. Whereas Paris adopted a psychological approach to Marlow, Wake finesses a rigorous narratological standpoint, surveying a plethora of theoretical mechanisms while also thoroughly weighing the immense bulk of secondary scholarship devoted to this figure. Wake figures Marlow in terms of the liminality that allows him to occupy an ever-shifting position within, and across, the four key texts (p. xi). Graham MacPhees essay, Under English Eyes: The Disappearance of Irishness in Conrads The Secret Agent (in MacPhee and Poddar, eds., Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective, pp. 10117), questions the insights into imperialism of that self-identified Englishman, Joseph Conrad (p. 19) by reading the disappearance of the Irish context of political insurgency from one of Conrads most widely praised novels. MacPhee contends that Conrads Englishness, far from being idiosyncratic, actually fuses with the potent tendency within nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture in submerging Irish political violence under the banner of an irrational, wayward and abstract attack on civilized virtue (p. 103). David Punters essay, Terrorism and the Uncanny, or, The Caves of Tora Bora (in Collins and Jervis, eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, pp. 20115), conceives of the Professor in Conrads The Secret Agent as an early avatar of the suicide bomber; without obvious motivation, he seems a necessary efflorescence of the inhumanity of the city, a figuration constructed from alienation (pp. 2012). Christopher Herberts War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma situates Mutiny literature in a lineage of modern writing that culminates in Mr. Kurtzs encounter with the horror (pp. 256) in Heart of Darkness. Yael Levins Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrads Novels proposes that Conrads narratives evolve and develop around a central contradiction: shadow, silence and darkness and other such indelible markers of lack as if
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they had a formidable presence and intensity (p. 3). Conrad, according to this densely textured account, delights in complicating the clear categorical distinction between absence and presence as revenants of the intangible seem to brush physical objects with spectral fingertips (p. 3). For Levin, the key aesthetic principle in Conrads fiction is the otherwise presentnamely that which stimulates desire and perpetuates it by preventing its satisfaction or fulfilment. The consideration of The Arrow of Gold and Suspense in this regard is especially impressive. Levins account of Lord Jim should be measured against Thomas Strychaczs Dangerous Masculinities, which contains an important chapter on Conrads novel and its relationship to gender studies. Knowles, ed., My Dear Friend: Further Letters to and about Joseph Conrad is a sequel and supplement (p. ix) to Knowless A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad [2006], which has become a companion to the nine weighty volumes of Conrads own correspondence. Volumes 8 and 9 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad were published in December 2007, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the birth of this Polish seaman turned writer of English literature, and brings to completion a mammoth enterprise that began with the appearance of the first volume in 1983, under the general editorship of Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. The final four volumes have appeared since 2002, though Laurence Davies, reflecting on how it has taken the best part of half a century to garner, catalogue and annotate Conrads letters, admits in his eloquent introduction to volume 9 that this does not pretend to be the final word on the correspondence. Knowles benefits from Daviess sterling editorial scholarship, and does a fine job here of restoring the quality of exchange, interaction and debate that characterizes Conrads correspondence with H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and Arnold Bennett, as well as offsetting the inevitable one-sidedness that results from the tendency of publishing the writers letters in splendid isolation (p. ix). This present volume also gathers a number of recently discovered letters to and about Conrad, including the important cluster of late letters from John Galsworthy, located by J.H. Stape. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Record [1912], edited by Zdzislaw Najder, J.H. Stape and S.W. Reid, was first serialized in Ford Madox Fords English Review in 19089 and represents Conrads most probing autobiographical work. These reminiscences both chronicle and fictionalize his early life and the first tentative phases of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. A Personal Record also operates as a highly effective artistic and political declaration of intent. In this scholarly edition errors introduced by typists and earlier publishers have been corrected to present the text as Conrad intended it. The introduction scrupulously tracks Conrads myriad sources and provides a lively history of writing and reception. In addition to notes which clarify recondite literary, historical and geographical references, the editors offer four maps and a genealogical table to supplement this explanatory material. Berthoud et al., eds., Twixt Land and Sea is a most welcome addition to the excellent Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, which presents new texts of The Secret Sharer, The Smile of Fortune and Freya of the Seven Isles. These three stories, drafted while Conrad was working on Under Western Eyes, were collected together in 1912 and marked the turning point in
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Conrads professional fortunes. The introduction canvasses the sources for these stories, and supplies a detailed and discerning history of composition, publication and their reception up to our time. Of particular help is an insightful essay and comprehensive textual apparatus which gauges the manifold revisions, excisions and censorship the tales underwent. Agnes S.K. Yeows Conrads Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance posits that Conrads Malay Archipelago is an inscrutable, unmoored and notoriously slippery construct which draws attention to the discursive collision and collusion of fiction and history (pp. 13). Yeows central contention that the dialogue between these bitterly contesting voices creates an amorphous discourse is hardly fresh; yet her detailed textual analysis reveals that Conrad stages truth as a conversation between myriad vehicles of meaning and is itself a pernicious illusion. Yeow also demonstrates that, in Conrads era, the fascination with subjective standpoints was evidenced by the dizzying proliferation of new optical devices and innovative techniques of seeing. In the Eastern tales, Yeow argues, it is the nebulous nature of vision which Conrad underscores as he evokes a milieu which is true to his fleeting impressions yet also vaporous, inconclusive, open-ended and tentatively provisional. Tom Henthornes Conrads Trojan Horses: Imperialism, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial Aesthetic contends that while abundant scholarship has fixed Conrad as an early modernist, it may be more accurate to measure his work against such early twentieth-century writers as S.K. Ghosh and Solomon Plaatjepostcolonialists who refined canny strategies for camouflaging their anti-imperialist stance when dealing with British publishers. Henthorne posits that as Conrad began to acquire a larger, imperial audience, he refined a strategy of obfuscating his radical politics through deployment of multiple narrators, slyly sardonic irony and free indirect discourse, and other modes that are now inextricably tied to literary modernism. Henthornes alertness to recent critical responses to Conrad as both a man of, and beyond, his time is impressive. To some degree, Conrad was ready to offer imperialist readers what they required: exotic narratives of adventure and romance. Yet Conrad employs the conventions of populist imperialist genres only to subvert them with malicious glee. In effect, Henthorne concludes, he was writing postcolonial novels well before the genre was established (p. 173). Alex Segals Deconstruction, Radical Secrecy, and The Secret Agent (MFS 54:ii[2008] 189208) shows that Derridas preoccupation with secrecy throws into high relief the intermingling of legality, genteel respectability, intrigue and withheld knowledge in Conrads novel. Segal avers that Derrida and Conrad both evoke what might be termed a depthless secret which allows incompatible interpretative hypotheses to proliferate, so creating an insoluble mystery or a code that cannot be broken (pp. 1956). However, The Secret Agent does not embrace Derridas notion of a democracy to come, nor does it exemplify the endeavour to loosen the sway of the Author. Rather, Segal adeptly concludes, Conrad strives to solidify his own identity as a survivor, specially authorized to dissect the tainted underbelly of metropolitan life (p. 204).
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vinas, and the Scene of Ihor Junyk, Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Le Recognition (MFS 54:i[2008] 14059), interprets Heart of Darkness through vinass ethical philosophy, focusing specifically on two key the lens of Le scenesMarlows meetings with Kurtz and the Intended. Conrad, in Junyks thesis, strives to move beyond the brutality inherent in the Hegelian philosophical tradition, to a viewpoint which places sober self-restraint, respect and responsibility as the first articles of its creed. Of the huge array of article-length submissions on Conrad mention should be given to the following pointed interventions, many of which evince adventurous independence of mind: Douglas Kerr, Stealing Victory? The Strange Case of Conrad and Buchan (Conradiana 40:ii[2008] 14763); Harry Sewall, Liminal Spaces in Lord Jim and The Rescue (Conradiana 40:ii[2008] 10928); Paul Vlitos, Conrads Ideas of Gastronomy: Dining in Falk (VLC 36:ii[2008] 43349); Daniel Just, Between Narrative Paradigms: Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism from a Genre Perspective (ES 89:iii[2008] 27386); Fred Solinger, Absurd BeExploded!: Re-membering Experience through Liminality in Conrads Heart of Darkness (Conradiana 40:i[2008] 6170); and John Lutz, A Rage for Order: Fetishism, Self-Betrayal, and Exploitation in The Secret Agent (Conradiana 40:i[2008] 124). (b)British Fiction 19301945 Much work in this area has taken an ethical turn. Studies of Greene, Orwell and Waugh tend to focus on the moral universe of the narratives. There is also an increasing number of studies on re-narration, especially in connection with the work of Greene and Orwell. New approaches include studies of the cultural transmission of texts. However, the only publication to deal exclusively with fiction of this period is an online journal, Working Papers on the Web, produced by Sheffield Hallam University. A special edition, entitled Investigating the Middlebrow and edited by Erica Brown, includes essays on authors whose cultural status was the subject of contemporary debate: Gilbert Frankau, Winifred Holtby, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth von Arnim. Browns introduction offers an incisive overview of the ways in which critics as different as Q.D. Leavis and Virginia Woolf responded to the growth of a print culture which seemed to threaten their constructions of literary value. However, as Brown points out, the very selection of novelists Leavis uses to illustrate middlebrow taste demonstrates the instability and subjectivity of the category. The diversity of the texts discussed by the essayists in this journal volume and the range of critical approaches used demonstrate the value of attending to the reception of interwar texts to help us understand how cultural hierarchies during this period were constructed. The first essay in the issue, Nicola Humbles The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow (WPW 11[2008] 17 paras), examines the use of camp in depictions of homosexual identity in a range of novels, using the framework for debate set up by Susan Sontag in Notes on Camp. In her discussion of the novels of Nancy Mitford, Rosamond Lehmann, Rachel
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Ferguson and, pre-eminently, E.F. Benson she suggests that the concept of camp provides one more way of understanding that elaborate dance whereby the middlebrow novel manages to be both populist and snobbish, conservative and radical, inclusive and excluding, sophisticated yet playfulall at the same time. Not only is Humbles use of Sontags terms persuasive and the range of insight formidable, but she exhibits two qualities rare in academic discourse: wit and the ability to convey the pleasures of the texts she is analysing. Though Juliane Ro mhilds essay on Elizabeth von Arnim, Betwixt and Between: Reading von Arnim Writing Elizabeth (WPW 11[2008] 18 paras) does not deal with a text from our period, it raises an issue pertinent to the cultural debates conducted within it: the suspect nature of literary pleasure and readability that accompanied the valorization of an uncompromising high modernism. Ro mhild demonstrates how von Arnims fictional Elizabeth exercises the critical independence of just such a woman and in just such a novel that would later be disparaged as middlebrow. In Half-amused, half-mocking: Laughing at the Margins in Rosamond Lehmanns Dusty Answer (WPW 11[2008] 17 paras) Sophie Blanch, like Humble, considers the way in which homosexual identity is depicted in Rosamond Lehmanns Dusty Answer [1927] (Lehmanns equivocal cultural status having been subtly analysed by Wendy Pollards recent reception studyRosamond Lehmann and her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception [2004]). Blanch, like Humble, notes that humour remains a critical, and critically under-examined, mode of discharging gender anxiety and fragile constructions of class superiority in the inter-war years. Her essay suggests further uses of George Merediths and Henri Bergsons theories of comedy in studies of the neglected genre of interwar comedy. Victoria Stewart, Middlebrow Psychology in Gilbert Frankaus Novels of the 1930s (WPW 11[2008] 22 paras), argues that one of the male authors anathematized by Q.D. Leavis as middlebrow, Gilbert Frankau, was experimenting with techniques to represent new ways of understanding unstable subjectivities and mental breakdown, in ways that parallel modernist experiments. Winifred Holtby too attempted to communicate radical ideas to a wide audience. Lisa Regans essay, The Romance of Africa: Gender, Adventure and Imperialism in the Novels of Winifred Holtby (WPW 11[2008] 28 paras), explores how Holtbys fiction positions the interwar middlebrow novel in critical dialogue with high- and lowbrow representations of Africa as an exotic, distinct and inferior other . Regan discusses the way in which Holtby resists the terms with which a large and ever increasing body of competent fiction read by the great intermediate class of novel reading public was dismissed. Both Stewarts and Regans studies provide evidence that popular fiction can be read as counter-hegemonic. There is still scope for more investigation of the cultural status and the narrative strategies of the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and George Orwell. Though their fiction has proved to have an enduring appeal, the critical work on them sometimes tends to deal with the nature of their non-literary values. Stephen K. Land, in The Human Imperative: A Study of the Novels of Graham Greene, describes the nature of the moral universe constructed in Greenes novels: the dynamics of the conflict between hero and
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antagonists and the way in which these dynamics change in the later novels. He points out that, though the victims of the conflict between hero and antagonist have minor roles in the plot, they function as key moral indicators, their fate providing a moral epiphany for the morally confused protagonist. The attraction of the morally dubious for the hero renders his investigative gaze compromised, but nevertheless shapes the readers response to the complex moral distinctions constructed by each novel. Land reads the novels as stable constructs and focuses on structure and plot function rather than discourse; several interesting points are made, chief of which is that hero and antagonist become progressively kin during the later novels, thus putting pressure on Greene to create a second antagonist more sinister than the first in order to restore the dynamics of the default plot associated with the thriller genre. Though all the readings are persuasive there are, perhaps, few surprises. Also concerned with Greenes ethical imperatives, and to some extent a study of re-narration, is Malika Rebai Maamris Cosmic Chaos in The Secret Agent and Graham Greenes Its a Battlefield (Conradiana 40:ii[2008] 17992). The links drawn between the two texts are largely thematic: the injustice of official justice and the unreadable and unknowable nature of identity. However, there is a suggestive discussion towards the end of the essay of the debt both authors owe to Lombrosos construction of female deviance. sare Lombrosos The Female Maamri argues that Guglielmo Ruggero and Ce Offender [1895] might be the origin of the contrast between the ways in which male and female criminality are represented in the work of both Conrad and Greene. Whereas the male criminals aberrant behaviour deviates from a supposedly civilized norm, the female criminals behaviour is essentially that of a victim who is therefore not considered deviant. Greene is linked with Waugh in the brief essay by Lynda Prescott in Robert Fraser and Mary Hammonds Books Without Borders, volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. This two-volume collection of essays introduces a new dimension to book history and studies of reception by examining the way in which texts acquire new meanings as they are transmitted from one culture to another. Many of these essays offer new avenues of research into cultural transmission at this period. Lynda Prescotts brief essay, Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel (pp. 14758), explores the way both authors use the notion of elsewhere (discussed by Paul Fussell in Abroad [1980]) as an expression of alienation both from an authentic inner identity and from a British culture from which they could derive such an identity. Both authors, of course, used the material gathered for commissioned travel writing in their fiction; Prescott points the way to more extended comparisons of how the differing genres of travel writing and fiction enforce differing kinds of perspective on and engagement with the same observed other. Greenes fictions, like Orwells, are now so deeply embedded in our culture that it is not surprising to find studies of the ways in which they have been re-narrated, for example Sander Lees John Drake in Greeneland: Noir Themes in Secret Agent (in Sanders and Skoble, eds., The Philosophy of TV Noir, pp. 6982). However, such studies rarely illuminate much about the original narrative transposed.
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In his article Noble Bodies: Orwell, Miners, and Masculinity (ES 89:iv[2008] 42746) Ben Clarke has followed his exemplary Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths and Values [2007] with a persuasive account of the way in which Orwell represents miners and mining. Orwells celebration of the supposedly and traditionally masculine qualities engendered by mining means that such work is figured as elemental rather industrial. Clarke argues that Orwells positive myth of the archetypal proletarian . . . obscures the inequalities and tensions within these communities. It also does not resolve the problem of their being closed structures. The very practices and values that made mining communities cohesive excluded outsiders, not least Orwell himself(p. 427). Clarke argues that, although Orwells homoerotic celebration of miners is shared with Harold Heslops Last Cage Down [1935], Jack Hiltons English Ways [1940] and the works of D.H. Lawrence, his utopian fantasy of what he calls, in The Road to Wigan Pier, the easy completeness of a miners family life lacks the acknowledgement contained in the work of Alan Sillitoe and Lawrence that drunkenness and violence often threatened domestic happiness. Nor did Orwell address the gender inequalities upon which his fantasy rested, either within the home or within the mining communities. Orwells idealizations of mining communities lack the complexity of debates about value and identity traced by writers such as Lawrence, Lewis Jones and Sillitoe; however, his idealizations serve to dramatize the perceived absence of cohesion in the communities to which Orwell felt he might be assigned. The title of Lorraine Saunderss critical study of Orwells novels, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels, from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four, declares its recuperative intent. The literary focus of her critique is welcome and the comparison of Orwells narrative strategies with Gissings is illuminating. Her analysis of the subject position of each novel works to weaken the traditional identification of Orwell with his defeated and compromised protagonists. However, it is curious that the pressure on Orwell scholars to be thrown back on to a moral evaluation is felt even within this literary-critical study. It is as though they are constrained by the terms Orwell set himself and which Saunders strives to challenge, terms which derive from Orwells conviction that the political commitment demanded of the times was bound to compromise literary artistry. As its title indicates, David Lebedoffs The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War is not a work of academic scholarship or literary analysis. Its sources are not new and its interests are biographical and ideological. However, its uses for the academic lie in its provocative argument, outlined in the chapter entitled The Same Man (pp. 181211), that Orwell and Waugh, for all their personal and political differences, promote a similar set of values. In conclusion, there have been far fewer studies of works from this period than there were in 2007. Not many of the studies that have been published make connections between writers, who remain segregated by gender, genre or cultural status.
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(c) James Joyce The absence of any prevailing theoretical trend in Joyce studies over the past few years has proven to be advantageous in that a number of disparate theoretical and methodological approaches have been allowed to thrive. This present survey will cover two years, 20078, in which a number of important works appeared, and while there is no overall critical direction that could be said to be dominant, the number of micro trends in evidence here is encouraging. For example, 2007 saw the publication of a spate of books specifically devoted to Finnegans Wake, which until recently had seemed to be neglected when work published on it is compared to the number of books concerning Joyces other texts. Two of these works on the Wake involve genetic criticism, which now seems to be emerging into the mainstream of Joyce and Wake criticism, one is a throwback to postcolonial criticism, albeit with a novel angle, and one offers a fresh philosophical, and specifically ethical, reading. Consolidating more than a decade of pioneering work on genetic studies of the Wake, the inelegantly but aptly entitled collection of essays, How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, presents a survey of the Wake from the perspective of the composition of each chapter. As the editors Luca Crispi and Sam Slote note in the introduction, this arrangement is potentially problematic in that the Wake was not, in point of fact, written chapter by chapter. To assuage this problem, their introduction summarizes the salient features of the Wakes seventeen-year composition from a chronological perspective, thereby providing an overview for the detailed information that follows in the various chapters. Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume provide a comprehensive account of the creation and development of the Wake from a variety of perspectives, thereby illustrating the range and possibilities of genetic criticism. In total, the essays in this collection make a compelling case about how the Wake can be better understood by seeing it through its work in progress, that is, through its seventeen-year gestation. The editors were also fortunate to be able to discuss the Wake manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in March 2006 and so the information presented is reasonably up-to-date. These new documents show that Joyces composition practices were more varied than previously assumed. Predictably, some of the contributions are better than others. Particularly notable contributions include Jed Deppmans slow and patient analysis of how chapter II.4 was built up or fused together out of two separate vignettes; Dirk Van Hulles subtle reading of the genesis and evolution of Book IV; and Finn Fordhams essay, which describes the ways in which the first and last chapters, which were composed at different times, were linked together to form the circular ricorso of the Wake. How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake is a major achievement and represents a significant advance in genetic studies. Finn Fordham, one of the contributors to How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, has also written a first-rate full-length study of the Wake: Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake. In terms of influence, this book will likely supersede John Bishops Joyces Book of the Dark, now over twenty years old. Fordhams
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approach is multi-polar: rather than limit himself to one theoretical methodology, he deploys seven different theoretical perspectives as a means of not just interpreting the Wake but of showing how, through practical exegesis, the Wake invites and encourages multiplicity. These different approaches structural, narrational, theoretical, inspirational, philological, genetic and exegeticalare introduced and discussed in the first chapter and then applied to four brief sample passages from the Wake. The readings themselves are nuanced, original and perspicacious, and the book is crisply written. The readings proceed from a genetic perspective by starting with the compositional evolution of the selected passages, but the readings Fordham provides are much more catholic than genetic criticism. Beyond simply providing exegeses of passages of the Wake, Fordham presents and illustrates a whole new approach to reading it, one that is generous and sensitive to multiplicity. In a sense, Fordhams book is valuable as a lesson in the ethics of Wakean hermeneutics. In many ways, complementary to Fordhams book is Philip Kitchers Joyces Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake. Kitcher aims towards a more general interpretative overview of the Wake which is developed in the first seven chapters. He then moves on to give a chapter-by-chapter survey of the work that follows from his prolegomenon. In effect Kitcher reads the Wake as a work of ethical philosophy and argues that it is vitally preoccupied with the assessment and vindication of a human life, a vindication to be achieved, if at all, in retrospect (p. 12). He thus construes it as a humanist work eminently concerned with the ambiguity and ambivalence of life. While such a reading may seem retrograde, Kitcher argues for it well and with the requisite force and nuance. His book is very much in keeping with an ethical turn that has been taking place in Joyce criticism over the past few years: an awareness that perhaps Joyces works arent merely repositories of puzzles for critics and readers to solve and resolve but are instead concerned with promoting a way of life open to and tolerant of ambiguity and plurality. While it is admirable in many ways, I find that Kitchers underlying thesis is belied by the readings he presents of individual chapters and passages. While overall he is concerned with plurality and an ethics of ambiguity, his readings are, for the most part, strikingly linear and novelistic, as if he were denying ambiguity and complexity at the level of the individual passage while championing ambiguity at the larger level. In this respect I find Fordhams book, with its more eclectic hermeneutics, a better illustration of the thesis Kitcher presents. Nonetheless, this is a significant book and, taken together with Fordhams, advances the state of Wake studies. Len Platts new book, Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake, follows from much of the recent postcolonial criticism of Joycein particular Vincent Chengs Joyce, Race, and Empirewhile also offering a substantial new take on the topic. Platt reads the Wake as engaging in a sustained negative critique of European racism as promulgated through both the sciences and politics. In this he follows on from Philippe Sollerss famous claim from the 1975 Joyce Symposium in Paris that the Wake is the most formidably anti-fascist book produced between the two wars. Platt finds Vicos influence on the Wake important because of the way in which Vico promoted the universality and
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interconnectedness of human life and culture. And so, through this prism of universality, Platt reads every page of the Wake as orientated against the promotion of any form of monolithic culture and identity. He also faults much postcolonial criticism of the Wake for focusing too much on an Irish context to Joyces critique of race, thereby being guilty of (or at least susceptible to) the charge of a form of Hibernocentric racism. Like Kitchers book, and perhaps even more so, Platt does little to problematize issues of plot and character in the Wake, preferring to treat them as relatively stable entities in order to educe his chosen theme. Such critical mono-opticality perhaps runs the risk of undermining the theoretical plurality he wishes to reveal and analyse. Of the four major books on the Wake to appear in 2007, Platts is the most reductive in that he continually insists upon one central theme to Joyces book, even if that theme is plurality. However, this is far from a damning problem and does not necessarily seriously undermine the contribution that Platt makes with this book. Like Fordhams book, Richard Beckmans Joyces Rare View: The Nature of Things in Finnegans Wake advocates a multifaceted approach to the Wake. Beckmans approach is different from Fordhams, although the results are equally playful and incisive. Beckmans analysis can effectively be summed up as variations on a theme, with the theme being the rare view. The idea is that each new perspective affords another rare view of both this particular motif and its variations, as well as of the larger structure of the Wake. In this way, Beckmans analysis differs from Clive Harts motival analysis of the Wake first published in 1962 but inordinately influential on most of the Wake criticism that has appeared sinceby showing how interpretations of structurality themselves change through shifting motifs. Beckmans readings are minute and attentive, but he is always aware of larger issues and makes a cogent argument about the epistemological implications of Joyces linguistic experimentation. As with Fordham, Beckmans work exemplifies the virtues of critical plurality. Each of these five books is significant for Wake studies, and the fact that they all appeared in the same year is both unusual and welcome. Of course, other significant books on Joyce were published in 2007. The introductory volume genre remains, as ever, popular, with new titles appearing regularly. One of the finest examples of the general introduction to Joyce is Derek Attridges How to Read Joyce, which is part of Grantas How to Read series. In his introduction Attridge cogently argues the virtues of Joyces complexity to the end that, rather than impeding a first-time readers appreciation of Joyces works, the complexity actually serves it. The readings Attridge presents of passages from Joyces major works illustrate this principle. His readings of the individual texts begin with brief passages that then lead into discussions of grander themes. These readings are models of elegance and perspicacity. While intended for the beginner, there is much in his readings that could be of use to (supposedly) more advanced critics, at least in terms of being a paradigm of lucid style. In particular, his two chapters on the Wake are thorough and engaging. This book is definitely one to recommend for the novice and would be particularly suitable as a secondary text for a course on Joyce.
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A strong addition to theoretical approaches to Joyce can be found in Brian Cosgroves James Joyces Negations: Irony, Indeterminacy and Nihilism in Ulysses and Other Writings. Cosgroves concern is an issue central to all of Joyces worksirony. Specifically, Cosgrove construes irony as a metaphysical stance rather than a humble problem of rhetoric, in that the existence of the possibility of irony indicates an insufficiency of the representational capacity of language. The central focus of his argument is that Joycean irony has more in common with the Schlegelian flavour than the Flaubertian. This is not to deny Flaubert influence over Joyce; rather, it serves to emphasize where Joyce differs from his French precursor. Cosgrove claims that the Flaubertian ironic stance is one of detachment and thus implies the artists bemused superiority. In distinction, the perspective of Joycean irony would be embedded within the chaotic world it ironizes, thereby avoiding the pretence of superiority. This allows for a reading of Joyce that is at once humanistic (Joyce laughs with us, not at us) but also complex, in that this Joycean empathy derives directly from a realization of the negativity of language. Joycean irony is thus Joyces vehicle for acknowledging, and affirming, the indeterminacy, and even incoherence, of the world. Cosgrove nimbly works his way through Schlegel (and, crucially in this case, Nietzsche, whose influence on Joyce remains something of a lacuna in the secondary literature) in order to show how Joyces works negotiate systematicity through indeterminacy. Through detailed readings of Dubliners and Ulysses, Cosgrove examines numerous modalities of the unreliability of linguistic utterance. He also provides thematic investigations through Ulysses, such as the issues of stylistic multiplicity and Joyces encyclopaedic mania and how these implicate broader epistemological issues, such as how a putatively totalizing work relates to and indicates chaos and indeterminacy. Cosgroves analysis is fresh and insightful about both the theories he applies and, more importantly, the Joycean text. As part of the increasing productivity of Joyceans in Italy, the Joyce Studies in Italy series continues to publish compelling new work. The latest addition to the series, Joyce and/in Translation, edited by Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Ira Torresi, derives from a panel held at the 2006 Joyce Symposium in Budapest. The essays in this collection show the diversity of approaches translation studies makes possible for Joyce criticism. Patrick ONeills contribution summarizes his 2005 book Polyglot Joyce, where he characterized the material and theoretical implications and additions posed, exposed and imposed by translations. He argues that translations are not merely secondary derivatives that exist alongside an original text which retains supremacy, but rather are interpretations and reinterpretations of an ongoing trans-linguistic process of textuality. Many of the other contributions in this volume share and expand upon ONeills premises and provide many fascinating examples and illustrations of what happens when the Joycean texts get translated. Of particular note is Serenella Zanottis account of early Italian translations of Ulysses, Irena Grubicas analysis of the two Croatian translations of Ulysses and Fritz Senns brief survey of the ostensibly simply elements of Joyces text that can confound translation. Another volume on translation and Joyce is Ida rds Fictions of Hybridity: Translating Style in James Joyces Ulysses. Klitga rd examines the three different Danish translations of Ulysses (all by the Klitga
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same translator, Morgens Boisen) for their relative strengths and weaknesses; she pays special attention to the vagaries and problems of rendering stylistic rd writes engagingly, even though a effects across languages. Klitga book-length study on the subject of translation can easily devolve into a series of tables of mistranslated or poorly translated words and phrases. Besides the Joyce Studies in Italy series, Franca Ruggieri has initiated a new series of shorter books devoted to Joyce, the piccolo biblioteca Joyciana, also published by Bulzoni. Amongst their offerings is a collection of recent essays by Fritz Senn, Ulyssean Close-Ups. Despite the title, the focus is not exclusively on Ulysses: the first essay, In Full Gait: Aesthetics of Footsteps, traces patterns of walking and gait from Dubliners through Ulysses. Throughout these essays Senn displays his customary sense of sticking close to the details of the text in order to unweave compelling interpretations. If, as Kitcher proposes in his book on the Wake, Joyce teaches us something about how to livethat is, Joyce is a writer primarily concerned with an ethics Senn is an interpreter most concerned with the ethics of reading, of responding to the nuances and oddities of the text with probity and acumen. In particular, the final essay, Authorial Awareness, is important in that it opens the question of how much a reader should account for what the author may or may not have known; while Senn doesnt formally answer this question, he does much in this short piece to elucidate the importance of the issues raised by this problem. Senns memoirs of his many years with both Joyces texts and his fellow-JoyceansJoycean Murmoirs, ably edited by Christine ONeill make a compelling addition to his many essays on Joyce. On the one hand, these memoirs serve as an insiders perspective upon the evolution of what is (sometimes derisively) termed the Joyce industry (in which this present review is but one tiny cog). Senn is consistently tactful and avoids straying into the realm of the merely gossipacious. While Senn has been instrumental and influential in the development of this critical cadre right from the start, he is also, as he announces, something of an outsider since he is not a professional academic. On the other hand, he frequently takes the opportunity during his recollections to launch into reflections on and observations about Joyces texts. His love of Joyces works is clearly in evidence. The memoirs consist of interviews held with Christine ONeill, who has done a superlative job of editing the material into thematically aligned chapters (a separate German edition is also available, with some differences in the contents in order to orient the volume to a Swiss German audience). In terms of providing an insiders account of the development of Joyce criticism, a companion volume to Senns memoirs can be found in the collected letters of Adaline Glasheen and Hugh Kenner, A Passion for Joyce, edited by Edward Burns, who has previously edited Glasheens correspondence with Thornton Wilder. Like Senn, while both these individuals were instrumental in establishing the Joyce industry, both considered themselves outsiders: Kenners interests were too wide-ranging for him to think of himself as solely a Joycean, and Glasheen was not a professional academic. Their letters provide a fascinating running commentary on this history of Joyce studies from these individuals, revealing various biases (such as a mutual dislike of
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Richard Ellmann). In particular, Kenners letters about the controversy that emerged after the publication of the Rosenbach manuscript of Ulysses in 1977 as to whether or not that manuscript provided all the fair-copy text of the first edition of Ulysses show that bitter polemic over textual matters is hardly novel in Joyce studies. The letters also provide an interesting window on Kenners critical creativity as he writes to Glasheen about the books he is writing, first Joyces Voices (first published in 1978) then his Ulysses (first published in 1980, revised in 1987). As with his previous volume, Burnss editorial work is beyond impressive: seemingly no detail is left unglossed. His care and attention to the letters of Joyce critics make one realize yet again the deficient state of affairs such critics have to contend with because of the unavailability of a good collection of Joyces own letters. Of course the Joyce industry continues to flourish, as is evidenced in the number of conferences devoted to this one author. One of the issues of the large biennial Joyce symposia is that while a broad topic is chosen for the conference, and usually one that is related to the location of that conference, the sheer number of papers means that this rubric is honoured more in the breach than the observance. This means that most symposia tend to lack an overall coherence, which is not necessarily a bad thing in that it allows, at least potentially, for spontaneity. For example, the 2002 symposium in Trieste was designated Mediterranean Joyce, and indeed some, but hardly the majority, of the participants delivered papers related to this theme. However, the editors of the conference volume, Sebastian D.G. Knowles, Geert Lernout and John McCourt, chose to entitle the conference proceedings, Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, after Margot Norriss plenary address, thereby letting that emerge in retrospective arrangement as the conference theme. Norriss talk, Risky Reading of Risky Writing, which is included in the volume, follows from her 2003 book Suspicious Readings of Joyces Dubliners. Norriss argument is that the reader can take responsibility for textual uncertainties by pressing in readings against the grain to see what conclusions and ramifications, however tentative, may emerge. In the 2003 book she focused on Dubliners, and in her Trieste paper she applied this tactic to Ulysses and the Wake. Like Senn and Kitcher, although in a slightly different vector, her argument has broader ethical implications than just hermeneutics since, as she says, In life we are often obliged to make judgements in the face of insufficient evidence, limited knowledge, and characters, events, and motivations that are unfathomable (pp. 378). While the other writers collected in this volume dont necessarily practise this idea of risky readingand the notion of risk is perhaps something of a melodramatic overstatement when it comes to literary criticismthere are a good number of compelling articles. Michael Groden provides a preliminary account of the National Library of Irelands 2002 acquisition of Joyce manuscripts; while this was cutting-edge in 2002 when he first delivered this paper at the conference, the material is still useful as a survey of the new material. Vike Martina Plock provides an original reading of Nausicaa by linking it back to Cyclops through its manipulation of Irish nationalist hagiography. The collection also includes a brief piece by Hugh Kenner, perhaps his last on Joyce.
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Other works that appeared in 2007 are the new edition of Vivian Igoes guidebook James Joyces Dublin Houses and Nora Barnacles Galway, a meticulous inventory of Joyce and Noras numerous residences in Dublin and Galway that is filled with detailed information garnered over many years. At the other end of various different spectrums would be Peter Mahons book on Joyce and Derrida, Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas. While obviously heavily theory-laden, Mahons book lacks meticulousness. In his reading of the rapports between the Wake and Derridas Glas he neglects to seriously discuss the works of Derrida that actively engage with Joyces texts. In many ways, Mahon largely ignores the linguistic complexity of Finnegans Wake; instead, his reading is thematic and narrative-oriented and so, ultimately, his readings of both Derrida and Joyce tend to be simplistic and reductive. His book is an example of the sort of work that gave deconstruction a bad name in the 1980s. Beyond the expected arrival of numerous new books of Joyce criticism, the traditional venues, the journals and conferences, keep chugging along. The year 2007 saw the North American conference at the University of Texas Austin as well as the summer schools in Dublin and Trieste and a workshop at the Zurich Joyce Foundation on cruxes in Joyces work. The Joyce Studies Annual was resurrected, being translocated from Austin to Fordham University in New York, under the editorship of Moshe Gold and Philip Sicker. Highlights include an essay by Margot Norris, again following from her suspicious readings of Dubliners, but this time moving into possible worlds theory with a reading of Wandering Rocks. The 2008 issue includes some papers first presented at the 2007 Austin conference by Carol Shloss and Robert Spoo about the litigation between Shloss and the James Joyce Estate over her 2003 biography of Lucia Joyce. In early 2007, a California court upheld Shlosss rights to use copyrighted material in her work. While her victory technically does not set any precedent, it is a heartening result for scholars. In collaboration with Michael Groden and Paul K. Saint-Amour, Shloss and Spoo prepared a list of frequently asked questions about copyright matters affecting Joyce scholars for the James Joyce Quarterly (JJQ 44[2007] 75384). Dublin is seeing a marked increase in Joyce activity. In addition to several annual conferences that began in 2008, including one for postgraduate students that will rotate between University College Dublin, Trinity College ` Roma III and a research colloquium at UCD, the Dublin, and the Universita Dublin James Joyce Journal (DubJJJ), under the editorship of Anne Fogarty and Luca Crispi, was launched in 2008. The inaugural issue contains articles il n Owens on Dubliners, by Christine ONeill on Niall Montgomery, Co Terence Killeen on Alfred Hunter and Malcolm Sen on Joyces orientalism. The range of Joyce books that appeared in 2008 is more eclectic than those from 2007, although a few broad trends can be educed. The multi-contributor introductory volume, as exemplified by the Cambridge Companion series, sees a fresh entry with Richard Browns A Companion to James Joyce. The twenty-five essays are divided into three broad sections. The first looks at Joyces four major works, the second, Contexts and Locations, examines the various cultural resonances that inform Joyces works, and the third,
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Approaches and Receptions, examines the contexts in which Joyces works can be and have been examined. The second section is especially interesting in terms of essays devoted to contexts not normally associated with Joyce, especially within an introductory volume, such as Japan and New Zealand, written by, respectively, Eishiro Ito and David Wright. Indeed, essays by John Nash (on Joyces reception in Ireland) and Mark Wollaeger (on postcolonial theory) do an excellent job of showing how complex the question of Joyce as an Irish writer is and has been for previous generations of readers and critics. The essays in the third section are mostly first-rate In particular, Jean-Michel does a very good job in clearly delineating the impact Joyce has had on Rabate French theory. Daniel Ferrer provides an elegant introduction to genetic criticism and Katherine Mullin does an excellent job of contextualizing Joyce as a modernist writer through the magazines in which his works were serialized. The introductory volumes gained another addition with David Pierces Reading Joyce. Unlike the typical introductory book, Pierces weaves in autobiographical elements: describing what Joyce has meant to him is one of his strategies for trying to entice others to share his enthusiasm. Ever since Alice Kaplans French Lessons the memoir form has acquired some popularity within works of criticism as this has the advantage of conveying an emotional as well as an intellectual response to a work of literary art. (Perhaps Roland McHughs The Finnegans Wake Experience could be seen as a precursor to the hybrid of memoir and critical monograph.) Since Joyce is somewhat of an autobiographical writeralbeit a complex one in terms of the interweave between autobiography and fictionalizationan autobiographical or semi-autobiographical response can certainly be apt. And in the context of Pierces book I think that he does effectively communicate his enthusiasm to first-time readers. What is potentially very useful is that Pierce spends some time with potential misapprehensions such readers may encounter, using them as potential portals of discovery for the text. He also provides many useful e into Joyce by helping ground the illustrations to his text as a further entre texts within their historical and cultural milieu. Pierces book is certainly unique within the genre of introductory texts and manages to be both engaging and informative. A number of comparative studies appeared in 2008, each one with a different theoretical and critical orientation. Perhaps the most striking of these is Dirk Van Hulles Manuscript Genetics, Joyces Know-How, Becketts Nohow, which attempts to rephrase the rapport between Beckett and Joyce, thereby moving the comparative study of these two authors to a more nuanced level. As Van Hulles title indicates, his approach is to this problem is through genetic criticism, and this proves to be an ideal optic for the task at hand since he argues that, for both Joyce and Beckett, the composition process is an integral part of what these authors works convey (p. 2). Van Hulle is remarkably adroit at showing how practical problems of interpreting Joyces manuscripts, such as the relative dating of different drafts, implicate broader theoretical issues. For example, his examination of the various possible hypotheses of the sequence in which Joyce wrote the first drafts of what became the first two sections of chapter I.5 of the Wake suggests how Joyce
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himself was a kind of genetic critic of his own work in that he was actively commenting upon his own processes of writing. If Joyces works are exemplary for genetic criticism, as can be seen in the sheer quantity of work done in this regard over the past twenty years, then, Van Hulle argues, Becketts writings are likewise relevant. It is in the Beckett section that Van Hulle really breaks new ground. This is clearly a significant work of criticism for Joyce studies, Beckett studies and genetic criticism. Alistair Cormacks Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition maintains that both Yeats and Joyce turned to esoteric philosophy and mysticismsuch as Berkeley, Blake, Bruno and Vicoas a means of creating a new prolific historical consciousness (p. 159), thereby effecting a specifically Irish variety of modernism. Cormacks yoking of Yeats and Joyce in a reconfiguration of how modernism might be construed is novel and provocative, albeit not without room for contention. His reading of chapter II.2 of the Wake as an earnestrather than, as has previously been understood, ironicreworking of Yeatss use of mysticism and esoteric sources in A Vision is perhaps exemplary of his whole book. The reading is audacious and original and potentially provides a whole new way of understanding the Wake, although at the expense of seeing its humour. Unfortunately, Cormack tends to miss or downplay the ironic in Joyce. One of many surprising gaps in Joyce scholarship is the absence of a sustained study of Joyce and Proust, two obvious key figures for European modernism. Attempting to redress this lack is Michael O Sullivans The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh. Rather than approaching these two authors from the perspective of the issue of memory and recollectionan obvious but still pending analysisOSullivan addresses the issue of incarnation. He makes a distinction between incarnation and embodiment in order to signal a critique of poststructural readings of both Joyce and Proust. As will be familiar to readers of Merleau-Ponty, embodiment redefines the Cartesian split between mind and body, but, OSullivan argues, at the expense of valorizing linguistic negativity, as can be evinced in deconstructive readings of Joyce and Proust. And so, instead, he emphasizes incarnation, that is, a consubstantiality of word and flesh. In terms of Joyces persistent engagement with Catholic theology, such a notion is promising, although OSullivan might be missing the mark when he argues that in Ulysses only Molly can be said to exemplify the union of flesh and language. His argument is novel and engaged with both the Joycean and the Proustian corpus. A different approach to Joyces use and abuse of Catholic theology can be found in Roy Gottfrieds new book Joyces Misbelief. In effect, Gottfried reads Joyces works through Buck Mulligans comment to Stephen that you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only its injected the wrong way (Ulysses 1.209). According to Gottfrieds analysis, Joyce consistently defines his aesthetic against Catholic dogma, and so he consistently redefines and reorients key concepts of Catholicism, such as epicleti and epiphany. In order to rebel, Joyce consistently needs something to rebel against. For Gottfried, Joyces catholicism comes as a reaction from and against Catholicism; that is, Joyce rebels against dogmaany type of dogma, any self-privileging assertion
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of a univocal truthby projecting an eclectic array of the partial and fragmented. Gottfried does tread an established critical path, but he provides some original and meticulous close readings of passages, from Dubliners to Ulysses to the Wake. While he attenuates certain conceptssuch as schism and heresyin order to advance his overall argument, his book is a welcome and serious addition to a crucial dimension of Joyces aesthetic. Thomas Jackson Rice offers a different definition of Joyces aesthetic in his new book Cannibal Joyce, which, like Gottfrieds book, is published as part of the University Press of Florida Joyce series. Rice characterizes Joyce as cannibalistic, not strictly in the sense of flesh-eating, but rather in an alternative meaning of the word cannibal: a repurposing of parts from an otherwise non-functional machine. In this way, cannibalism is a type of creativity born out of what is defunct, redigesting it, so to speak. Rices analysis of Joyces cannibalistic reappropriation and repurposing consists of three aspects, linguistic, cultural and technological. In this final part of the book, on technology, Rice follows on from his earlier book Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity [1997] as well as from work by Louis Armand. An interesting conceptual association can be made between Rices book and those by Gottfried and OSullivan in that all three discuss transubstantiation as a metaphor (or perhaps metonym) for artistic creativity. Rices insights and readings are novel and provocative even if he is on occasion in danger of attenuating his metaphorical concept of cannibalism. Proving that it still hasnt been fully digested into the corpus of Joyce criticism, postcolonial criticism remains a potent force, as is evinced in the collection edited by Leonard Orr, Joyce, Imperialism, and Postcolonialism. There is no overarching theme to the essays in this collection other than an engagement with various modalities of postcolonial criticism and theory. Jon Hegglunds essay on how Joyce mimes and parodies colonial patterns of epistemological acquisition and codification in Ithaca is one of the stronger contributions. Also of note are essays by Christy Burns and Michael Tratner, both of whom apply a comparative approach to their readings of Joyce by bringing in, respectively, Brian Friel and Salman Rushdie. Joyces sole extant play Exiles has always been the ugly duckling of his oeuvre; even Giacomo Joyce has received more critical attention. In The Early Joyce and the Writing of Exiles Nick De Marco attempts to situate Exiles within the development of Joyces aesthetic as a kind of culmination of Joyces youthful interest in and enthusiasm for Ibsen and his earliest writings on aesthetics. De Marco goes through all of Joyces early works and notebooks in great detail and traces out a line of artistic egoism in the evolution of Joyces s aesthetics. In this, his book works as a complement to Jean-Michel Rabate James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism [2001]. While his thesis suffers from the Ellmaniacal mistake of biographical tautology in terms of reading the character of Stephen Dedalus as a figuration of James Joyce, his study is a worthwhile addition. il n Owenss Rounding out another years worth of new Joyce criticism is Co James Joyces Painful Case, a thorough reading of that story from Dubliners through a variety of different perspectives, each prompted, Owens argues, by tendencies latent within that text. Although his focus is one story, his readings
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have implications for all of Dubliners and, indeed, for all of Joyces oeuvre. Owens argues that Joyce concatenates so many diverse perspectives into one single story that it likewise requires a critical plurality to reckon with it. His methodology and readings are elegant and inspire one to imagine similarly multi-perspectival approaches to Joyces other works. (d) D.H. Lawrence D.H. Lawrence criticism and scholarship continue to open up fresh perspectives on his life and works. The year 2008 saw the publication of three monographs, two biographies, two significant chapters in books and five journal articles, plus new volumes of the three specialist Lawrence journals, and new selections of Lawrences letters and poems. Keith Sagars D.H. Lawrence: Poet is a welcome addition to the slim body of reliable writings on the poetry. In a prefatory note to the books lengthy bibliography, Sagar stresses that Lawrences poetry has certainly not been neglected in critical circles, but there are still surprisingly few book-length studies one could recommend without reservation to interested undergraduates. The only two consistently insightful monographs are Sandra M. Gilberts Acts of Attention [1972] and Holly A. Lairds Self and Sequence [1988]. Amit Chaudhuris more recent D.H. Lawrence and Difference: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present [2003] is perhaps symptomatic in the way it sets up a promising theoretical framework for approaching the poetry, only to pay seriously flawed attention to specific poems. As both an authority on Lawrences life and works, and a practising poet, Sagar brings a well-informed and clear-headed, but also refreshingly opinionated, perspective to bear on Lawrences poetry. His book comprises six chapters, covering the full range of Lawrences career in verse; the chapters were previously published between 1985 and 2003, but they are presented here in a fully revised and updated form. The title invites us to read it as a kind of riposte to F.R. Leaviss hugely influential D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, which helped to secure Lawrences place in the canon at the expense, perhaps, of undervaluing his achievements in verse. Where Leavis inserted Lawrence the novelist into a Great Tradition of English (or naturalized English) writers whose works are imbued with a high moral seriousness (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad), Sagar sees the mature, post-1920 poetry as departing from native models and following the free-verse example of the American Walt Whitman. In fact, the chapter on Lawrences Debt to Whitman reflects the particular strengths of Sagars approach, as he reads Lawrences early and late poetry against the work of the earlier poet, giving detailed critical consideration to Lawrences essay on Whitman from Studies in Classic American Literature. He notes that Lawrence described one of his early poems as Whitmanesque, and, drawing on the insights of Christopher Pollnitz, the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge edition of the poetry, he suggests that this poem may be A Still Afternoon in School, in which Lawrence first turned his hand to writing free verse. The confused and inept rhymed opening of this poem gives way to an impressive, rapturous free verse coda (p. 33). Another early poem, A Man at
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Play on the River, is said to be as close to Whitman as Lawrence was ever to get, perhaps a little too close (p. 34), yet the chapter traces Whitmans formative influence on Lawrence, showing how the several drafts of Lawrences essay on Whitman in the Studies move from treating him as a whipping-boy for American democracy (p. 39), or controversially dismissing him as a sexual pervert foolishly pursuing small girls, to finally acknowledging Whitmans importance as a poet opposed to the dualism of mind and body, the first to break the mental allegiance (p. 41). Sagar argues that the Whitman essay actually tells us remarkably little about what Whitman gave Lawrence as a poet; for this we must turn instead to the essay Verse Free and Unfree (later retitled Poetry of the Present), which is said to echo Whitmans account of his own poetic principles. The real connection between Whitman and the author of Birds, Beasts and Flowers lies in their shared use of a complex humour in their verse: a tricksy technique for subverting the normal standards of . . . readers, luring us, under cover of comedy, beyond the limitations of our usual, narrowly reasonable and secular anthropocentrism (p. 45). Taking account of the latest research on Lawrence, Sagar has written the kind of book which helps us to see new things in the verse, and to reassess elements which we thought we knew but had never subjected to serious critical examination. Hilary Hilliers short volume Talking Lawrence: Patterns of Eastwood Dialect in the Work of D.H. Lawrence takes a sociolinguistic approach to Lawrences use of dialect in his Nottingham writings, focusing on the short story Odour of Chrysanthemums, the novel Sons and Lovers and the plays A Colliers Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, The Merry-go-Round and The Daughter-in-Law. Hillier compares Lawrences rendition of the dialect in these works with the data she has collected from recent interviews with children from two schools in the area, including Greasley Beauvale Infants School, which Lawrence himself attended. Her work shows the care with which Lawrence recorded features of the language of his home town, and his great sensitivity to the connotative implications of expression and the social codes that non-standard language conveys. In Love and Death in Lawrence and Foucault, Barry J. Scherr sets himself the task of exposing what he sees as the repressive and damaging hegemonic structure of the modern American academy. He rails against the Wests self-destructive practice of multiculturalism, left-wing political correctness, and the Clintonesque trendy left-wing obliviousness/appeasement/valorization of Third World Terrorists (from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein to North Koreas Kim to Arafat to Mandela) (p. 1). Scherr views academics like Henry Louis Gates, the highest paid Professor of Humanities at Harvard University, as thriving on the political culture created by these self-destructive practices. Gates is criticized as the most successfuland most blatant and simplisticplayer of the victimhood card/race card (pp. 2012); he is referred to as a bogus, pretentious sham (p. 251). However, at the centre of the book is an intensification of Scherrs earlier attack, in D.H. Lawrence Today [2004], on what he views as the anti-life theories of Michel Foucault, and on Foucaults openly homosexual lifestyle. In a frankly offensive discussion of Foucaults lifestyle choices, Scherr refers to his
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(homo)sexual promiscuitypromiscuity which eventually achieved his death via AIDS (p. 192). In a short chapter of four pages (Foucault on Death: A Lawrentian Note), he views Foucaults analysis of the subjects powerlessness before socio-political structures as unduly negative, and sees his celebration of death as a guarantor of self-realization as denigrating some Lawrentian ideal of the God-mystery within us (p. 194). It is unfortunate to find Lawrence being co-opted into an angry, even bitter, rant against recent trends in American political and academic life. Even those readers who sympathize with Scherrs overriding critique of political correctness will struggle to engage with the angry, homophobic and racist tone of the book. Scherrs rhetoric is monotonous and exhausting. He wields quotation marks like Ursula wields her cane in chapter 13 of The Rainbow: they descend on the reader like so many brutal blows, bludgeoning him into submission. Any new insights on offer are sadly lost in the breathless onslaught. Michael Squiress D.H. Lawrence and Frieda: A Portrait of Love and Loyalty is a compact new biography of the writer, concentrating on the emotional dynamics of his relationship with his wife. Squires has access to a large body of Friedas unpublished correspondence, which lends his writing on the marriage, and on Friedas nurturing of Lawrences posthumous reputation, a greater authority and insight than earlier accounts. The book presents their married life as marked by commitment and affection shaded with betrayal (p. 173). It sheds an interesting light on the couples strained relations with admirers like Dorothy Brett and Mabel Dodge Sterne, and it highlights Lawrences brief affair with Rosalind Baynes, and Friedas amorous interactions with John Middleton Murry and the early stages of her affair with Angelo Ravagli, whom she eventually married in 1950. D.H. Lawrence and Frieda offers a concise and accessible version of a story which is told at greater length in Living at the Edge, the 2002 biography Squires wrote with his own wife, Lynn K. Talbot. David Ellis, the author of the third and final volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, has written an experimental biography focusing on the authors final illness, death and posthumous life. Death and the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered uses Lawrences response to his tuberculosis, his treatment of the condition, and his death, with its various emotional and legal implications and literary critical legacies, as a central focus around which he gathers a whole series of reflections on final things, drawing on the lives and deaths of other famous consumptive writers such as Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka, Chekhov and George Orwell. The book is broken down into three sections (Dying, Death and Remembrance), each subdivided into short chapters dealing with issues such as denial, the lure of suicide, famous last words, and the posthumous settling of scores. It contains a wealth of biographical detail on Lawrence, including several very telling anecdotes relating to Lawrences relations with his mother-in-law, the Baroness Anna von Richthofen, and with his sometime friend and worthy adversary, John Middleton Murry. Indeed, despite its morbid subject-matter, the book is extremely readable and informed throughout by an urbane, dry humour which refuses to sentimentalize things. We are reminded of Lawrences own comment on Maurice Magnus, an acquaintance who
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committed suicide to avoid the legal consequences of debt: the dead ask only for justice: not praise or exoneration (quoted by Ellis, p. 219). The intelligent, sympathetic but unapologetic clear-sightedness of this book is something which Lawrence himself might have appreciated. In a chapter entitled When the Indian Was in Vogue: D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest, from her British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (pp. 15788), Carey J. Snyder reads Lawrences writings on New Mexico and the American Southwest in the context of contemporary Southwest tourism and ethnography. Lawrence is said to criticize both the tourists idealization of the native Indian and the white Indians pandering to the tourist mentality, but Snyder argues that his own desire to access the primitive Indian psychehis primitivist longing to reconnect with lost origins (p. 160)is riven with contradiction, since it uncritically reproduces the Westernized gaze of the ethnographer. Lawrences hatred of the spectacle of an inauthentic Indian culture staged for Western visitors is felt to overlook the fact that his own writings on the regionand especially on its landscape echo the idealized discourses on the Southwest intended to draw visitors to the area. Snyders critical positioning here is interesting, and her engagement with the problems and paradoxes associated with the ethnographic gaze is highly suggestive, but the tone of the chapter in its treatment of Lawrence is peculiarly arch; in the final paragraphs, an implicit dislike of what Snyder clearly sees as Lawrences colonialist mindset gives way to open hostility. The chapter refers to Lou Witt in St. Mawr as Lawrence in drag, and it clumsily attacks what it sees as Lawrences racist attitude towards Tony Luhan, the Indian partner of his Taos host, Mabel Dodge Sterne. Lawrence is said to claim the right to move between cultures while implying that Luhan and other Indians jeopardize their identity by crossing over into mainstream American life (p. 175). The racial issues at stake here are, of course, complicated and delicate; while one can concede the point about Lawrences blindness to certain features of his own positioning as a Western observer of authentic American Indian culture, it is difficult to imagine what a fully self-aware gaze might be like. Snyder praises Emily Post in the travel narrative By Motor to the Golden Gate [1916] for her self-negating awareness of her inability to escape the ignorant and potentially destructive reproduction of the tourist gaze. However, one might question whether this resignation manages to free itself of all traces of Western bias, or (indeed) whether Snyders own use of the term mainstream American life is as innocent or neutral as she would have us believe. Andrew Harrison contributed an essay entitled Hymns in a Mans Life: The Congregational Chapel and D.H. Lawrences Early Poetry to Adrian Grafe, ed., Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period (pp. 4657). Harrison examines Lawrences early involvement with the Congregational Church in Eastwood and his painful break with orthodox religion in the autumn and winter of 1907. He explores the tensions involved in the young Lawrences exile from his mothers beloved chapel through a close consideration of the early poem Weeknight Service, and close readings of EastwoodEvening and The
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Piano (early versions of the poems better known as The Little Town at Evening and Piano). Turning to this years journal articles, in I need a master: Sylvia Plath Reads D.H. Lawrence (English 57:ccxviii[2008] 12744) Sally Bayley seeks to examine Lawrences significant impact on Plaths body of imagery, lexicon and choice of theme (p. 128). She alludes to an essay Plath wrote on Lawrence while studying at Cambridge, notes Plaths attendance at the second day of the Lady Chatterley trial, and draws sporadically on Plaths annotations of selected Lawrence works in her library, currently held at Smith College. In particular, Bayley suggests that Plaths interest in uncanny landscapes, reflected in poems such as Wuthering Heights, can be traced to her close reading of Lawrences story The Woman Who Rode Away ; she remarks that Plaths The Shrike seems to be directly connected to her reading of . . . Sons and Lovers (p. 133); she speculates that Plaths Dark Wood, Dark Water appears to be a study of gothic landscape akin to the aesthetic of Northern Romanticism, mediated via Lawrence (p. 137); and she argues that Ariel enacts the new dawn or self of Lawrences fable, The Man Who Died (p. 142). These comparative readings might have made for an interesting (if rather disparate and unstructured) short essay on the two writers, but Bayleys ambition to reveal Plaths broader indebtedness to Lawrences thematic range and lexicon effectively leads her away from the safe shallows of the comparative approach into the deep and murky waters of cultural studies. Bayley discusses Plaths use of the Freudian and Lawrentian vocabularies as if neither was influential in the wider Anglo-American culture of the 1950s and 1960s; she writes as if each note of influence, or each possible allusion, can be traced back to a specific source, or even to an underlining in a personal copy or a marginal annotation. We are informed that the language of Plaths Elm . . . is strikingly similar to the language of Freuds essay, The Pleasure Principle, with its definition of the death-drive (p. 135), and that Plaths selfish involvement with Lawrence continued into her year spent as a Fulbright scholar in Cambridge, 195657 (p. 131). In effect, of course, we can hardly be surprised to find Plaths lexicon of the death-drive, or the uncanny, echoing Freud, or her language of the mythical, the primitive, the gothic and the sexual echoing Lawrence. It would have been impossible for anyone studying English literature at Cambridge in the mid-1950 s not to have been exposed to, and influenced by, Lawrences writings. In reading Fantasia of the Unconscious, Plath was engaging with Lawrences own osmotic mediation of Freudian ideas in the 1920s; any account of that texts impact on Plath in the 1950s, or of her own engagement with Freudian terms, must necessarily acknowledge the intervening layers of mediation, and respond with a suitably nuanced understanding. In contrast, Bayleys language of influence flattens out the history of ideas into naive assertions of the following type: Lawrence draws together the language of Freudian psychoanalysis with a smattering of colour-coded symbolism (p. 137); Both Plath and Lawrence . . . are engaged with the experience of the uncanny as it relates to and releases unconscious material (p. 140). The essay is hamstrung by its weak grasp of cultural and intellectual contexts.
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gesund applies an unusual historical lens to the fiction in D.H. Peter Fja Lawrences Women in Love: Gerald Crich and Captain Scott (ES 89:ii[2008] 18294). This essay re-examines the myth surrounding Scotts heroism and selflessness on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, 191012. Drawing on a range of historical and biographical sources, he suggests that Scotts connection with British imperial ambitions and national pride both before his death in 1912 and during the war years, is drawn upon by Lawrence in his critical depiction of Gerald Crich in Women in Love, whose soldierly demeanour and reputation as an explorer of the savage regions of the Amazon in some sense deflates and satirizes British military pride, especially in the final chapters, in which Gerald dies among the snow-capped peaks of the gesund spends much of his article filling in the possible access Tyrol. Fja Lawrence may have had to Scotts private life through his friends Mary and Gilbert Cannan, Compton Mackenzie and Lady Cynthia Asquith; he argues that it is likely Lawrence had considerably more information than he would otherwise have received from the press alone of Captain Scott, his wife and the personal intrigues involving them (p. 190). His observation that contemporary readers of Women in Love in 1916 (when its first version was completed) and even 1920 (when it was first published in America) might well have associated Geralds physical prowess and the manner of his untimely death with Captain Scott is an intriguing possibility. However, his further argument that Lawrence went to the pains of collecting relevant biographical material and . . . sifting it for his artistic needs (p. 191) is less convincing, as is his contention that the novels assault on the Scott myth contributed to its refusal by publishers during the war years. In Eros in the Sick Room: Phosphorescent Form and Aesthetic Ecstasy in D.H. Lawrences Sons and Lovers (JNT 38:ii[2008] 13576), Kimberly Coates reads Lawrences third novel as staging a search for a new and shifting, organic or phosphorescent idea of aesthetic form, and doing so through its commitment to exploring Paul Morels radically unstable sexual identity and wavering desire. Coates focuses on the significance of sick-rooms in Sons and Lovers, suggesting that they function in the novel as queer spaces which break down hetero-normative representations (p. 136). Paul is said to be attracted to the somewhat masculine Clara Dawes, whose proud and sullen bearing reflects the attitude of her estranged husband, Baxter; Paul achieves a real bond with the husband once he (Baxter) is feminized through illness. Paul moves between the sick-rooms of his mother and Baxter, just as he moves between the masculine woman and the feminine man, suggesting that his sexual identity, like his aesthetic vision as an artist, is caught between different possibilities and various performative acts. We are reminded of the scene from the uncut version of the novel, in which Paul stays overnight at the house of Claras mother, wearing Baxters pyjama trousers and trying on Claras stockings. Coates suggests that libidinal crossings that refuse to be contained in predetermined narratives lie at the very heart of Sons and Lovers (p. 140); Lawrence is said to be a writer who arguably anticipates post-structuralist notions of identity and sexuality as inherently unstable; a writer who creates a language and style radically at odds with predetermined meanings and fixed categories as they plagued his time and continue to plague our own (p. 168).
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The connection the essay makes between the unstable form of the novel and the transformations in Paul Morels desire is in places intriguing, but its lengthy engagement with Lawrences two books on psychoanalysis is opaque and diffuse, and its treatment of Lawrence as a forebear of Judith Butler seems rather opportunistic, eschewing any consideration of Lawrences modernist radicalism in favour of a celebration of his contemporary relevance. In I am not England: Narrative and National Identity in Aarons Rod and Sea and Sardinia (JML 31:iv[2008] 5470), Bridget Chalk seeks to redress the negative consensus of critical opinion on the formlessness of Aarons Rod and the emptiness of its central protagonist by reading the novel as a conscious departure from the convention-bound and restrictive ideas of selfhood imposed by, on the one hand, the tradition of the Bildungsroman, and on the other the ubiquity of the passport as a guarantor of ones physical identity, nationality and moral rectitude. Chalk draws on Lawrences later essays on the novel, written in the mid-1920s, to argue that the form of Aarons Rod and its characterization represent a systematic unravelling of the logic of the Bildungsroman (p. 61). She suggests, however, that his ambitious attempt ultimately fails to reconstitute the novels social purpose from within (p. 57), since he can only negate the old conventions of character motivation and plot development crucial to the novel genre. By way of contrast, she suggests that the looser and less generically homogeneous form of travel writing gave Lawrence the freedom to transform narrative convention and use episodic structure in a more incisive and compelling manner. The strength of the article lies in its attempt to account for Lawrences post-war experimentalism without treating him as a proto-postmodernist. Lawrences narrative style is quite rightly traced back to his resistance to the imposition of official identity and the accompanying loss of autonomy in the construction of the self (p. 55). Unfortunately, the piecemeal and rather too descriptive analysis of the novel is insufficient to support the essays bold assertions about the disarticulation of identity, or the texts disconnected and aimless structure (p. 63), or the destabilization of Aarons social identity (p. 58). The essay also builds its argument on a very narrow range of Lawrences texts, not even alluding to other, equally experimental, post-war novels such as The Lost Girl, Mr Noon and Kangaroo. Indeed, its grip on the rest of Lawrences oeuvre seems surprisingly weak; for example, there is a striking reference to Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow as novels which trace the development and social integration of a single protagonist (p. 62), whereas in fact the central thrust of each of these texts is precisely the failure of its central protagonist to achieve social integration. Finally, in The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Elliss Seaweed (ELT 51:ii[2008] 12337), Jo-Ann Wallace discusses Edith Elliss 1898 novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, and raises the possibility that it served as one source for D.H. Lawrences 1928 novel, Lady Chatterleys Lover (p. 131). The description of the novels fraught publication history is fascinating. Edith Elliss novel was published by The University Press at Watford, but effectively suppressed after a raid on that publisher by Scotland Yard, whose intended target was her husbands (Havelock Elliss) sexological study, Sexual Inversion. It was subsequently reissued in Britain in a substantially
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revised (i.e. toned-down) form in 1907 as Kits Woman: A Cornish Idyll, and in America in 1909 as Steves Woman; T. Werner Laurie published a popular edition in Britain in 1916. The suppression of Seaweed invites comparison with the still more complex fate of Lawrences novel in the literary marketplace; its plot echoes Lawrences later text at a number of points. In Elliss novel, a Cornish tin-miner is paralysed from the waist down; his devoted wife cares for him, but briefly takes a lover (a ships mate) whom she meets on one of her regular trips to the coast to gather seaweed to use as a tonic for her husbands legs. The physical relationship soon ends, however, because of her spiritual commitment to her husband, in spite of her husbands willing (indeed enthusiastic) acceptance of her sexual nature and need for physical fulfilment. Wallace describes it as a turn-of-the-century sex novel, and notes how Lady Chatterleys Lover reads like an ironic postwar response (p. 132) to its idealistic, spiritual treatment of its sexual theme. In Elliss novel, the husbands broadmindedness is rewarded by his wifes spiritual devotion, while in Lawrences novel Cliffords readiness to entertain the idea of his wife taking a lover is subject to his rigorous (and quite brutal) upholding of class boundaries, and Constance Chatterley must renounce constancy to the spiritual depravity of her culture in favour of a revitalizing sexual commitment to Mellors, the gamekeeper. Even if we are not convinced by the argument that Lawrence actually read the novel (and/or that he learnt about it during his time in Cornwall between 1915 and 1917), the two novels can be said to emerge in response to a common English cultural heritage. In reading Elliss novel alongside Lady Chatterleys Lover, Wallace backs a recent trend of interest in Lawrences last novel which seeks to locate it in the culture of late-nineteenth-century English progressive idealism (p. 124). The D.H. Lawrence Review is slowly catching up with its backlog of essays. The latest double issue, comprising volumes 32 and 33, was published in 2008 but backdated to 20034. It contains nine essays, applying a range of textual, historical and theoretical approaches to their subject. Highlights include David Games essay on Aspects of Degenerationism in D.H. Lawrences Kangaroo (DHLR 323[20034] 87101) and Ben Stoltzfuss Lacans Knot, Freuds Narrative, and the Tangle of Glad Ghosts (DHLR 323[20034] 10214). Tim Marshalls Claiming the Body: Odour of Chrysanthemums, Death, the Great War and the Workhouse (DHLR 323[20034] 1934) reads the death of Walter Bates in Lawrences story in the context, first, of cultural practices surrounding death in the nineteenth century (p. 19); then of debates around the ownership of dead bodies following the 1832 Anatomy Act, which granted anatomists legal access to dead bodies remaining unclaimed from workhouses and hospitals (p. 27); and finally of tensions during the Great War over the status of the bodies of dead soldiers, which in 1919, in the face of growing logistical problems with mass repatriation, were formally declared the property of the British state. Marshalls approach is attentive both to textual details in the story and to the historical context of the texts reception: he describes Lawrences subtle depiction of Elizabeth Batess specific social anxieties, but he also suggests rather convincingly that the first readers of the short-story volume The Prussian Officer, published in November 1914, would
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have read Odour of Chrysanthemums as engaging with early wartime debates around the status and fate of soldiers bodies. tudes Lawrenciennes, volumes 38 and 39, were This year the two issues of E devoted to the subject of pluralism in Lawrence, collecting essays on The One and the Many and A Plurality of Selves and Voices respectively. Volume 38 contains contributions by (among others) Michael Bell on Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, Noe lle Cuny on The Lost Girl, and Stephen Rowley on Bavarian Gentians; the contributors to volume 39 include Earl Ingersoll on Lawrences friendship with E.M. Forster, Neil Roberts on free indirect discourse in Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and Jacqueline Gouirand on screen adaptations of Lady Chatterleys Lover. The Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies (1:iii[2008]), contains James T. Boultons Further Letters of D.H. Lawrence (JDHLS 1:iii[2008] 713) and John Worthens transcription of the 1921 Hutchinsons Magazine version of the short story Fanny and Annie (JDHLS 1:iii[2008] 5777), plus essays or notes by Colm Kerrigan, Keith Sagar, John Turner, Howard J. Booth, David Game, Jeff Wallace, and Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot. In D.H. Lawrence and the Spontaneous Gesture (JDHLS 1:iii[2008] 3354), John Turner discusses Lawrences celebration of spontaneity in the personal context of his long-standing inner conflict between depression and creativity, the historical context of the Great War, and the cultural context of the spread of psychoanalytic theories. He notes that the word spontaneity only became an important term for Lawrence after the publication of The Rainbow: in Women in Love the word is used seventeen times, while it occurs forty-three times in the 191819 Studies in Classic American Literature, and 24 times in the 20 pages of the 1919 essay Democracy (p. 46). Turner traces Lawrences use of the term, and the broader implications of spontaneity, in his essays on classic American literature, where Lawrence proposed a revision of Freudian ideas, dealing not with the repressed unconscious, but with the creative unconscious or the hidden spontaneous life of the material body (p. 48). On the one hand, through his analysis of the American authors Lawrence critiques the repressive age in which we live (p. 47), while on the other he attempts to construct a quasi-scientific account of the emotional life of the body (p. 49). Turner shows how the versatile account of repressed impulses in the essays bears eloquent testimony to [Lawrences] inner liveliness (p. 52), while their esoteric neurological language is strained, revealing the difficulty of [his] own struggle to achieve spontaneity (p. 50). Among the latest editions of Lawrences texts, James T. Boulton has edited a new volume of Selected Letters for Oneworld Classics. He provides a generous selection from the eight-volume edition of the Letters he edited for Cambridge University Press, and includes three additional, recently discovered letters in an appendix: the first to Augusta de Witt, 22 October 1916; the second to Philip Heseltine, 11 June 1917; and the third to Dr Andrew Morland, 9 February 1930. The letters are helpfully divided into seven sections, each prefaced with a few short paragraphs describing the biographical context. The volume also includes a short (25-page) biography of Lawrence, a descriptive list of correspondents, and a full and extremely useful index.
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The new Penguin Classics edition of Lawrences works is completed with the publication of the Selected Poems, edited and introduced by James Fenton. In his introduction Fenton describes his editorial principles: he selected poems from the individual collections made during Lawrences lifetime and printed them in the order in which they occur in these collections (p. xiii). Unfortunately, he chose to print the texts found in the Complete Poems volume, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, rather than reproducing the poems as they appeared in the contemporary collections. The Complete Poems volume is not a critical edition, and it does not always reproduce the order of poems established in the first editions. However, editorial reservations aside, Fentons selection is judicious, and he brings an infectious enthusiasm to the job. He argues that Lawrences free verse is free to some purpose. It is powerfully mimetic, and what it imitates is the surge of the passions, the motions of thought, the rush of the perceptions. He reprints all the old favourites: Last Lesson of the Afternoon, Piano, Bat, Snake, Bavarian Gentians, and The Ship of Death. Yet the reader new to Lawrences verse will also be introduced to lesser-known gems such as Sorrow and Brooding Grief from Amores [1916] and On the Balcony from Look! We Have Come Through! [1917]. As we wait for the publication of the Cambridge edition of the poems, the liveliness of this selection, and its comparative brevity, may help to win over those readers perturbed by the 1,000 pages of the Complete Poems. (e) Virginia Woolf The central thesis of Kathryn Simpsons fascinating book Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (one of only three monographs dedicated entirely to Woolf this year) is that gift-giving in Woolfs writing signifies an alternative feminine libidinal economy (p. 2). Drawing on Mauss, Rubin and Cixous inter alia, Simpson amplifies her thesis at a number of different levels: in terms of Woolfs own practices of gift-giving, particularly of books; by close-reading instances of gift-giving in Woolfs work, explicit or implied; and through exploration of the textual generosity of Woolfs writing, in its richness, depth, and associative connections (p. 6). Her first chapter continues the recent growth of interest in the previously neglected short essays, as well as A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas. Simpson traces a trajectory in Woolfs non-fiction, arguing that in the mid- to late 1930s what Woolf saw as the damaging ramifications of the increasing commodification of writing and the pressures of the literary marketplace come into sharper critical focus (p. 34). The second chapter discusses queering the market in Mrs Dalloway and associated texts; careful close reading of both actual and intended gift-giving in these texts reveals how the characters mov[e] between gift and market economies, between homoerotic possibility and heterosexual conformity (p. 84). A third chapter discusses creative gifts in To the Lighthouse, Orlando and Between the Acts, and a fourth and final chapter examines the short fiction, introducing the seductive idea of Woolfs smuggling sexual and economic contraband (p. 131) into these stories. This is a
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meticulous and rigorous exploration of the intersecting discourses of desire and economics without ever reducing one to the other and, crucially, never losing sight of the texture of Woolfs prose. Teresa Prudentes A Specially Tender Piece of Eternity: Virginia Woolf and the Experience of Time aims at shedding light on the stratified temporality characterizing Woolfs novels (p. ix): the a-linear temporalities of Woolfs texts (following Ricoeur), and in particular temporalities of eternity and the ecstatic. The first part of the book reads To the Lighthouse and Orlando especially with reference to moments of being; Prudente concludes that the coexistence and interdependence of the two feelings of ecstasy and emptiness . . . appear as the climax of Woolfs insistence on the modern subjects divided perception (p. 63), the roots of which perception can be found in Woolfs handling of time. The second part is a specific inquiry into the relationship between ecstasy and writing (p. xi) focusing particularly on the ineffability of the ecstatic moment; Prudente elegantly expresses the way in which the ineffable engages a foundational problematic of artistic representation: The un-representability of ecstasy thus seems to function also as an allegory which suggests the less specific discrepancy between experience and expression (p. 71). The third part opens out to look at Woolfs novels in context, particularly in relation to Gides Les Faux-Monnayeurs, moving towards a discussion of the novel genres capacity to handle time. As the subtitle would suggest, Maria DiBattistas Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography takes an unconventional approach to the biographical form. DiBattista treads a careful path in negotiating her position which, while crucially acknowledging that authors, Virginia Woolf included, are knowable primarily and most intimately as figments that exist only in our imaginationindeed, she bases her entire project on this premisenevertheless insists that this knowledge is as valuable as it is inevitable (p. 172). While what drives the work is the inevitable sense that we construct an idea of the author as we read, this instinct (to take up a word of Woolfs) is not converted into a hunt for what might be called the real Woolf. Rather, as DiBattista puts it, The subject of this biography is not the historical person who was born in 1882 and died in 1941. The subject is Virginia Woolf, the figment who exists as much in the minds of her readers as in the pages of her books (p. 9). The result is a highly readable yet serious and novel reading of Woolf through various personalitiesthe Sibyl of the Drawing Room, the Author, the Critic, the World Writer and the Adventurer (with the Adventurer emerging as the Captain Self, per Orlando)which admirably articulate Woolfs multifaceted writing personae. The discussion of the contrast between Woolfs novelistic voice and her critical one, for example, seems to exemplify Woolfs own view of the true critic as one who can seem . . . to bring to light what was already there beforehand, instead of imposing anything from the outside (Woolf, quoted in DiBattista, p. 100). Gabrielle McIntires Modernism, Memory and Desire announces itself as the first monograph devoted to the unusual pairing of T.S. Eliot and Woolf. The books central thesis is that for both these writers representing the past was . . . a sensuous endeavour that repeatedly turned to the erotic and the corporeal for some of its most authentic elaborations (p. 2)in other words,
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that there is often a desiring, even sexual, charge to their engagement with memory and history. This erudite work is perhaps slightly belated in some of its claims: the suggestion that there is a lack of critical focus on corporeality and sexuality in Woolf is contraindicated by, for example, Simpsons work reviewed here, or Patricia Morans work on trauma reviewed last year. Similarly, McIntires appeal for us to see Woolf as a thinker of memory and history chimes directly with, for example, Sanja Bahuns essay this year. Nevertheless McIntires work adds substantially to thinking about both of these areas. Her careful cross-references across texts, focusing on Orlando, To the Lighthouse, A Sketch of the Past and Between the Acts but including many of the essays, add conviction to her readings of, for instance, the implications of the promiscuity of memory for Woolf. Particularly significant is McIntires exploration of Woolfs claims not to have read Freud before 1939claims which, as McIntire demonstrates, are often accepted by Woolf critics but appear thoroughly implausible. Rosi Braidottis Intensive Genre and the Demise of Gender (Angelaki 13[2008] 4557) gestures towards the various Deleuzian becomings in Woolfs work, and focuses on Woolfs correspondence with Vita Sackville-West where, as Braidotti puts it, The space of the letters is an in-between, a third party that does not fully coincide with either Virginia or Vita, but rather frames the space of their relationship (p. 50). Elsewhere Braidotti puts it even more emphatically, arguing that the apersonal nature of the desire at work here [between Woolf and Sackville-West] does not coincide at all with the individual biographies of the protagonists (p. 51). This argument relies on a sustainable model of an affective, de-personalized, highly receptive subject which quite simply is not one, not there, not that. As Virginia Woolf put it: I am rooted, but I flow. (The Waves, 69) (p. 46)a subject easily recognizable to readers of Woolf. While one senses that those without thorough grounding in Deleuzian terminology and thought may sometimes miss some of the nuance in this piece, Braidottis sensitive reading of the space of the correspondence, and in particular Sackville-Wests reaction to her relationship with Woolfs Orlando, provides an exciting and productive way to approach the humanity of the participants, without falling back onto potentially simplistic biographical readings. Megan M. Quigleys Modern Novels and Vagueness (Mo/Mo 15[2008] 10129) argues that vagueness is a central, valued concept in Woolfs theories of language. Quigley deftly explores evidence of Woolfs engagement with Bertrand Russells alleged formulation of a special language to avoid vagueness and aspiring to the definite, compared with Woolfs own attachment to the vague, in a range of texts including To the Lighthouse, Night and Day and her BBC broadcast Craftsmanship. Quigley concludes that Woolf posits, contra Russell, an ontological, or semantic, vagueness, one which does not come about because of an inadequacy in language to express the definite outlines of the world, but rather is the result of vagueness in the world itself. While Quigleys suggestion that there is an overemphasis in literary criticism on classicism and objectivity as characterizing modernist works of art (p. 123) might itself be overstating the case, nevertheless this piece certainly adds
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another helpful inflection to our understanding of Woolfs engagement with an uncertain, transitional world. Sara Crangles essay The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom (MFS 54[2008] 20932) similarly reads Woolf through an apparently unpromising concept, though Crangle does not want to rehabilitate boredom as a positive term so much as draw our attention to its literary and philosophical significance. Though the essay begins with boredom in Heidegger and Nietzsche, Crangles work continues the current flourishing trend in critical work reading Woolf with Levinas. Crangle summarizes her position as a sense that the boredom behind Woolfs creative desiresboth authorial and fictionalis informed by a longing to abandon the stultifying sameness of selfhood for the endless unknowns of otherness (p. 211). Key here is Levinass boredom or haunting presence which, contra Heidegger and Nietzsche, demands that we continually perceive ourselves in the light of otherness (p. 215); it is this sense of the indispensable other which resonates so strongly with Woolf. The article weaves together a few key instances or evocations of boredom across Woolfs writing, focusing in particular on Orlando; as in much recent work on Woolf class becomes strongly visible as Woolf appears, in part, to perpetuate the traditional distinction between aristocratic melancholy and plebeian boredom. It concludes with an extended reading of the short story The Lady in the Looking Glass which, Crangle argues, demonstrat[es] how a bored self remains determined by, and might move toward, the endlessly interesting unknowability of otherness (p. 227). Virginia Woolf: Art, Education and Internationalism offers a selection of papers from the seventeenth annual international Woolf conference. As one would expect from the theme, comparative essays feature strongly in this collection, South or Central American writers in particular, with contributions on Woolf and the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos (Reyes), the Brazilian Clarice Lispector (Smith-Hubbard), and the Chilean Mar a Luisa Bombal (Ayuso). Elizabeth Bowen and Monica Ali are also put into dialogue with Woolf (in Gerend and Smith respectively); as are, in a slightly different way, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy in Kimberley Engdahl Coless essay; whether explicitly or implicitly, argues Coles, all three of these writers endorse Woolfs call to fight with the mind, and, Coles concludes, we can, we must, teach others to do the same (p. 45). Judith Allens analysis of Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid concludes with a similarly urgent assertion of the continued relevance of Woolfs essay, whose politics, argues Allen, are articulated not least through its dialogic, conversational mode. To keep talking is, by implication, crucial at a time when, as Allen notes, the silencing of womens voices is still with us (p. 29). (Elsewhere, Marian Eides The Stigma of Nation: Feminist Just War, Privilege, and Responsibility (Hypatia 23[2008] 4860) also assesses the utility of Woolfs politics in relation to twenty-first-century geopolitics.) Chinese connections appeared in Patricia Laurences Hours in a Chinese Library, focusing on Woolfs correspondence with the Chinese writer Ling Shuha which, according to Laurence, challenges Gayatri Spivaks position that the subaltern cannot speak (p. 14); and in Xiaoquin Caos brief but fascinating overview of the reception of Woolf in China, which began to flourish from the late 1900s (p. 83). Richard
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Zumkhawala-Cooks Tae the Lichthoose: Woolfs Scotland and the Problem of the Local entertains rather than answer[s], the question: why Scotland? (p. 57) as the setting for this novel, and elegantly suggests that while the characters in the novel in the end are shown to be tourists; the novel . . . is not (p. 62), redeemed by the Time Passes central section and in particular the figure of Mrs McNabb, who Zumkhawala-Cook argues appears as the human and humanized embodiment of the Scottish working class, of domestic labor, and of regional identity (p. 58). Other notable essays are Erica Delsandros suitably dynamic exploration of aerial perspectives in Woolf; the next instalment of Suzanne Bellamys work on the Australian scholar Nuri Mass, whose previously unpublished 1942 MA thesis constitutes possibly the first [complete study of Woolfs major novels] in the world (p. 131); and Jane de Gays plenary address, which explores how the trope of metamorphosis plays a key role in Woolfs rejection of nation, her embracing of transnational cultures, and her archaeological journeying down into the past (p. 139). The Berkeleyan table of To the Lighthouse featured in a number of essays this year. Michel Serress Feux et signaux de brume: Virginia Woolfs Lighthouse (SubStance 37[2008] 110-31) gravitates towards a philosophical discussion of animism, via a lyrical eulogy to Woolfs novel which, Serres claims, converted him from a realist to an idealist; and which, in opening, he suggests registers the superabundant multiplicity of . . . durations (p. 111) more precisely than does Proust, whom Woolf was reading while she was writing To the Lighthouse. Taking up the invitation to consider Berkeleys question, namely what becomes of the things of the world when no one perceives them (p. 113), he concludes that the novel comes down on the side of the idealists, asserting that I see, for my own part, that Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse only in order to describe, passionately, subtly, precisely, intensely, ecstatically, divinely . . . perception: her own and that of the two heroines. And to affirm that it sustains the world (pp. 1223). Heidi Storls Heidegger in Woolfs Clothing (P&L 32[2008] 30314) is a brief but elegant reading of To the Lighthouse from a philosophers perspective as a way of understanding key Heideggerian concepts; it also indicates to Woolf scholars how helpful Heideggerian terminology might be to elucidate the effects of Woolfs prose and her sustained meditation on that-which-is (p. 303). Finally, the Berkeleyan table is also present in David Dwans Woolf, Scepticism and Manners (TPr 22[2008] 24968). Suggesting that Woolfs investment in manners is closely related to her distinctive form of scepticism (p. 249), the first part of Dwans closely textured essay discusses Woolfs scepticism in relation to Humes, arguing that the limits of their scepticism can be drawn where they both engage with the role of habits and customsor, more specifically for Woolf, of manners. Dwan concludes that while manners, for Woolf, add a necessary pattern to our world, one must be wary of this pattern becoming a fetish and the basis for another form of dogmatism (p. 263); but while, according to Dwan, Woolf certainly acknowledges that manners reflect and sustain structures of domination, this does not ultimately mitigate her own snobbish views (p. 264). The content of the years Woolf Studies Annual was particularly eclecticin terms of form and perspective, at any rate, with Mrs Dalloway being the main
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focus of two of the six essays (by Melissa Bagley and Kaley Joyes), and featuring strongly in a third, Patricia McManuss The Offensiveness of Virginia Woolf: From a Moral to a Political Reading (WStA 14[2008] 91 138). McManuss substantial essay is a sustained challenge to current paradigms of reading Woolfs politics, and begins by directly engaging with Woolfs snobbish views. As McManus observes, commentators tend to deal with Woolfs more politically problematic statements either by dismissing her as a snob or by dismissing the statements as aberrations. For McManus, as for Hermione Lee, from whom McManus takes her cue, this will not do; we must swallow Woolf whole (Lee, quoted in McManus, p. 92). To do this, McManus argues, we must shift from a moral to a political discourse, and in particular we must see Woolfs comments in historical context. She argues that Woolf privileged above all the private self, conceived not as the inhabitant of a particular realm but as the site of a particular way of knowing, a disembodied, profoundly non-social, epistemological position from which and only from whichculture, and with culture politics, becomes possible (p. 101), which we must see as resistance to the increasing deprivatisation of areas of life hitherto designated private (p. 98). McManus demonstrates Woolfs privileging of this private self not only through the more explicit articulations of Three Guineas but also, and perhaps most contentiously, through Woolfs use of free indirect discourse, taking Mrs Dalloway as an examplethough McManus suggests that any of Woolfs novels would have done just as well, since they all desire a public composed of privatised readers (p. 124). McManuss careful weighing up of the factors informing Woolfs politics are summed up in this suggestion: That she had to make a choice [about which class position to align herself withnamely, her own] was a consequence of structural dynamics outside Woolfs control; that she made the choice she did speaks of her own politics, her perception of her class as the most likely agent of reform (p. 121). Melissa Bagleys Nature and Nation in Mrs Dalloway (WStA 14[2008] 3552) also considers the politics of Mrs Dalloway but explores the use of biological metaphor in the text to indicate Woolfs critique of the assumption that the nations order and socially or politically formed identities have less to do with a wilful or subconscious engagement of ideology than with biological factors (p. 35). Bagley identifies a faultline in the discourse of nature and nation which Woolf aims to expose; the patriarchal order replicates and reinforces social structures, including gender, through metaphors of the natural, but many kinds of industrial and technological progress tie to a societys ability to work with and overcome the forces of nature (p. 47), thus rendering these metaphors, and in turn the structures they underpin, unstable. Kaley Joyess Failed Witnessing in Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway (WStA 14[2008] 6990) approaches a different theme in this text, extending critical work on Woolf and trauma to argue that Woolfs authentic representation of individual psychological trauma and its cultural context can expose, but not overcome, the innumerable challenges to healing First World War trauma (p. 69). Social structures are also crucial here: Joyes convincingly argues that, while Rezia and Clarissa are the only characters in the novel to approach Septimuss trauma with anything like the dialogic witnessing that can heal psychic wounds (p. 70), they are ultimately
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prevented from adequately doing so because of their marginalized social positions. nica G. Ayusos essay, Virginia Woolf in Mexico and Puerto Rico Mo (WStA 14[2008] 119), is a more expansive addition to the work on Woolf and Spanish American writers published this year. Encouraged by theoretical developments in transnational feminism (p. 1) and informed by the work of Homi K. Bhabha, Ayuso explores how two contemporary Spanish American , have read Woolf over the writers, Rosaria Castellanos and Rosario Ferre course of their careers. The influence of A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas appears particularly strong, for perhaps obvious reasons; Ayuso concludes by suggesting that Woolfs Outsiders Society could be said to stretch beyond the spatial boundaries of England to include these two educated mens daughters, born a generation later and an ocean apart (pp. 1415). Heidi Stallas essay, William Bankes: Echoes of Egypt in Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (WStA 14[2008] 2134), also has an international theme, though of a very different sort. This shorter piece investigates a possible model for William Bankes: William John Bankes, a prominent plunderer of Egyptian artefacts in the late eighteenth century, and one of the first Europeans to record the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel (p. 27). Stalla notes that Vita Sackville-West wrote to Woolf from Egypt in 1926, while Woolf was composing the novel, and concludes by pointing at a few apparently Egyptian allusions in To the Lighthouse (and indeed other novels), the most persuasive of which is the echo of the slave-maker Ramses II in the name Ramsay, given that, as Stalla notes, Woolf writes frequently about how the English government throughout the greater part of its history has treated women like slaves (p. 31). Unfortunately, however, the essays findings are somewhat piecemeal and inconclusive; the intriguing question the essay poses, namely what part might William Bankes and the exploration of Egypt play in To the Lighthouse? (p. 27) is not convincingly answered. Finally, Molly McQuade offers a letter to Woolf: entitled Life Sentences (WStA 14[2008] 5367), this creative-critical hybrid picks up and runs with Woolfs reinvention of the sentence, noting that your sentence could respond with a freedom that seemed denied to you personally (p. 54). This engaging piece performs as it observes the work of the sentencethough McQuade admits that I prefer the pursuit of paragraphs, not sentences (p. 53), she nevertheless reveals in darts and flashes some of the techniques Woolf used to (re-)create the sentence, and their effects. The spring 2008 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English was devoted to Woolf; as Christine Reynier points out in her introduction, the cosmopolitanism of Woolfs short stories is aptly addressed here by thirteen contributors from six different countries. Of particular note were Kate Hendersons Fashioning Anti-Semitism: Virginia Woolfs The Duchess and the Jeweller and the Readers of Harpers Bazaar (JSSE 50[2008] 4965), offering a truly novel perspective on this text and its depiction of Jewishness by considering the context of its original appearance in what was a fashion magazine as much as a literary publication; Anne McClellans investigation of the woman scholar figure in Adelines (Bankrupt) Education Fund: Woolf, Woman and Education in the Short Fiction (JSSE 50[2008] 85101); the
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elegant use of Deleuze and Guattari and careful attention to textual variants in Oliver Taylors Whats itWhat do you mean by it?: Lost Readings and Getting lost in Kew Gardens (JSSE 50[2008] 12135) to produce a reading of that story which emphasizes the role of the body; Laura Marcuss dazzlingly wide-ranging exploration of the telescope story in its various manifestations across a range of Woolfs texts, In the Circle of the Lens: Woolfs Telescope Story, Scene-Making and Memory (JSSE 50[2008] 15369); and Emilie Crapoulets illuminating reading of The String Quartet as an elaboration of the shortcomings of the verbalisation of music (p. 212) in Beyond the Boundaries of Language: Music in Virginia Woolfs The String Quartet (JSSE 50[2008] 20115). There was a notable clutch of what one might call compare-and-contrast essays this year. Among the most successful was Rebecca Wisors Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain: Pacifism and the Gendered Politics of Public Intellectualism (StHum 35[2008] 13753), using Edward Saids idea of cultural marginalization as a necessary precondition for intellectual activity (p. 139) to trace the confluence of [Woolfs and Brittains] thinking on the subjects of marginalization and intellectualism (p. 148) and more broadly to implore intellectual historians to pay more attention to the potentially unacknowledged predecessors of todays public intellectuals. Sarah Balkins Regenerating Drama in Steins Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Woolfs Between the Acts (MD 51[2008] 43357) subtly negotiates around the question of influence, moot in this instance, to offer a perceptive study of the temporality of these texts in relation to their dramaturgical aspects. Like Stein, Balkin argues, Woolf ends with a return to the beginning and, as Stein, the beginning is one we never saw (p. 452). Louise A. Poreskys Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professors House and To the Lighthouse (PLL 44[2008] 6786), however, sometimes appears to forget its initial caveats about the necessarily speculative basis of any argument that Cathers novel directly influenced Woolf; while some of Poreskys comparisons are intriguing, they risk being undermined by overstated claims such as Virginia Woolf takes Cathers novel [with various characteristics also found in To the Lighthouse] [and] From all this Woolf creates a novel . . . (pp. 845)this surely needs to be couched in more cautious terms. In her Demolishing the Castle: Virginia Woolfs Reaction to T.S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral (CEA 70[2008] 46 55), Carol Osborne is in the more secure position of being able to draw on Woolfs recorded responses to Eliots play; also addressing Between the Acts, this essay explores the differences between the two authors positions on religion in particular. Rather than comparing Woolfs fiction with that of a contemporary, Monica Girard, in Virginia Woolfs Suicide Notes: Michael Cunninghams Art of Transposing a Lifes Epilogue into a Fictitious Prologue (in Crinquand, ed., Last Letters), explores Michael Cunninghams use of Woolfs real suicide note, plus first-hand accounts of the day of her suicide, in his novel The Hours, arguing that he interweaves fictional and real elements to generate an illusory representation of Virginia Woolfs death which satisfactorily appears quite real and plausible (p. 52). Woolfs cosmopolitanism is again to the fore in Caroline Lusins Red Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of Madness in Virginia Woolfs
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Mrs Dalloway (CCS 5[2008] 289300), which emphasizes the Russian fever that gripped Great Britain in the early twentieth century, and uses this as the foundation for a clear, sharp and convincing reading of novellas by Gogol and Garshin as intertexts for Woolfs novel. Finally, Pam Fox Kuhlkens Clarissa o (En)Dure e Suicidal Time in Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway and and Cle ` s Vardas Cleo de 5 a` 7 (CLS 45[2008] 34169) provides an interesting Agne cross-disciplinary comparison of Woolfs novel and Vardas 1961 film, demonstrating how they are more than texts by women about women set in a single day (p. 341). Kuhlken argues that in both these texts the protagonists escape from masculine temps, move through feminine duree, but finally move towards an androgynous time in an aesthetic black hole conjured into extra-textual existence (p. 341). Sanja Bahun also puts Woolf into dialogue with a figure from a different discipline, but attenuates the distinction between Woolf as a writer of fiction and Walter Benjamin as a cultural historian and philosopher to emphasize the commensurability of [their] philosophies of history (p. 100). Her exceptionally fine essay, The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolfs and Walter Benjamins Philosophies of History (ModCult 3:ii[2008] 10015), carefully negotiates what is known or can be speculated about Woolfs and Benjamins knowledge of each others work; it then produces a highly convincing reading of both the shared subject-matter and, crucially, the structural correspondence of their late work, specifically Between the Acts and On the Concept of History. Bahun suggests that neither writer simply proposes a replacement of the linear model of history with a cyclical one; rather, their reflections vacillate between the different proposed and rejected models of history (p. 104). This vacillation is, Bahun argues, reflected in the quality of both writers prose, characterized by the alteration of exuberance and minimalism, and serial composition (p. 110). Bahuns claim that both writers gain from their discursive juxtaposition, in that Woolfs mature aesthetic politics is placed where it should rightfully abidein the realm of the philosophy of historyand Benjamins cogitations on history become actualized in aesthetic performance (p. 111) is amply justified on the basis of this intervention. Andrea Zemgulyss Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage provides an original reading of modernisms literary heritage not so much through texts, but rather the places and spaces that had become, as she puts it, newly historic (p. 4) in the early twentieth century. Chapter 6 considers Woolfs approving engagement with literary geography in her essays, as well as its presence in Orlando and Night and Day. Like McManus, Zemgulys draws attention to Woolfs approval of the impersonal attitude in reading and writing, and also makes a claim for Night and Day as marking a turn to Woolfs modernist vision, a turn that does not dismiss the Victorians . . . but instead captures their worthy character (p. 178). Marie Lanels Revisiting a Great Mans House: Virginia Woolfs Carlylean Pilgrimages (CAnn 24[2008] 11731) comes to a similar conclusion, namely that Although she had sought to repudiate Carlyles historical vision, Woolf cannot disown it entirely (p. 129). In keeping with this current interest in Woolfs Victorian inheritance was this years Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, by Henrietta Garnett.
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Published as Leslie Stephen: A Nineteenth Century Legacy, Garnetts paper paints a lively portrait of Stephen and the different perspectives from which Virginia viewed him as well as . . . those traits she inherited from him (p. 3). A number of books taking a broadly postcolonial perspective featured Woolf to some extent. Laura Winkiels discussion of Woolf in Modernism, Race and Manifestos focuses almost entirely on her non-fiction. Winkiel argues that the essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown borrows from the manifesto genre several of its revolutionary qualities, but suggests that, by the time of Three Guineas, Woolf had come to critique an overuse of the manifesto form (p. 197). Three Guineas emerges as a hybrid text which ultimately, in both form and content, suggests that impurity and inclusion are the proper attributes of a democratic state (p. 195). In her immense Freedoms Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 16401940, Laura Doyle observes that while postcolonial readings of Woolf most often consider her in relation to India, she herself proposes instead that many of Woolfs novels present revisionary parables of Anglo-American modernity, detectable if we consider the water tropes in her writing as expressions of the colonial legacy more broadly (p. 413). Doyle also emphasizes the fleeting visibility of a queer sexuality emerging alongside, and in resistance to, the discourse of race and empire which these tropes evoke. Carey J. Snyders chapter on Woolf in British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters persuasively reads The Voyage Out through the concept of self-nativizing, which Snyder defines as the move to regard ones own culture through the estranging lens of ethnography, such that familiar customs, artefacts and beliefs are rendered strangely visible (p. 100); she also considers Street Haunting as an instance of self-nativizing participant observation. Drawing also on Woolfs contemporaries Jane Harrison and Ruth Benedict, this chapter is a significant addition to work on the intersections between Woolfs text and ethnography (also this year, see Glenn Willmotts Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market and the Gift for a brief discussion of Woolf drawing on anthropological and psychoanalytic discourse). Alissa G. Karl also focuses on Woolfs first novel in a chapter of her Modernism and the Marketplace. Karls argument that Voyage features no native characters who can provide an alternative view renders Woolfs entire text vulnerable to the charge of Anglocentrism (p. 54) indicates the difference between her position and Snyders, though Karl goes on to indicate that Woolf does critique patriarchy and imperialism in this text, albeit ambivalently; she states that Woolfs texts allow us to trace the strategies and effects of consumer capital as it administers ideological, psychic, political and economic empire (p. 43). Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltans chapter on beauty in Mrs Dalloway, in their book Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf and Merrill, both explores how that novel seems to view beauty and what it can and cannot achieve, and attempts to identify what is beautiful about Woolfs prose. Part of a larger project which aims to return discussion of the beautiful to academia, and the undergraduate classroom in particular, this chapter is narrated from the position of an instructor leading a class in discussion of Woolfs novel. It offers some attentive close readings of Woolfs prose, and if it comes to any conclusion, it is perhaps that the beauty of her writing has in
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large part to do with its evocation of correspondences, and its gesture towards a shared experience. The evocation of shared experience is also central G. Douglas Atkinss lively appreciation of Woolfs The Death of the Moth in his (in some ways unabashedly old-fashioned, p. xi) collection Reading Essays: An Invitation, with Atkins observing It is not . . . individualcertainly not personalinterpretation that emerges here: through Woolfs far-from-clinical eye we see the seen, and share in it (p. 138). It is not perhaps surprising that Jack Stewart focuses on To the Lighthouse in his chapter on Woolf in Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers. Beginning with reference to Frys aesthetic theory, the chapter traces the way in which particular features of visual art (optics, particular colours alone, in pairs or in groups, etc.) function in Woolfs text, though not, Stewart is careful to note, as simple colorcharacter equations but rather through transpos[ing] emotional vibrations into color wavelengths (p. 41), while the second part of the chapter considers gendered and geometric space and the psychology of creativity (p. 20). Julia Prewit Browns The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film also has a chapter on To the Lighthouse; she reads Woolfs text as an elegy to the nineteenth-century domestic interior, with a deeper sense of communal loss at its close than in Forsters Howards End: once [Mrs Ramsaywhich Brown misspells as Ramsey throughout] departs from the living, the domestic interior decays (p. 109). Janine Uttells essay, Meals and Mourning in Woolfs The Waves (CollL 35[2008] 119), adds to the growing body of work on Woolf and elegy. Here, Uttell uses Patricia Raes concept of proleptic elegy to explore the significance of the two communal meals that feature in The Waves and argue that not only, as is frequently argued, is the first meal a prefiguration of Percivals death, and thus functions as a proleptic elegy, but the second meal is itself, too, a proleptic funeralfor each of the six characters as they near the end of their lives (p. 14). I meant nothing by The Lighthouse: Virginia Woolfs Poetics of Negation, by Roberta Rubenstein (JML 31[2008] 3653), systematically reads the marked meanings of nothing and its variants (p. 36) in Woolfs novel, arguing that the poetics of negation cues readers to notice the dark places and negative spaces in Woolfs fiction and in her life, but also reminds us that the text is structured by oscillation, concluding that Virginia Woolf names, frames and imaginatively negates nothingness (p. 50). The two issues of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany published this year focused on Woolf and pedagogy (VWM 73[2008]), and Woolf and photography (VWM 74[2008]). The issue on pedagogy was particularly engaging, with essays addressing topics as diverse as using Woolf as a model in the composition classroom, embracing the difficulty of Woolfs writing and teaching Woolf using GoogleEarthTM. The Virginia Woolf Bulletin features a previously unpublished review by Woolf entitled Some Poetic Plays (VWB 27[2008]), as well as a variety of lettersof particular interest is the correspondence between Woolf and Mrs G.E. Easdales, whose daughter Jean had her poetry published by the Hogarth Press at the age of 17 and went on to write a gothic-modernist narrative poem Amber Innocent, published with a dust-jacket by Vanessa Bell (the only one Bell designed for the Press in
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1939) (VWB 28[2008]). Mrs Dalloway was the most written-about novel in this years three issues; one essay probes the significance of the texts minor characters (including Purvis and the singing beggar) (VWB 28[2008] 3647), and another short piece identifies the song from Tennysons The Princess as key intertext for the first page of Woolfs novel (VWB 28[2008] 4852). Also of note was an intriguing short memoir of growing up at 22 Hyde Park Gate from 1943 (VWB 29[2008] 4450). Finally, there were two particularly interesting titles this year from the growing Bloomsbury Heritage series: Julie Singletons A History of Monks House and Village of Rodmell, and Diana Gardners The Rodmell Papers: Reminiscences of Virginia and Leonard Woolf by a Sussex Neighbour, published posthumously, and which, as Claire Gardner (the authors niece) says in an introduction, gives the reader some more glimpses of [the Woolfs] as they interact with the Rodmell community (p. 7). 3. Post-1945 Fiction The year 2008 was reasonably productive in the area of post-1945 fiction, although there were fewer monographs than in previous years. There has, however, been a higher proportion of books that balance an introductory approach aimed at the student market with genuinely new research. This review will begin by looking at four books that were published in 2007, but did not make last years list. There were three additions to Manchester University Presss Contemporary British Novelists series in 2007: Dominic Heads Ian McEwan, Brian Bakers Iain Sinclair and Simon Ko vesis James Kelman. Heads book provides a critical insight into the novels of one of the most important contemporary writers and indeed, Head makes great claims for McEwan as the most significant of a number of writers (including Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Swift) who have resuscitated the link between morality and the novel for a whole generation, in ways that befit the historical pressures of their time (p. 1). This reading of McEwan as central to contemporary British literary culture is advanced in an interesting introduction that identifies the connection between the novelist and some of the main issues in British society and culture more generally over the last forty years or so, including fading colonialism; the dissolution of the British class structure; educational reform; the transformation of family life; and the second wave of feminism (p. 5). McEwans exploration of moral dilemmas and situations in his fiction is thus read as mapping similar concerns in public debates at large. For Head, McEwans concern with the ethics of narrative is a touchstone of his work, although the way in which that has been expressed has developed over his novelistic career from the beginning of the 1970s. Head also sees a link in McEwan to a tradition in the post-war British novel that engages with the sense of an identity crisis in liberal humanism, an influence he traces to McEwans teachers on the University of East Anglias pioneering Creative Writing MA, Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury. Perhaps more important for Head is McEwans connection with Iris Murdochs exploration of the ethical function of fiction to investigate moral issues, especially during
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moments of crisis for individual characters. The book is organized into ten chapters, the middle eight of which offer close readings of McEwans main fiction from The Cement Garden [1978] to Saturday [2005]. Head deals with one novel in each chapter (except chapter 2, which discusses McEwans short stories alongside The Cement Garden, and chapter 5, which discuses both The Innocent and Black Dogs), and this allows him the space to provide intriguing and detailed analyses of individual texts. The chapters on The Child in Time, Enduring Love and Atonement are especially astute. Head reads The Child in Time as a social condition novel in which McEwan reinvents the novel of society in his own terms by interweaving the public and the private and exploring moral dilemmas that relate to both. Enduring Love is discussed as a hybrid form that cleverly produces a philosophical novel of ideas with the pace and narrative drive of a thriller. In chapter 8, Head rightly identifies Atonement as McEwans greatest achievement, concentrating particularly on the way in which the novel explores how national myths are inscribed [and] the construction of a literary tradition (p. 156). The book as a whole provides a fascinating analysis of McEwans fiction up to 2007. Brian Bakers Iain Sinclair is only the second full-length monograph on this important contemporary British writer (the first was Robert Bonds Iain Sinclair, published in 2005 by Salt Publishing). This may be due to the perception that Sinclairs writing is difficult. Baker, however, manages to produce a sophisticated and yet accessible analysis of the authors work. His approach is to relate Sinclairs writing to relevant literary and cultural contexts, and to useful theoretical concepts drawn primarily from poststructuralist and postmodern theory. In a very useful introduction, Baker identifies some of these main contexts and themes, which are then explored in the rest of the book. In particular, he identifies the 1960s countercultural influences on Sinclairs writingon his early poetry in particular, but also on his later fiction. Baker also cleverly explores one of the central tensions for Sinclair: how to combine the figure of the detached social observer with a writing that, in part, wants to offer a social, political and cultural critique of contemporary Britain. Baker suggests that Sinclairs approach to this tension is through his interest in the anti-psychoanalytic theories of R.D. Laing, who is shown to be an important touchstone for the authors work. Laings romanticized focus on the radical potential of the idea of madness is shown to be attached for Sinclair to a utopian politics of the counterculturean idea that features in much of his fiction. Baker is also keen to identify Sinclairs interest in the relationship between textuality and geographical space, linking him to the postmodern geographies of figures such as Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson and Michel Foucault. After the highly informative introduction, the book is divided into seven main chapters, each of which takes a particular theme in Sinclairs writing. The first chapter concentrates mainly on Sinclairs 1970s poetry, while chapter 2 discusses his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Chapter 3 focuses on Sinclairs particular form of social and political critique, and especially on the critique of Thatcherism in Downriver. The next chapter traces Sinclairs interest in outsider figures, manifest in his own narrative techniques, and in some of his subjects, such as his non-fiction book on John Clare, Edge of the Orison. This theme is further pursued in a detailed
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reading of Rodinskys Room, a collaboration between Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein that focuses on exile and the marginalization of Londons East End Jewish community. The fifth chapter, The Visual Text, develops the ideas introduced in the introduction on Sinclairs radical and distinctive exploration of the relationship between geographical and textual space. This is focused primarily on Slow Chocolate Autopsy, the 1997 book Sinclair published in collaboration with Dave McKean. Chapter 6 details the move of Sinclairs textual geographies to the spaces outside central London, specifically the Millennium Dome and the M25, in London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. The last chapter offers interesting readings of Radon Daughters, Landors Tower and Dining on Stones. All in all, Baker has produced a wide-ranging, erudite and theoretically informed analysis of Sinclairs work that will set the standard for future Sinclair criticism. The third book to come out in 2007 in the Contemporary British Novelists series is Simon Ko vesis James Kelman, which is a well-informed and engaging analysis of one of Scotlands most important contemporary writers. The book is organized into six chapters, the first of which is a fascinating discussion of some of the main themes in Kelmans writing. Ko vesi looks in particular at the critical reception of Kelmans work and the positioning of himself outside what he sees as mainstream British fiction. In particular, Ko vesi shows how the representation of the ordinary is political in Kelmans fiction. There is also an excellent discussion of the way in which Kelman approaches issues related to working-class fiction through his manipulation of narrative voice, language and realism. This includes a description of Kelmans careful selection of words in a socio-political context, for example, in an intriguing analysis of the authors replacement of the word margarined for buttered in a draft of one of his novels. Ko vesi extrapolates this specific example to tease open some of the tensions inherent in Kelmans representation of working-class life. The rest of the book discusses these issues in relation to Kelmans main novels, with a chapter each given over to The Busconductor Hines [1984], A Chancer [1985], A Disaffection [1989] and How Late It Was, How Late [1994]. The final chapter looks at Kelmans two most recent novels Translated Accounts [2001] and Careful in the Land of the Free [2004]. Interspersed in these chapters is a discussion of Kelmans short stories, plays, and political and critical essays. Throughout, the focus is on the interrelated themes . . . of class, politics, language and masculinity (p. 30). Although Ko vesi is occasionally critical of some of Kelmans writing, the book as a whole celebrates the novelists control of language and narrative technique, and Ko vesi succeeds in achieving one of the stated aims of the book: to recover Kelmans work as artful literature, conveyed in a highly crafted and actively resourced language [which] works against the prevalent notion that Kelmans world is the product of a primitivist, passive mimesis assumed by many commentators to be the only tool of the working-class realist (p. 30). Sonya Andermahrs edited book Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide includes essays by a number of leading critics of contemporary British fiction. Andermahr has done an excellent editing job on this book, providing an introduction and very helpful synopses at the beginning of each chapter. She also provides a useful introduction that focuses on the two main
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trends in the overall critical approach to Winterson: her place within (lesbian) feminist discourses, and her engagement with the formal and philosophical aspects of postmodernism. She also contributes a chapter that investigates Wintersons adaptation of the traditional romance narrative to incorporate lesbian relationships, and to attempt to produce romance narratives that loose themselves from fixed gender identities. Lucie Armitt argues that Winterson has gradually moved away from feminist concerns in her fiction, replacing them with a genderless engagement with postmodernism. Helena Grice and Tim Woods also explore Wintersons engagement with postmodern theories, especially in her tendency to deconstruct a series of binary oppositions such as fact/fiction, history/story and male/female. Jane Haslett looks at Wintersons treatment of the body in The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body, drawing on feminist and queer theory. Jennifer Gustars chapter, Language and the Limits of Desire, deploys psychoanalytical models from Freud, Lacan and Kristeva in thoughtful readings of The Passion and Written on the Body. Ginette Carpenter focuses on the representation of reading in Wintersons fiction, while Michelle Denby looks at the importance of religion in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Gut Symmetries. Philip Tews essay on the representation of male characters and masculinity offers an area that has been lacking in Wintersonian criticism to date. He argues convincingly that although male characters tend to take a background role in Wintersons fiction, they are, nevertheless, treated with a certain amount of sympathy; an approach that splices interestingly with her treatment of female identity and sexuality. Sonia Marie Melchiore extends the discussion by looking at Wintersons writing for film, radio and the stage as well as the BBC adaptation of Oranges. Gavin Keulks closes the volume with a critical survey of Wintersons most recent work, arguing that she both pushes postmodern experimentation in terms of form while holding on to more realist concepts such as love and history. The book as a whole is an excellent addition to the critical body of work on Winterson, and although many of the essays address common debates in Wintersonian studies, there are a number of fresh perspectives on her writing. One of the main monographs to come out in 2008 was Dominic Heads The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond, which, as its title suggests, takes a critical overview of the condition of contemporary British fiction. It would be misleading to describe Heads book as a polemic; nevertheless, he produces an interesting critique of the contemporary novel and its relationship with literary-critical practice. In particular, the book registers his impatience with academic literary criticism, and its deepening insularity in its failure to connect with fiction writers and the broader literary culture. In an engaging introduction, Head sets out his advocacy of an access of self-consciousness and a willingness to break out of the systematic institutional straitjacket into which he considers academic literary criticism finds itself. The introduction goes on to address a number of other concerns in the contemporary literary culture. He challenges the predominant chronological reading of post-war fiction as a gradual decline in the British novel from the 1950s to the 1970s followed by a renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s, countering such a narrative by citing a number of significant novels produced in the mid-1970s. He also
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rejects the mandarin assumptions of academic critics regarding the general reader, stressing that the former should not underestimate the sophisticated reading practices engaged in by the latter, and arguing that the well-versed novel reader might be at a parallel level of sophistication to the narratologist (p. 8). He also analyses the complexities and inconsistencies in defining the serious literary novel, citing examples from Nick Hornby and, in an extended analysis, John Banvilles The Sea as revealing the difficulty of identifying what is both serious and literary about these writers work. Head pursues these themes in five chapters that are organized around specific issues and offer critical readings of individual novels, some well known, and some less so. Chapter 1 continues to interrogate the idea of a renaissance in British fiction from the 1980s onwards, and addresses what he sees as the false dichotomy between realism and experimentalism deployed in much criticism in the field. The second half of this chapter directs these themes to an analysis of the genre of the seaside novel, which he describes as an example of English provincialism, and he discusses work by less well-known novelists such as Stephen Blanchard, Andrew Cowan and Chris Paling. His main argument in this section is that the seaside novel of the 1990s distils the essence of social relations post-Thatcher . . . by revitalizing the prosaic descriptiveness of provincial realism with the reflective tones of confessional narrative (p. 46). The second chapter explores the place of fiction in broader contemporary culture, assessing the impact the recent culture of prizes and awards has had on literary production. This is discussed through the example of Ian McEwans Amsterdam, which Head claims represents a novel that might almost be said to have been designed to win the Booker Prize, which it did in 1998. The second half of the chapter looks at the way the Booker Prize has produced an ambiguous relationship with fiction on the part of former commonwealth nations despite the number of writers that have won it from some of those countries. Head uses this as a basis to discuss fiction by V.S. Naipaul, J.G. Farrell, Paul Scott, Nadine Gordimer and, in particular, Kiran Desai. Chapter 3 continues to explore postcolonial literature written in English, focusing specifically on issues of representation in Monica Alis Brick Lane, and later exploring it as an example of post-9/11 literature in comparison with Zadie Smiths White Teeth, a novel that has a similar cultural setting but a distinctly different tone and outlook. The post-9/11 theme is pursued in the fourth chapter, which includes intriguing readings of Ian McEwans Saturday and Martin Amiss Yellow Dog in particular, both of which he reads as metaphorically replaying acts of terror through localized examples of violence. Heads reading of Saturday is more convincing in this context than that of Yellow Dog, as with the latter the splicing of the novel with Amiss journalistic pieces on terrorism and Islamism seems forced. However, his discussion of Yellow Dogs exploration of masculine violence produces an intriguing reading, whether or not it can be fruitfully described as a post-9/11 novel. There is also discussion of Philip Roths American Pastoral and John Updikes Terrorist, which frames the chapters title, Terrorism in Transatlantic Perspective. The last chapter, Global Futures: Novelists, Critics, Citizens, returns to one of Heads main aims in the bookto explore the cultural dialogue between those groups. He does this through analyses of a number of
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novels by contemporary writers that offer (usually negative) representations of academics and cultural commentators, including Philip Roths The Human Stain, Claire Messuds The Emperors Children and J.M. Coetzees Disgrace. This chapter also returns to the theme of the post-9/11 novel with discussion of Don DeLillos Mao II and Falling Man (the former as a pre-9/11 anticipation of the metaphorical power terrorism accumulates in post-9/11 America). In summary, the book produces a mature and thoughtful reflection on the condition of contemporary British fiction and literary criticism, and despite the jumping around in terms of theme the central arguments are established with keen intelligence and supported by insightful readings of individual novels. Another monograph published this year in the field of contemporary narrative is Gerry Smyths Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel. This is an engagement in an aspect of literature that has not previously had much attention. Smyth sets out his relationship with other writers and theorists working in the intersection of fiction and music in the introduction. In particular, he makes reference to cultural theorist Jacques Attalis claim that sound (or what he calls noise) is central to human culture. Smyth also discusses the development of word studies and music studies, both of which are influences on his approach. Although Smyths main aim is to pursue an immanent form of analysis, based primarily upon what emerges from the texts themselves (p. 5), and although his main focus is on the period 19902008, the first part of the book sets out a theoretical approach and discusses historical examples of what he calls the music-novel from the eighteenth century to the early 1990s. This part is divided into two chapters, the first of which identifies distinctions in the use of music in literature in terms of inspiration, metaphor and form, and in which he maps out the terrain of the critical debate in each of these areas. The second chapter discusses examples such as Lawrence Sternes Tristram Shandy, Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure and Colin MacInness Absolute Beginners. Part II offers readings of individual contemporary British novels in three chapters organized around the themes of different musical genres; the way music is used in different genres of fiction; and the uses of music in fiction. Chapter 3 identifies the way in which popular music, in particular, became a source of serious cultural discourse from the 1980s onwards. He attributes this cultural shift to two factors: first, the resistance to a perceived waning of art music in the period resulted in a number of novelists producing fiction that engaged in cultural debates over music; secondly, the emergence of punk in the 1970s as a moment after which popular music increased its cultural capital. This chapter then goes on to identify the way in which selected novels from the period engage with specific musical ` res; genres, for example, folk in Captain Corellis Mandolin by Louis de Bernie rock in Salman Rushdies The Ground Beneath Her Feet; hip-hop in Zadie Smiths On Beauty; and dance in Alan Warners Morvern Callar. The fourth chapter moves the focus from musical genre to fictional genre and, interestingly, carries out the task of observing the manner in which music is invoked in relation to the different formal and conceptual concerns in a range of literary genres (p. 133). It then goes on to discuss a range of genres with respect to specific novels, including graphic fiction in Horace Dorlan by
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Andrzej Klimowski; fantasy in Terry Pratchets Soul Music; the thriller in Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott; and the crime novel in Ian Rankins Exit Music. The last chapter moves the discussion away from genre and engages with a diversity of social and cultural themes in which the music-novel has been central. These include the use of music to identify historical periods, and in some cases to create a sense of nostalgia; the exploration of the relationship between music and silence; and, lastly, how love and music have often been connected in contemporary British fiction. This chapter includes a short discussion of a number of novels, including Rose Tremains Music and Silence, Hanif Kureishis The Buddha of Suburbia, Jonathan Coes The Rotters Club, Kazuo Ishiguros The Unconsoled and Buddha Da by Anne Donovan. Overall, Smyths book is a broad survey of this relatively new field, and while it would have been good to have had more detailed readings of individual novels, it succeeds in further opening up a rich area for the study of contemporary fiction that promises to be a feature of much criticism in the future. Another major series concentrating on contemporary British fiction is Palgraves New British Fiction, aimed at both literary scholars and students. There have been two books in the series this year, the first of which is Kaye Mitchells A.L. Kennedy. As with all the books in the series, it is organized into three parts, the first of which offers a timeline, which combines important historical and cultural events with relevant biographical details and publishing history pertaining to Kennedy; an introductory chapter that contextualizes her fiction; and a brief biography. The second part offers critical analysis of Kennedys major works, and the third part includes an interview with the author and a critical survey of the critical reception of Kennedys work in both the literary media and in academic studies. The introduction picks up on two important contexts for Kennedy, her place as a Scottish writer and her relationship with contemporary womens fiction. Through discussion of Kennedys comments and other relevant works, such as Alasdair Grays Lanark, Alan Warners Morvern Callar, Irvine Welshs Trainspotting and Janice Galloways The Trick is to Keep Breathing, Mitchell argues that Kennedy distances herself from both a national and a gendered (and in particular a feminist) context, preferring to maintain an outsider status in her writing generally. While avoiding being attached too closely to reductive social categories, Mitchell does stress that Kennedy is interested in exploring the representation of marginalized identity. As she writes: What we find in Kennedys work . . . are the suggestions that [the] representation of the culturally and socially marginalized is by no means straightforward, particularly where their interior lives are concerned (pp. 1718). Part II looks at Kennedys major works in a series of three chapters, each of which serves as both an introduction to recurrent themes and approaches in her work, and as a critical reading of individual books. Chapter 3 discusses Kennedys exploration of marginal identities in two of her early collections of short stories, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains and Now That Youre Back, and her first novel Looking for the Possible Dance. In this chapter, Mitchell is particularly interested in the way in which identity is represented as unstable in these books, especially in terms of Scottishness and gender. She draws thoughtfully on theoretical perspectives from Homi Bhabha and Franco
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Moretti in her analysis of Kennedys work in this chapter. Chapter 4 concentrates on readings of So I Am Glad, Original Bliss and Everything You Need, focusing specifically on her reconfiguration of the romance genre wherein romance becomes a kind of religion (p. 69). This is followed in chapter 5 by an intriguing analysis of Kennedys interest in the inadequacy of language and breakdowns in the communication process as a general theme identified in three of her later works, Indelible Acts, Paradise and Day. This analysis of individual texts is followed by the transcription of an interview with Kennedy from 2006, and an informative and critically engaged summary of the critical reception of her work. There has been relatively little literary criticism on Kennedys fiction to date, and this book sets a solid benchmark for future work on a writer who is increasingly becoming an important figure in British fiction. The second book in this series this year is Stephen Mortons Salman Rushdie, which follows the established format of an introductory part with a timeline and biographical reading, which in this case is a discussion of Rushdies position as a postcolonial writer who has embraced South Asian modernity and migratory narratives. Morton intervenes in the debate on Rushdie by focusing attention away from him as a postmodernist writer to read him in terms of South Asian historical and cultural contexts. As Morton writes, to read Rushdie as an avatar of postmodernism is to ignore the ways in which Rushdies literary style is precisely a response to the historical condition of South Asias postcolonial modernity from the diasporic standpoint of a British Indian Muslim (p. 13). The second part of the book takes this broad approach and applies it to Rushdies major works. This part is divided into six chapters that follow a chronological framework. Chapter 3 discusses Midnights Children and Shame, offering a detailed analysis set against the politics of India and Pakistan respectively in the period after the Second World War. Chapter 4 looks at The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West. This might seem at first to be an awkward grouping (other than in terms of chronological proximity), given the varying audiences for these texts; however, Morton makes interesting connections between them based on the way each text achieves a reassessment of Islamic literature and culture, which itself reveals Rushdies engagement with religious and historical contexts. Chapters 5 and 6 are given over to one novel each, The Moors Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet respectively, while chapter 7 examines Fury and Shalimar the Clown. Each of these chapters develops Mortons central reading of Rushdie as a major figure in what he identifies as postcolonial modernity. The last part provides a detailed summary of Rushdies other writing and his critical reception. The book as a whole is a worthy contribution to Rushdie studies, and Morton achieves the often difficult balancing act of producing an introduction to a writer in a style that is accessible, while engaging with and often advancing the important debates on this central figure in contemporary fiction. Nick Bentleys Contemporary British Fiction also combines an introduction to the area with critical engagement with some canonical writers that have emerged over the period as well as some less well-known writers. The present reviewer is the author of this book so what follows is informative rather than
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critical. The book is part of Edinburgh Universitys Critical Guides series and follows the format of the series by including a chronology and an introduction that focuses on the major historical and theoretical contexts for the period. This includes the following section headings: Politics; Class; Gender and Sexuality; Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism and National Identity; Youth and Subcultures; and A Note on Theory. The rest of the book produces critical analyses of fifteen contemporary British novels divided into five chapters. The first of these chapters discusses narrative form and includes critical analysis of Martin Amiss London Fields, Alasdair Grays Poor Things and Zadie Smiths White Teeth, approaching the former two novels as examples of postmodernist technique, while Smiths novel is read as a return to a realistic mode, echoing nineteenth-century models in a contemporary and multicultural British setting. Chapter 2, Writing Contemporary Ethnicities, explores Salman Rushdies Shame, Courttia Newlands Society Within and Monica Alis Brick Lane. The third chapter turns its attention to issues of gender and sexuality in studies of Angela Carters The Passion of New Eve, Jeanette Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Nick Hornbys Fever Pitch. Chapter 4, History, Memory and Writing, explores this range of topics in Graham Swifts Waterland, A.S. Byatts Possession: A Romance and Ian McEwans Atonement. The last main chapter focuses on issues of the representation of cultural and literary space in Hanif Kureishis The Buddha of Suburbia, Iain Sinclairs Downriver and Julian Barness England, England. There is a conclusion followed by a number of student resources at the end of the book. Elizabeth Taylor is a post-war writer who has received relatively little critical attention, and N.H. Reeves book on her in the Writers and their Work series aims in part to address this lack. Reeve emphasizes the understated style of Taylors writing and reads her work as tied to the historical context of the three decades after the Second World War, during which most of her fiction was published. This short book concentrates on Taylors thirteen novels, the analysis of which is arranged in five chapters that take a broadly chronological approach, although the last chapter concentrates solely on Taylors 1954 novella Hester Lilly. The attention given to this novel is warranted by Reeves claim that it brings together most of the themes in Taylors fiction: the antagonism between an older and a younger woman; the terror of being supplanted; old age, loneliness, repletion and habit; living in a house not properly ones own; a sudden crisis of identity, the dream of transformation above all, the breaking down of defence, the raw exposure of crumbling and growing: crumbling mostly (p. 86). Not all of these themes, of course, are present in every Taylor novel, but this synopsis provides a way of approaching many of them. In the previous four chapters, Reeve offers perceptive, if relatively brief, readings of Taylors fiction. The first two chapters discuss Taylors 1940s novels, identifying them as concerned with characters that in different ways are coming to terms with the personal upheavals caused by the Second World War. Reeve often refers to Freudian (and to a lesser extent Lacanian) models of psychoanalysis as ways of reading of Taylor, and this works especially well with the gothic sensibilities that Taylor uses in some of her 1940s novels, including A Wreath of Roses. Reeve also identifies Taylors
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use of intertextual allusion, such as to Charlotte Bronte in At Mrs Lippincotes and to Jane Austens Northanger Abbey in Palladian. The former of these is particularly convincing as Reeve analyses the thematic use of the attic space in At Mrs Lippincotes, where To have the key to the attic . . . is to have the means of guarding the secret places of the self against the danger of unpredictable exposure or trespass (p. 27). Chapter 3 looks mainly at Taylors fiction of the 1950s, which Reeve argues shows her developing the possibility of longer, more detached views or of a more decisive sense of shift into new conditions (p. 42), and their interest in the imprisoning effects of power, on both those wielding it as much as on those suffering it or drawn into its orbit (p. 56). This chapter offers readings of A Game of Hide and Seek, The Sleeping Beauty, Angel (Taylors only historical novel), and In a Summer Season. The fourth chapter begins by tracing a certain move in Taylors 1960s fiction to the influence of her seeing a production of Samuel Becketts Happy Days in 1962. This Beckettian influence is seen particularly in characters attempting to distract themselves from a vacuous world in Taylors The Soul of Kindness, and in an increasingly dry and laconic voice [with] sentences and paragraphs pared right down in The Wedding Group (p. 67). This sensibility is continued in explorations of ageing in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and Blaming. Books in the Writers and their Work series tend to bridge the gap between an introduction to a writers work and a critical engagement with the fiction, and Reeves book consummately achieves this balance. It is well written, offers intriguing analyses of Taylors fiction, and succeeds in its aim of reclaiming this much underrated writer. The Fiction of A.S. Byatt by Louisa Hadley is another addition to Palgraves Readers Guides to Essential Criticism series. Hadley provides an accessible and detailed guide to the most important criticism on Byatt to date. In an informative introduction she gives biographical details and publishing history and sets out the key parameters and contexts of Byatts fiction and other writing. In this she emphasizes the tendency in the early criticism of the novelists work to compare her to her sister Margaret Drabble, much to the annoyance of Byatt. It was with the success of Possession: A Romance, her fifth novel, published in 1990, that Byatts work started to be taken more seriously in its own right. Hadley identifies three main areas in which Byatts fiction has been approached: the relationship to literary traditions, the role of the artist and womens issues (p. 5), although she stresses Byatts ambivalent relationship with all of these issues, citing her work as an example of self-conscious realism which flirts with postmodernism, and her concerns with the position of the artist in general, and not only the female artist. The book as a whole aims to consider both the responses to individual texts as well as the wider critical debates surrounding Byatts oeuvre as a whole (p. 4). This is achieved in chapters arranged chronologically (in the main) that deal with each of the novels from Shadow of a Sun [1964] to A Whistling Woman [2002], while also making reference to Byatts literary criticism, and a final chapter that concentrates on the short stories. Given the prominence of Possession in Byatts output, two chapters are dedicated to it: one on its formal experiments as a dialogue between realism and postmodernism, and one on its engagement with historical contexts. Each of the chapters begins with a section on the
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immediate reviews, followed by short sections on the main critical responses particular to each text. The first chapter on Possession, for example, divides the critical attention it received into the following sections: Possession as a Victorian Novel, Possession as a Postmodern Novel, Beyond Postmodernism?, Postscript: A Romantic Ending?, Byatt on Realism and Woman as Artist. This division of the criticism into thematic areas is one of the strengths on the book, and reveals Hadleys knowledge of both the main criticism and the contexts in which that criticism was produced.
4. Pre-1950 Drama There is rather an odd selection of pre-1950 drama books to review this year, including several general works on theatre in the West End, and those on T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves, as well as collected essays on the Grand Guignol. Once more, this period of theatre history seems to be little covered by writers and critics. In this respect, it is salutary to mention Marina MacKays edited book, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II. In what is always an excellent series, this volume misses an opportunity by (briefly) mentioning French theatre during the Second World War (Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh), but not British theatre. Rod Mengham, for example, mentions the film Cottage to Let [1941] to illustrate his point about contemporary interest in spies and fifth columnists, but does not seem to be aware that this first appeared as a stage play by Geoffrey Kerr in 1940. Admittedly, the books remit is wide, covering world literature, but its omission of drama is perhaps typical of the way in which British theatre before 1950 is often overlooked. Haunted Theatres, by Tom Ogden, is an amusing selection of ghost stories about American, Canadian and British theatres, and also recounts a little of the history of various West End theatres. We learn about the death in 1897 of Victorian actor William Terriss, outside the Adelphi, at the hands of Richard Prince, who envied Terriss his career. As Terriss lay dying outside the stage door, his last words were I will be back. Since then, it is claimed, there have been several sightings in the theatre and surrounding area. The event is marked by a plaque on the wall of the Adelphi, although the building itself was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century, upon which it was given a new identity as the Century theatre, before becoming the Adelphi again. Replaced by an art deco design in 1930, when it had the addition of Royal to its name, it reverted back to its original name ten years later. Another tale is told of Margaret Rutherford and her husband, Stringer Davis, forced by the thick fog outside to spend the night in the dressing room at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. During the night, she saw the ghost of John Baldwin Buckstone, a nineteenth-century actor-manager, as did Donald Sinden during the run of The Heiress in 1949. His appearance is meant to be a good omen, marking the successful run of a show. In a touch of meta-theatre, the Phantom of the Opera made a ghostly appearance during the musical of that name, at Her Majestys theatre in London in the 1980s. Other ghosts of that theatre include Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who was seen by the entire cast of Sir Terence Rattigans Cause Cele`bre in the 1970s. The playhouse itself underwent a number of
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transformations, having been consumed by fire three times before its present incarnation was built in 1892. There is also the strange story of the jacket in the costume department of the Duke of Yorks theatre, which actresses insisted was trying to suffocate them, and the apparition of a Victorian actress, Violet Melnotte, who took up ownership of the same theatre, on and off, until she died in 1935. Spectral manifestations continued there throughout the Second World War, when it was badly damaged in bombing raids, becoming less frequent as the theatre underwent a number of changes: it was refurbished by Capital Radio in the late 1970s, and used by the Ambassador Theatre Group chain as its headquarters from the 1980s. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is purported to be the most haunted theatre in the world: its ghosts include Charles Macklin and Sarah Siddons from the eighteenth century, Edmund Keans son, Charles, the clown Joseph Grimaldi, and Dan Leno, a music-hall artiste. There is also a figure known as the Man in Grey, who made an appearance in the upper circle as the cast of The Dancing Years had a photo call in 1939. Paul Ibells Theatreland, as its subtitle explains, is a journey through the heart of Londons theatre. Charting the history of Londons Theatreland, from the Elizabethan period to the present day, there are a number of areas of interest to those who study the theatre of the first half of the twentieth century. We learn, for example, that the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, one of two patent houses allowed by Charles II to stage serious drama during the Restoration, was in danger of closing down in the 1930s, due to dwindling audiences. Ivor Novello was called upon to save the Lane, coming up with the extravaganza Glamorous Night [1935]. During the war the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) had its headquarters there, and the nose cone of a bomb, which crashed through the roof and became buried in the floor, is on display next to a chair taken from the Reichstag at the end of the war by theatre producer Basil Dean. We also hear about the popularity of all-male drag shows which toured in the period immediately after the war, such as Soldiers in Skirts and Forces Showboat, which stemmed from shows got up by the men in the services while they were away fighting. Ibell says, the shows were a way of seeing (and in a curious way celebrating) men in the armed services in a fun, and certainly unthreatening way. This was militarism not as in a Nazi propaganda film, but as in a saucy seaside postcard (p. 34). This tradition, it is suggested, prompted the careers of performers like Danny La Rue. Ibell has a jaunty, conversational style, and the book zips along at a speedy pace as he covers a range of subjects: the relationship between the Royal Family and the theatre, theatrical dynasties, Americans in London, and so on. There is also an interesting chapter on Drama Queens, recounting the amicable but rival-driven friendship between Ivor Novello and Noe l Coward, as well as a section on female theatre managers, such as Gladys Cooper, who ran the Playhouse theatre with her husband from 1917 to 1927, and then on her own until 1933, and Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic and Sadlers Wells. Yet while this may be an appealing book it is essentially rather lightweight; there is a lack of considered analysis, which at times can be frustrating, as well as certain antiquated prejudices: Terence Rattigan is described as a very old-fashioned writer, for example, whose career was destroyed by John Osbornes Look
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Back in Anger, when, as critical commentary for some time has observed, the playwrights are not as dissimilar as was once thought. Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson provide a coherent investigation of Londons Grand Guignol and the Theatre of HorrorGuignol being a kind of drama popular during the 1920s, perhaps as a response to the First World War. The book is divided into two sections: the first gives a historical overview of Londons Grand Guignol, with information on performance, censorship, reception, critics and its legacy, while the second section consists of ten plays by writers as various as Reginald Berkeley (Eight OClock [1920]), Christopher Holland (The Old Woman [1921]) and Noe l Coward (The Better Half [1922]). The first Grand Guignol-influenced play was introduced to Britain by Jose Levy in 1912, with Seven Blind Men at the Palladium in London. Like several others that followed, this was adapted from the French. As Hand and Wilson note, The Grand Guignol was quintessentially a French form, and more specifically Montmartrean, and whilst it adapted to local conditions as it was exported around the world, it remained resolutely French in its approach to the portrayal of sex and violence in particular (p. 20). Yet Levy founded a Grand Guignol theatre at the Little Theatre in London, which produced a series of British plays in this style, even if this took place over a very short period of time: from 1920 to 1922. He did this by asking for one-act plays, which would present sections of life as it is, gay sometimes, frequently sad, occasionally very horrible, but as it is, without the sugar coating, or saccharine centre of the so-called popular play (p. 24). This had the effect of appealing to new writers such as Noe l Coward. The involvement of Sybil Thorndike, her brother Russell, and her husband Lewis Casson also helped to give the plays an air of respectability, as well as attracting other actors and writers. Like the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris, the geographical placement of the Little Theatre added to the overall theatrical effect. Sandwiched between the Strand and the Embankment, it had a marginal place in Londons theatreland, being close enough to the West End to draw audiences and yet slightly off the beaten track. It had an established air of rebellion, being originally set up in 1910 by Gertrude Kingston as a place to stage suffrage drama. The Parisian Grand Guignol was more erotic and bloody than its British counterpart, which was tempered by the gentility of West End audiences and the censorship laws of the Lord Chamberlain, and anyone interested in history of stage censorship in Britain would do well to look at the chapter here on this subject. Hand and Wilson note how scripts were sometimes only submitted to the Lord Chamberlains Office once rehearsals were well under way, in the belief that this would force them to capitulate over any changes, and that the ensuing bad publicity often helped to arouse audience interest. Working in a genre that set itself against the Establishment was seen as a worthy aspiration, as Mervyn McPherson declared in The Grand Guignol Annual Review 1921: we prefer to be ambitious and, if necessary, to die of too much daring, than complacently to endure the mediocre. This might well be the slogan of the Grand Guignol (p. 61). In terms of the plays themselves, Christopher Hollands The Old Women [1921] stands out. Set in an asylum, peopled by doctors, nuns and madwomen, Hollands play balances comedy, tragedy and horror as the underlying clash between science and religion is played out.
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Altogether this is a well- researched book on a fascinating piece of theatre history. Robert Graves is known particularly for his writing on the First World War, for example Good-bye to All That. Steven Trout brings together the original transcript of the 1929 edition, with the essay A Postscript to Good-bye to All That, and Gravess play But It Still Goes On (both 1930). Trout suggests that the essay and play provide a context in which to read the more celebrated work. Maurice Browne, the producer of R.C. Sherriffs Journeys End in the West End in 1929, who founded the Chicago Little Theatre before overseeing the beginnings of a drama programme at Dartington Hall, invited Graves to write a war play. Good-bye to All That stood in direct contrast to the typical war narratives of the time, which emulated Victorian stylistic elegance, for a fragmentary and rambling meta-memoir (p. xviii). Equally, But It Still Goes On was quite different from Sherriffs claustrophobic trench setting and worthy speeches about the conflict between patriotic loyalty and the dangers of life at the Front. Instead, Graves presented Browne with a farce set in London, which satirizes English morality and at time seems almost Ortonesque in its surreal juxtaposition, and brusque treatment, of sexuality and death. Unsurprisingly, especially given its frankness about homosexuality and use of famous people and family members (for example, Siegfried Sassoon appears as a closeted homosexual, p. xxxix, and Gravess father as an over-rated novelist and poet , p. xxx), the play was not staged. Trout sees connections between this play and works by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, as well as suggesting that it anticipated characters in Evelyn Waughs satirical novels of the 1930s. This is an absorbing and original take on Graves, whose despair about the horrors of the First World War punctures the comic surface of the play in a series of disturbing and violent vignettes. Another literary lion is taken on in John Worthens short biography of T.S. Eliot, which charts how Eliot had written the vast majority of his poems by 1942, when it was his plays that made and retained him a public name (p. 104). His career in the theatre began in 1933, when E. Martin Browne, an influential figure involved in the revival of religious and poetic drama during this period, asked him to write a pageant to raise money for north London churches. The Rock was the result, duly staged in 1934. Murder in the Cathedral swiftly followed a year later, again directed by Browne for the Canterbury Festival, before going on to the West End. It was this success that led Eliot away from writing plays like Sweeny Agonistes, which he had originally intended, and more towards the poetic drama favoured by Browne. His next play, The Family Reunion, was difficult to write, owing to its autobiographical basis, only lasting on the London stage for thirty-eight performances in March 1939. The Cocktail Party followed a decade later, first appearing at the Edinburgh Festival, before becoming a success in the West End. This was repeated with The Confidential Clerk in 1953, although it was not as profitable as its predecessor. Finally, in 1958, The Elder Statesman was staged. Worthen points to Eliots inability to move beyond verse in his plays, or to be able to create realistic conversations, which made them stilted and artificial. He quotes Virginia Woolf who, on seeing The Family Reunion, remarked: not a dramatist. A monologist (pp. 2056). Worthen concludes
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that The resulting superficiality of the lives with which the plays were concerned sits very oddly with the deep accounts Eliot proffers of how it might be possible to live better (p. 206). The plays revolve around a spiritual catalyst or crisis, even while they employ the dramatic conventions of the time: the drawing-room setting, the upper-class household, the comic working classes. Worthen suggests Eliot deployed this juxtaposition knowingly, which exemplified his conception of the violent intersection of the concerns of the timeless moment with events occurring in time, but for audiences, this resulted merely in being on two quite different levels simultaneously (p. 207). While there are only a few pages in this biography on Eliots work in the theatre, the comments are illuminating and cogent. Finally, Sos Eltis brings together a disparate group of writers in her article, Bringing Out the Acid: Noe l Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp (MD 51[2008] 21133). In doing this, Eltis manages to provide a fresh perspective on the work of Coward. She expands upon Susan Sontags theory in Notes on Camp [1964], where brief mention is made of Cowards use of intentional camp . . . which means to be funny, as opposed to Genuine Camp, which is always na ve and takes itself entirely seriously (p. 211). Eltis argues that Cowards work embodies the essence of camp sensibility, described by Sontag as a love of the unnatural, of style and artifice. Rooted in passion, it is the glorification of character (p. 211). While this is perhaps not true of Cowards more serious playsPost Mortem [1930], Cavalcade [1931], This Happy Breed [1939]it can be seen to apply to plays such as Hay Fever [1924], Present Laughter [1939] and Blithe Spirit [1941]. Here the instability of language and meaning rubs against the comic surface, creating a sense of ambiguity. This is furthered by the characters, who construct personae for themselves to act out. There is no real sense of closure at the end of these plays; rather, they display the ironic disengagement of camp, operating outside the conventional borders of comedy and tragedy, lacking the emotional and social commitment that gives them meaning (p. 212). 5. Post-1950 Drama While being a lean year for major studies there has been activity in other areas. For example 2008 saw the launch of Continuums Modern Theatre Guides, and there have been re-evaluations on the work of John Osborne and the theatrical landscape of the 1950s; the work of Sarah Kane has been revisited and a theoretical framework established that will assist ongoing debates about documentary theatre. The most significant monograph produced this year has been Amelia Howe Kritzers Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing, 19952000. This is a welcome attempt at contextualizing some of the complex developments that have taken place in new writing over the last decade. Whereas Aleks Sierzs In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today [2001] set out to provide a unified reading, of the 1990s by relating the story of a group of young dramatists, including Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony
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Neilson, with broadly unified aims and style, Kritzers book demonstrates that the millennium saw new theatre writing splintering off into many different styles and themes. The opening chapter provides a broad discussion of the term political theatre, before breaking new writing into five thematic chapters. The period of in-yer-face theatre is revisited, and there is a welcome chapter entitled Intergenerational Dialogue which looks at the work of older playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, who has continued to produce innovative work in the millennial decade. Kritzer is able to follow up and develop an ongoing interest that came out of her influential The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment [1991] as she looks at millennial and post-millennial work such as Blue Heart [1997] Far Away [2000] and A Number [2002]. Other chapters also start to reflect the difficulty of Kritzers project as the narrative of British playwriting in recent years has become more fragmented in its aims and approaches. The chapter Systems of Power attempts a hesitant discussion of recent history plays such as Nick Dears Power [2003], and then brings in a number of diverse examples such as Michael Frayns Democracy [2003] and Zinnie Harriss Further Than the Furthest Thing [2000]. The chapter Issues for Post-Thatcher Britain also considers aspects of racism, Northern Ireland and questions of political leadership. At times, it becomes difficult to come to firm conclusions about the social and political conditions that are producing these worksa situation not helped by the fact that the plays themselves are often discussed in isolation from each other. While the readings themselves are thoughtful and considered in their analysis, overall the book lacks a sense of cohesion that would make it a definitive study of the last ten years in British theatre writing. Philip Roberts, About Churchill: The Playwright and the Work, is the latest in Fabers excellent series on individual dramatists. In looking at Churchills work Roberts adopts an approach of largely choosing to ignore the considerable (and growing) amount of academic criticism on the playwright, preferring instead to draw on comments made by those who have worked with Churchill, such as Max Stafford-Clark, David Lan and Stephen Daldry. The volume looks at the plays in a chronological order and considers them in the light of their cultural and historical context. There is also perceptive analysis of recent work such as Drunk Enough to Say I Love You [2006]. Of particular scholarly interest is Roberts detailed inclusion of unpublished and unperformed work that opens up exciting new avenues for those working on Churchills existing canon. Caryl Churchills Top Girls [1982] is also the subject of Alicia Tycers short monograph study in the Continuum Modern Theatre Guides series [2008] The book provides intelligent readings of key scenes from the play and useful cultural and political background, as well as the changing critical views that this landmark play has elicited during a period of over twenty years. Of particular interest is Tycers analysis of Top Girls reception in America, through several notable, but under-reported, productions of the play. There is also welcome analysis given to the 1995 BBC television adaptation of the play. In the same series is this reviewers Patrick Marbers Closer, which follows the same format as other volumes in the series by setting out the cultural and
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political context in which the play was written as well as analysis of key scenes. There is also a production history and discussion of the 2004 film adaptation. The playwright Peter Gills Apprenticeship is both a partial biography and a cultural and theatrical history. Drawing on a recently discovered diary which Gill kept as young actor rehearsing for the RSCs production of Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle [1962], the book is both a personal account of life in post-war Britain and a record of Gills own reflections on the British cultural and theatrical landscape during the 1960s. Apprenticeship is most valuable in its accounts of the Royal Court and some of the abrasive personalities who did so much to shape its reputation during this decade. Although Gill has enjoyed a long relationship with the theatre over the years both as a director (the book includes an interesting account of his reclamation of D.H. Lawrences plays at the Court) and as a playwrighthis account is untainted by any trace of sentimentality, and he is keen to debunk some of the mythologies that have grown around particular productions or figures. There are also critical accounts (often shaped by bad personal experiences) of the early days of the RSC where Gill was acting, and thoughtful criticisms of its time under Peter Hall. The book contains Gills own frequently waspish impressions of other venerable institutions such as the National Theatre, and there are also several clear-sighted accounts and analyses of topics ranging from Noe l Cowards fortunes during the 1950s to the influence of Brecht on British theatre culture after the Berliner Ensemble visit in 1955. Theatre of the 1950s also dominates Dominic Shellards edited collection, The Golden Generation: New Light on Post-War British Theatre. The essays, many of which have been written as part of the British Library Theatre Archive Project, are diverse in range and with many based on direct archival research, succeed in allowing fresh perspectives to be reached on some familiar areas. Shellards essay, Stability, Renewal and Change: Gielgud and Olivier in 1957, using the two renowned actors as a case study, presents a convincing reappraisal of 1957 as a deeply significant year for British theatre (p. 91), whereby drama by new wave writers, such as John Osbornes The Entertainer [1957], consolidated the promise shown in the watershed year of 1956. Ewan Jeffreys Theatres of Resistance: Michel Saint-Dennis and George Devine traces through archival sources the complex relationship between the two men and how their work together brought much-needed ideas from Europe into the British theatre during the 1950 s. Kate Dorneys chapter, Ralph Richardson, also makes use of the archive held at the British Library to trace and evaluate Richardsons long theatrical and film career. Laura Whites Smashing Open the French Windows: The Acting Profession and British Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s also traces the changing styles and development of acting technique, drawn in part from interviews conducted with practitioners for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project. The strongest article in the collection is Kate Harriss Evolutionary Stages: Theatre and Television 194656, which not only traces the complex and frequently suspicious relationship theatre had with television during the years following the Second World War but, in drawing on the BBC Written Archives Centre, also shed new light on the impact of the BBCs screening of extracts from the original Royal Court production of Look Back in Anger [1956]. This
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collection, which is handsomely illustrated with some rare photographs and sketches, is a useful re-evaluation of the early post-war period in British theatre. Look Back in Anger is also the subject of a short monograph by Aleks Sierz (in many respects the Jimmy Porter of British theatre criticism), in the Continuum Modern Theatre Guides series. The volume is a useful addition to the attention that Osbornes play continues to attract. Sierz not only brings us up to date with current critical debates and controversies about the play, including recent attempts to displace its central place in the narrative that makes up post-war British drama, but also discusses notable recent productions of the play and includes useful extracts from new interviews with actors such as David Tennant. Michael Sheen and Emma Fielding. Look Back in Anger is also the subject of Luc Gillemans From Coward to Osborne: Or the Enduring Importance of Look Back in Anger (MD 51[2008] 10425) and notes both the rapidity of its canonization immediately after its Royal Court debut and the equal speed with which dissenting views set out to question its importance. Gilleman argues that a British theatre obsessed with its own stagnation during the 1950s, provided the vital conditions in which Look Back in Anger was able to burst through the defences of the theatrical establishment (p. 107). Gilleman also draws attention to the fact that the perceived gulf between the angry young men and established playwrights such as Coward and Rattigan was in some respects a false opposition. The supposed divergence in style and sensibility between Cowards generation and the one that followed is also the subject of Sos Eltiss Bringing Out the Acid: Noe l Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton Burnett and the Uses of Camp (MD 51[2008] 21133), also reviewed in the previous section, which reads a number of Cowards plays against Susan Sontags influential Notes on Camp. The article also revisits the appreciation that Coward and Pinter showed for each others work (with Coward describing Pinters The Homecoming [1965] as a sort of Cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett (p. 226)a reference to Burnetts novels which Eltis expands upon in the article). Eltis argues that both dramatists also share a quality of switching mercurially between different linguistic registers as well as producing work that presents a flawless surface that stands in problematic relation to content (p. 223). Here, Pinters The Caretaker [1960] is offered as an example of a more brutal extension of the techniques deployed by Cowards protagonists, or camp with the gloves off (p. 225) While the subject of documentary theatre continued to be a frequent topic for discussion in theatre journals this year, Will Hammond and Dan Stewards Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary Theatre is the first book devoted exclusively to the subject. However, this is not a major new study of the area. Instead, it is a volume consisting of a series of interviews with a number of notable British practitioners who have used this particular form. These include directors Max Stafford-Clark, Alecky Blythe and Nicholas Kent as well as the writers David Hare, Robin Soans and Richard Norton Taylor. While the interviews are informative and represent useful source material, the first major study on this important area of theatre has yet to appear.
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Elsewhere, a much-needed theoretical approach to the subject of documentary theatre has begun to emerge. Ursula Cantons article, We may not know reality, but it still matters: A Functional Analysis of Factual Elements in the Theatre (ConTR 18:ii[2008] 31827), uses Nicholas Wrights Vincent in Brixton [2002] and Tanika Guptas Gladiator Games [2005] as examples of a growing number of plays that incorporate documentary, biography and historical material. Canton observes that as yet no satisfactory critical apparatus exists to explain this trendeither as symptomatic of postmodern experiments in the real or as a reflective model of social reality. Canton points out that, with Vincent in Brixton, the production was sometimes overly keen to emphasize the veracity of its credentials as factualsuch as casting the Dutch actor Jochum ten Haaf to convince British audiences of the plays authenticity (p. 322). In comparison, Canton argues, Gladiator Games seems on the surface to be less artfully constructed, in that material taken from the inquiry into the death of Zahid Mubarek is used as verification for the narratives claims for truth, for example the list of citations included in the playtext (p. 323). However, Canton argues that by separating the documented sources and the invented dialogue, shows that artifice is just as much in play. In the same issue of Contemporary Theatre Review (ConTR 18:iii[2008] 307 17), Paola Botham brings the work of Ju rgen Habermas into the analysis of verbatim drama in her article From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: A Habermasian Framework for Contemporary Political Theatre (ConTR 18:iii[2008] 30717). Here she analyses Habermass term public sphere as a potential reason for the popularity of this form of theatre in plays such as Jonathan Holmess Falujah [2007], where it provides a means of breaking through audiences sense of powerlessness against the onslaught of postmodernism (p. 308). Botham argues that, by operating in the public sphere, such plays open . . . the door to a renewed understanding of political theatre (p. 310). The article also responds unconsciously to the debate raised in Cantons article about factual and fictional material coexisting in a text by asserting that the playwright/editor has a legitimate (and unavoidable) entitlement to add his/her own artistic voice to the verbatim chorus (p. 313). Botham also recognizes the austerity of much verbatim theatreexemplified in work staged at the Tricycle such as The Colour of Justice [1999] and Called to Account [2007]and argues that it is this very property that allows the form to exceed postmodernisms infinite itch for deconstruction (p. 316). Botham cites Derek Pagets early pioneering work on the subject as evidence of the public sphere on which verbatim drama operates (p. 312). Paget himself makes a welcome return to his work on the subject in the article New Documentarism on Stage: Documentary Theatre in New Times (ZAA 56:ii[2008] 12941), a reprise of and response to his influential article Verbatim Theatre: Oral History and Documentary Techniques, originally published by New Theatre Quarterly in 1987. In revisiting this area Paget looks at reasons behind the upsurge of new plays during the period 19902007. Particular attention is paid to so-called tribunal and verbatim plays such as David Hares The Permanent Way [2004] and Richard Norton Taylors Called To Account. Pagets article looks at some of the defining features of these offshoots of documentary theatre, and suggests that the popularity for this
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form comes from its insistence on the veracity of fact because faith in facts . . . ha[s] drained away from post-documentary cultures in mediatised societies (p. 141). Documentary theatre also exercises the Backpages section of Contemporary Theatre Review (ConTR 18:ii[2008] 2729), where a range of views are brought together from the universities of London, Glasgow and California in response to the National Theatre of Scotlands production of Black Watch [2006]. Some contributions are from those who saw the play in performance and others from those who had only read the play. However, the Anglo-American nature of the feedback is interesting in relation to a play that discusses both the highly nationalistic elements that operate in conflict zones such as Iraq and the Black Watch regiments involvement in a succession of past colonial wars. The respondents also make interesting comments about the plays attitudes to America, framed through the often disparaging remarks made by the Scottish soldiers. One respondent, David Archibald, calls Black Watch the Scottish play about Iraq, but also points out that its concentration on the regiment also constructs a one-sided historical narrative . . . that plays down its often brutal imperial past (p. 279). Not surprisingly, the centenary of Samuel Becketts birth in 2006 saw an outpouring of scholarly activity. One of the first edited collections from one of the many conferences that took place around the world in the centenary year is Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani, which brings together a selection of essays the majority of which were first presented at Trinity College Dublin. The essays encompass Becketts prose work, but there are also contributions that address particular plays. Several of these concentrate on Krapps Last Tape [1958], and it is interesting to note that, following Harold Pinters performance as Krapp at the Royal Court in Becketts centenary year, this play now seems to have displaced both Waiting for Godot [1953] and Endgame [1957] in the contemporary imagination. Carla Locatellis Projections: Becketts Krapps Last Tape and Not I as Autobiographies (pp. 6880) maintains that the play is less an autobiographical excursion than Beckett . . . reflecting back to his spectators the voyeuristic dimension of their pathos (p. 78). Enoch Braters Becketts Romanticism (pp. 13951), argues that Krapps attempts to record memory and his anti-heroic qualities make him a quasi-romantic hero, yet points out that at the same time, Krapps bulky tape recorder is nonetheless an effective instrument for keeping romanticism in check (p. 147) within a text that he sees as displaying intrusive but intuitive romanticism (p. 148). Irit Degani-Razs The Spear of Telephus in Krapps Last Tape (pp. 190201) concentrates on the central place of the tape recorder in the play, and its function as a modern-day spear of Telephus. Here, the recorder inverts and reveals itself to be a damaging tool capable not only of distorting memory but even corrupting the original event itself (p. 191). Antonia Rodr guez-Gados Re-Figuring the Stage Body through the Mechanical Re-Production of Memory (pp. 20216) is also concerned with the use of the tape machine through the relationship established between the stage figure of Krapp and the recorded voice of memory (p. 202). The essay draws attention to the moments where the stage presence of Krapp is compared to his mechanically recorded voice. Other
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theatre essays in the collection include Herbert Blaus semi-autobiographical Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett (pp. 3553), which observes that, from his experience of directing Becketts work in the 1960s, Krapps Last Tape can claim to be as political as anything written by Brecht. Angela Moorjanis Just Looking: Ne(i)ther-World Icons, Elsheimer Nocturnes, and Other Simultaneities in Becketts Play (pp. 12338) makes comparisons with artistic representations of the underworld and the instantly recognizable iconography of Becketts Play [1962], where the stage image of the three urns, encircled in darkness, echoes a still older mythic underworld (p. 127). Anna McMullans Becketts Theater: Embodying Alterity (pp. 16676) focuses upon Becketts first full-length play Eleutheria [1947] as a response to the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Mariko Hori Tanakas Ontological Fear and Anxiety in the Theater of Beckett (pp. 24658), Mary Brydens The Mid-Century Godot: Beckett and Saroyan (pp. 25970) and Elin Diamonds Beckett and Caryl Churchill along the Mo bius Strip (pp. 28598) all look at Becketts various legacies of influence. Finally, Hersh Zeifmans Staging Sam Beckett as a Dramatic Character (pp. 31118), is a lively essay looking at another aspect of Becketts afterlifenamely his appropriation as a dramatic figure in Michael Hastings play Calico [2004], Sean Dixons Sams Last Dance [1997] and Justin Flemings Burnt Piano [1999]. Becketts Waiting for Godot is the subject of Mark and JulietteTaylorBattys volume for Continuums Modern Theatre Guides series. Its major strength is its exploration of the plays French origins, and especially the first production in Paris directed by Roger Blin. The Taylor-Battys knowledge of French language and culture comes to the fore in their discussion of some of the important differences between the French and English versions that Beckett himself provided, and they argue that it is only when he begins to write in French . . . that Becketts unique style really begins to appear, and that he throws off the shackles of the influence of predecessors and contemporaries (p. 6). Jonathan Boulters Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed, also by Continuum Press, looks more widely across Becketts entire oeuvre and tends to concentrate more on the novels than the plays, although Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Not I [1972] and Krapps Last Tape are covered in some depth. The emphasis is far more on textual analysis than on the historical and cultural contextualization that Batty undertakes with Waiting for Godot. Instead, Boulter treats the texts to a range of philosophical and theoretical couplings, such as Beckett with Freud, Lacan and Derrida. However, the book is a considerable achievement in bringing together so lucidly in one volume Becketts work in both the theatre and the novel. The work of Sarah Daniels is the focus of Heathers Deblings How will they ever heal . . . ?: Bearing Witness to Abuse and the Importance of Female Community in Sarah Danielss Beside Herself, Head-Rot Holiday, and The Madness of Esme and Shaz (MD 51[2008] 25973, goes some way towards re-evaluating some of Danielss later plays which look at the effects of the abuse of women, associated mental illness, and the use of testimony as a process of healing. The article also makes a timely contribution to the ongoing
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debates that have arisen out of trauma studies in other disciplines, with Debling arguing that the presence of female communities in many of the plays discussed is vital in facilitating a coming to terms with past abuse. In these plays, Debling observes, Daniels places the female hysteric centre-stage, not as a male spectacle, but instead as one permitted to reveal the testimony recorded on her abused body (p. 26). Issues of psychiatry also preoccupy Alicia Tycer in her detailed and illuminating article Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander: Melancholic Witnessing of Sarah Kanes 4.48 Psychosis (TJ 60:i[2008] 2336) which looks at the problematic issue of interpreting Sarah Kanes last play through her suicide in 1999 as the lost object , which in turn threatens to annul the melancholic ambiguity (p. 25) of 4.48 Psychosis, and which Tycer argues has the potential to be both redemptive and enabling for an audience in witnessing depictions of psychic trauma (p. 27). Tycer goes on to argue that 4.48 Psychosis, with its non-linear structure facilitates a trauma-based reading (p. 27). The traumatized body is also the subject of Amy Strahler Holzapfels The Body in Pieces: Contemporary Anatomy Theatres (PAJ 30:ii [2008] 116). Using Caryl Churchills A Number amongst several other illustrative performances, Holzapfel questions modernisms reaction to the banning of the public spectacle of medical autopsy in early twentieth-century Europe. She argues that the practice has been resurrected through a fascination for the autopsy in television programmes ranging from MASH to Six Feet Under and Nip/Tuck, but also though the trajectory of postmodern performance where bodies on stage, while not deceased, are framed as anatomized subjects (p. 1). In the case of Churchills A Number, gene technology has rendered a series of cloned offspring as a mediated pastiche of parts (p. 1). Jerzy Limons Waltzing in Arcadia: A Theatrical Dance in Five Dimensions (NTQ 24:iii[2008] 2228) offers a close reading of the final scene in one of Tom Stoppards most popular plays, and in particular how a series of different time streams are manipulated via different melodies. Stoppards Arcadia [1993] is also the subject of John Flemings insightful short study of the play for Continuums Modern Theatre Guides [2008]. Drawing on previously unpublished interview material with Stoppard, Flemings volume traces the history of the plays production and its cultural and historical contextboth in its historical setting of the early 1800 s alongside Stoppards ongoing interests in scientific development between past and present. There is also an interesting discussion of the New York production of the play at the Lincoln Centre (pp. 7983). As Long as the Punters Enjoy it (NTQ 24:iii[2008] 2609) is a long interview conducted by Aleks Sierz with the playwright Tanika Gupta. The discussion looks back at a writing career that began in 1996 and considers two of her most recent playsthe quasi-docudrama Gladiator Games [2005] and Sugar Mummies [2006], about Western female sex tourism. Elaine Astons A Fair Trade? Staging Female Sex Tourism in Sugar Mummies and Trade (ConTR 18:ii[2008] 18092) is a far more extensive exploration of Guptas play, alongside analysis of Debbie Tucker Greens Trade [2004].The article brings into question the problems that feminism puts
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forward concerning womens sexual pleasure, against the economic disparity (and with it charges of sexual exploitation) that female sex tourism perpetuates in an international context. Aston sees one way of reading the two plays as a demonstration of the female individualism championed in the post-feminism of 1990s. However, Aston argues that Sugar Mummies and Trade both also demonstrate that sexual fulfilment ignores local, social inequalities and oppressions (p. 182). The article points towards the need for travel romance as a vital ingredient in female sex tourism, even if the belief is self-delusional (p. 186), and is also critical of Sugar Mummies as being prone to avoiding the more politicizing possibilities of [Guptas] subject (p. 190). In contrast, Aston sees Tucker Greens Trade as engaging far more rigorously in what she calls the feminist political (p. 190) and in particular its critique of bourgeois post-feminism. The theatre director James Macdonald is interviewed by R. Darren Gobert in Finding a Physical Language: Directing for the Nineties Generation (NTQ 24:ii[2008] 14157), where he talks about how different strategies as a director have come into play when working with the very different theatre languages encountered in Caryl Churchills Top Girls and A Number [2002] or Martin Crimps Fewer Emergencies [2005] and Sarah Kanes 4.48 Psychosis. Kanes last play, as well as Joe Penhalls Blue/Orange [2000] and Conor McPhersons Shining City [2004], form the core of Ariel Watsons substantial article Cries of Fire: Psychotherapy in Contemporary British and Irish Drama (MD 51[2008] 188210). Watson points out that, while the area of psychoanalysis and theatre has received more attention than psychotherapy theatre (p. 188), psychotherapy has the inherent theatricality of the confessional as well as showing power relationships between patient and therapist. However, Watson points out that Kane and Penhalls concern is primarily with [therapys] failures rather than with its capacity to improve the human condition (p. 189). This ends in both plays critiquing psychotherapeutic treatments as tools for the manipulation and objectification . . . of the patient (p. 189). Crimps earlier play, Attempts on her Life [1997], and Kanes 4.48 Psychosis also form the basis of David Barnetts When Is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts (NTQ 93:i[2008] 1423), in which some of the key ideas in Hans-Thies Lehmans book Post Dramatic Theatre [1999] are applied to Crimp and Kane, especially in relation to how their respective plays represent time. Barnett concludes that, by adopting these post-dramatic techniques rather than conventionally representative ones, both invite creative approaches to the business of acting and making theatre (p. 23). Questions of post-dramatic theatre also occupy Louise LePages short piece, Posthuman Sarah Kane, for the Backpages section of Contemporary Theatre Review (ConTR 18:iii[2008] 4013), in which contemporary identity in Kanes work is redefined as a kind of insecure posthuman hybrid (p. 402), either through disruption of space/time, or both, whereby self and other are no longer necessarily distinct (p. 402). Two articles on Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane are also to be found in Elizabeth Angel-Perez and Alexander Poulains edited collection Hunger on
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Stage [2008]. As the title suggests, the volume contains articles that look at representations of hunger, gluttony and starvation in drama throughout various historical periods. Vicky Angelakis Taking a Bite of the Big Apple: Martin Crimps The Treatment (pp. 25767) not only argues that the play is central to any consideration of his work, but that it is the first step towards a critique of the blatant commodification of art and the manipulation of the author/artist by the art industry for the purposes of financial gain (p. 328). Aleks Sierzs Were all bloody hungry: Images of Hunger and the Construction of the Gendered Self in Sarah Kanes Blasted (pp. 26879) argues that Sarah Kanes debut can be rediscovered as a world which is infused with a series of metaphorical ideas about hunger, feeding and body functions (p. 269). Sierz produces a comprehensive reading of the play in these terms, together with discussion of how these ideas operate with another overriding concern in her workthe mutilated body. Ideas concerning subjectivity in Kanes work also form one of the three case studies examining subjectivity within the framework of postmodernism in Karolina Gritzners (Post) Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment (ConTR 18:iii[2008] 32840). As well as examining current debates about postmodernism and performance, Gritzner usefully focuses on the work of Theodor Adorno as her main theoretical model, and argues that an Adornian approach to theatre would suggest that the theatrical space can provide conditions for subjective freedom only if the aesthetic principles employed create a world that is sufficiently removed from the social and moral prescriptions of objective reality (p. 331). Gritzner then traces the ways in which theatre has represented the condition of subjectivity through modernism and postmodernism, using examples including Howard Barker (who fits Adornos criteria of theatre most closely), Sarah Kane and Forced Entertainment. Gritzner reads Kanes work as more radically experimental than Barkers in its responses to the contradictions of late twentieth century global capitalism (p. 334), and also provides some important questioning of the humanist readings given to date in Blasted [1995] (p. 335). Her final two plays, Crave [1998] and 4.48 Psychosis, are also read beyond the common interpretation as plays for voices by placing an emphasis on the criticism of the subject [as] the latest turn of reification in global late capitalism (p. 336). Sarah Kanes Blasted is also the subject of Helen Iballs short monograph for Continuums Modern Theatre Guides [2008] This is the most ambitious treatment of the play to date in terms of both its analysis and revaluation of the play and its inclusion of new interview material. Iball provides fascinating analysis of the play in terms of the importance that space within the hotel setting provides, and with it the body as another form of space that is marked out. There is also an excellent tracing and reassessment of changing views of the play (which Iball terms its afterlife), both through academic criticism and successive productions. To this end, Iball presents two case studies in 2006 for comparison: Thomas Ostermeiers production at the Schaubu hne Berlin (which visited Londons Barbican in 2006) and Graeaes UK touring version in the same year. The concluding chapter also puts forward a speculative,
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but highly relevant, consideration of how future productions of Blasted might be reconceived by practitioners. Several articles this year consider ongoing developments in British playwriting. Harry Derbyshires The Culture of New Writing in the Backpages section of Contemporary Theatre Review (ConTR 18:i[2008] 1314) complements interview material to ask the question whether writers [are] being steered . . . towards writing the kinds of play that theatre companies wanted to stage (p. 132). Derbyshire comes to no firm conclusion over the matter, but the diversity of views expressed is of interest. In the same section is an interview with Lisa Goldman (ConTR 18:i[2008] 1347), who since 2006 has been the artistic director of Londons Soho theatre. Here she discusses the current state of political playwriting, and displays a scepticism about the current vogue for verbatim theatre, suggesting that it may be seen as debate . . . poorly dressed in the clothes of theatre (p. 135). There is a discussion of Philip Ridleys Leaves of Glass [2007], which was Goldmans inaugural production at the Soho as its artistic director. There is also a further interview in the same Backpages section with Graham Whybrow, the Royal Courts former literary manager. In Looking Back, Looking Forward: Literary Management at the Royal Court (ConTR 18:i[2008] 13740), Whybrow makes some interesting comments about current trends, such as the vogue for contemporary settings rather than historical ones (p. 138). Whybrow also displays scepticism towards the workshopping process to which many young playwrights find themselves subjected, and discusses the changes in ethos and direction during the time when Stephen Daldry, and later Ian Rickson, ran the Royal Court. This review of the years work ends pessimistically with two articles on the current state of British playwriting. Trish Reids short piece, Scottish Arts Council Wields the Axe, in the Backpages section of Contemporary Theatre Review (ConTR 18:iii[2008] 398400), discusses the demise of established companies such as 7:84 Scotland as a result of funding cuts, as well as the surprising (and disturbing) news that Glasgow-based company Suspect Culture has suffered the same fate. Reid goes on to assess some of the companys innovative productions, including Airport [1996] and Mainstream [1999], and speculates that the companys lack of a clear regional identity (in comparison to the worldwide success of National Theatre of Scotlands production of Black Watch) may have been the principal reason for its demise. Aleks Sierzs Reality Sucks: The Slump in British New Writing (PAJ 30:ii[2008] 1027) accuses British theatre of being in thrall to a mix of social realism and naturalism whose hegemonic power remains a problem even today (p. 102). Sierz perceptively puts forward the argument that this situation has come about as a rearguard critical reaction in response to experiments against realism such as Katie Mitchells production (in a new translation by Martin Crimp) of The Seagull [2006]. However, in Sierzs view, this reactionary retreat into the familiar comforts of socio-realism has resulted in new plays that are little more than soapy dramas for couch potatoes (p. 104) with the consequence that, since 2001, English new writing has entered first into a crisis and then into a slump (p. 105). However, Sierzs article is not entirely despondent. For example, it points towards the work of
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Dennis Kelly and Debbie Tucker Green as two notable exceptions, and to new appointments such as Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court and Lisa Goldman at the Soho, who have produced notable work including Mike Bartletts My Child [2007] and Hassan Abdulrazzaks Baghdad Wedding [2007]. 6. Pre-1950 Poetry Even now, Jean Moorcroft Wilson observes, Private [Isaac] Rosenberg lacks the rank he deserves and his work demands (p. 1). Her biography, Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life is one of two major publications in 2008 that may help to redress this. Wilson traces Rosenbergs life from early experiences in Bristol and the East End of London to his final years in the trenches of the First World War. She pays particular attention to the links between Rosenbergs artistic career and his poetry; to the influence of Yiddish upon the structure and soundscape of his writing; and to the detail of life in the trenches. In addition to documenting his life and acquaintance, she provides thoughtful readings of his war poetry. Without doubt, The Making of a Great War Poet will become the standard scholarly biography. Oxford University Press has also added a collection of Rosenbergs poems, plays and prose to its 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, edited by Vivien Noakes. This derives from her previous complete edition of Rosenbergs poems and plays, providing copious notes on allusions, sources and provenance. There is a useful selection of Rosenbergs letters here, including crucial letters written from the trenches during his final months. Noakes claims to correct various misreadings in the edition of mislaid letters by Rosenberg edited by Jean Lydiard (reviewed in YWES 88[2009] 972). The volume also includes notes and essays by Rosenberg on art, mostly written or published during his stay in South Africa before the First World War. The current hardback edition is unlikely to be purchased beyond libraries, but paperback publication might help to secure the wider dissemination of a poet whose work still tends to be underrepresented. The likely popularity of poets such as Rosenberg often depends upon the availability of reasonably priced, well-edited modern editions. So the publication of Edna Longleys new edition of Edward Thomass poetry may be good news for his fans. Until now, the most readily available collection of his work has been Fabers partial reprint of R. George Thomass edition. Longley claims to restore or emend various aspects of Thomass texts following re-evaluation of the manuscript evidence; the poems have also been reordered into chronological sequence. Longley has edited collections of Thomass poems previously, but this edition is specifically described as The Annotated Collected Poems. As many pages of detailed notes, including copious material from his prose writings, follow 150 pages of Thomass poems. Much of this material goes beyond the standard editorial task of supplying textual or contextual information and offers readings of form and detail, sketching broader arguments about Thomass significance: Longley emphasizes the importance of memory to Thomas, the reflexive treatment of artistic creation in the poems, and the importance of his eco-historical imagination.
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The volume, then, is the culmination of a lifetimes work on Thomas and, in effect, combines an edition of Thomass poetry with a meditation upon his work. Elsewhere, Nick Freeman contests Thomass reputation as a war poet by offering a reading of The Gallows, in Edward Thomas, Swinburne, and Richard Jefferies: The dead oak tree bough (ELT 51:ii[2008] 16483). After contrasting Thomas with the modernists, Freeman argues persuasively that his poetry responds to late Victorian influences, specifically, the folk ballads collected by Cecil Sharp, the animal stories (and sadistic tendencies) of Richard Jefferies and the poetic forms of Swinburne. These formed, Freeman concludes, an eclectic engagement. Gabrielle McIntire devotes four out of seven chapters to T.S. Eliot in Modernism, Memory, and Desire, her study of Eliot and Virginia Woolf. His bawdy poems about King Bolo and his Big Black Bassturd Kween feature prominently in her argument that, for modernists, memory is always already invested and intertwined with writing sexuality, the body, and desire (p. 2). Although they were written within private letters, McIntire describes the Bolo poems as Eliots most sustained poetic output (p. 15). She makes much of his suggestion that Wyndham Lewis publish them in Blast, but concludes that Eliot became reticent about their publication once he had achieved exposure poetry. For McIntire, Eliots treatment of Bolos obscene for less risque interactions with Colombo present a queer pornotropic poetics of colonialism (p. 28), offering a figure for his dealings with history in his public work. The book divides between reading the scurrilously obscene humour of the Bolo poems with a po face, and searching out innuendo (cunning passages) elsewhere in Eliots work. It has, though, the virtue of emphasizing the intense quality of yearning in Eliots poetry. An unconventional Eliot, sexy, dangerous, and crucially uneven (p. 7), replaces the coolly clinical possum, reviled by some critics. Ed Madden considers similar sexual material in Tiresian Poetics, which devotes two chapters to the appearance of Tiresias in The Waste Land as a figure par excellence of modernist textual and sexual ambiguity (p. 15). Madden considers Tiresias as queer, a site where oracular voice converges with sexual knowledge, evoking strangeness, sexual difference and unease. The first chapter on Eliot concludes that The Waste Land is a staging of homosexual panic (p. 127): Tiresias does not transcend sexual difference; instead he represents a feminized male and is used to tropologically figure anxieties about the penetrable male body (p. 124). The second chapter on The Waste Land is more wide-ranging, reviewing manuscript drafts, the influence of cinema, the work of Roger Vittoz on neurasthenia, J.G. Frazer, and anal dilators. Its conclusions are broadly similar though: Eliots Tiresias is autobiographically performative (p. 174) and the footnote about Tiresias added to book publication of the poem represents an attempt to control the revelations this figure threatens about the nature of desire and sexual difference. John McCombe considers a different seductive figure in Cleopatra and her Problems: T.S. Eliot and the Fetishization of Shakespeares Queen of the Nile (JML 31:ii[2008] 2338). In the early part of his career Eliot was drawn to
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Shakespeares Cleopatra and her sexuality, McCombe argues, as the subject of Roman imperial power. McCombe repeatedly places Eliots poetry and criticism in relation to colonialist discourse (p. 33). His allusions to her position in Shakespeares plays as the object of other peoples discourse coincided with parliamentary and journalistic debate about the problem of Egypt (p. 26). But Cleopatra also echoed Eliots own sense of himself as an outsider in London, which explains, McCombe suggests, why these references diminish as Eliot came to feel that he had established a critical and literary reputation. One premise of Leon Surettes comparative study of Eliot and Wallace Stevens, The Modern Dilemma, is that previous scholars have failed to compare without weighing the claims of one over the other. Yet this is not completely avoided here, and there is a slight deference to Eliot throughout: his work is usually the first to be considered in any chapter, and more chapters are devoted to specific consideration of his work than to that of Stevens. A central theme is the shared interest these poets took in humanism and, Surette claims, their shared rejection of it. He focuses discussion of this through their respective responses to the work of Ramon Fernandez, but also gives consideration to their interest in the work of Marianne Moore and their responses to the First World War. Surettes most controversial claims are that Eliot underwent a brief infatuation with humanism under the influence of Bertrand Russell and that Stevens was less sympathetic to some aspects of humanism than has been admitted previously. Tendentious in parts, the book remains mainly stimulating and informed. Chapter 5 of Andrea Zemgulyss Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage examines Eliots interest in the city churches of London. Her larger subject is that of Heritage, understood as the late Victorian attempt to preserve a particular vision of Britains past within locations and monuments. This view of the past is, she claims, unfashionable both with the modernists, who found it irredeemably middle-class, and with scholars of modernism, who prefer more urban, technologically driven conceptions of modern space. The chapter on Eliot (pp. 12644) draws on his outrage over the threat to demolish nineteen city churches. Zemgulys finds an odd but striking model for Eliots historical sense here, in his commitment to understanding the present through the vestiges of the past. She then discovers allusions to and traces of these churches in The Waste Land, claiming that they stage its innovations and reveal its art (p. 135). Her most forcefully argued claim is that the churches are co-opted into a Foucauldian heterotopia within The Waste Land and its conjunctions of different times and spaces. They are linked to the crumbling towers of What the Thunder Said and function, in effect, as synecdoche for Eliots sense of the world that he imagines is under threat and whose destruction The Waste Land may relish. Zemgulys does not always convince, but her approach is arresting and her interest in material space which is not a determining condition, but subject to the meanings made of it by . . . texts (p. 4) suggests recent refinements within literary historicism. Matthew Bolton argues, in Not known, because not looked for: Eliots Debt to Browning (YER 25:ii[2008] 1019), that Robert Brownings dramatic monologues constitute critical touchstones (p. 18) for Eliot. Brownings
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influence upon poems such as Portrait of a Lady is so obvious as to have remained hidden, Bolton claims. He cites passing references in Eliots criticism, allusions and manuscript drafts to show how Eliot internalized Browning (p. 15). Scholars of Eliots poetry continue to track down his sources and allusions for Notes and Queries. In A Possible Source for the Seduction Scene in The Waste Land (N&Q 55[2008] 4912) James Womack traces the encounter between the typist and the young man carbuncular to Aubrey Beardsleys Decadent poem, The Three Musicians. In the same issue, Matthew Peters maps plot elements of The Bostonians onto The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. In addition to the influence of Jules Laforgue, Peters argues, a less compacted Jamesian ironic tone should also be acknowledged (N&Q 55[2008] 48991). Ian Higgins argues that a partial allusion to Dracula in What the Thunder Said evokes Stokers treatment of imperial collapse (p. 500) in The Waste Land and Dracula (N&Q 55[2008] 499500). Similarly, David Boddy, The Fire Sermon, but which Fire Sermon? (N&Q 55[2008] 5001), claims that the Fire Sermon in The Waste Land may allude to an annual Fire Sermon at the church of St Magnus Martyr, as well as the Buddhist text Eliot cites in his notes. In a sub-chapter of Modernist Goods (pp. 16193) Glenn Willmott re-examines the Thunders question from The Waste LandWhat have we given?in relation to the notion of aboriginal heritages. This concept designates for Willmott those primitive cultures from outside Western capitalist and imperialist traditions which fascinated modernists like Eliot. Citing Kristevas abject and the role of the gift in these aboriginal heritages, Willmott suggests that Eliots relation to the primitive cultures which may hold out the vestiges of cohesion or transcendence in The Waste Land involves a patina of irony. He participates, Willmott argues, in a parodic shamanry (p. 193). In Poetry and Nation Review Eliot receives praise from Michael Alexander for his capacity to write on two levels simultaneously in a brief article about the influence of Dante upon poetry, Poets in Paradise: Chaucer, Pound, Eliot (PNR 34:iii[2008] 1213). Eliot is also discussed briefly, alongside Thomas Hardy and others, in David Gervaiss extended consideration of the forms and values of simplicity in poetry, The Condition of Simplicity: Parts One and Two (PNR 34:iv[2008] 428 and PNR 34:v[2008] 417). Significant amounts of important material relating to Eliot are promised in 2009 and 2010, including the first volumes in a collected edition of his prose. Until then, William Pritchard provides an amiable survey of the highlights of Eliots uncollected criticism, Eliots Mischievous Prose (HopRev 1:iii[2008] 383402), which emphasizes his sceptical and astringent humour, especially in the earlier essays. Elsewhere, G. Douglas Atkins praises Eliots capacity to make distinctions (p. 147) in his prose. Atkinss account of Tradition and the Individual Talent, in Reading Essays: An Invitation (pp. 14058), places Eliots essay within a broader framework. Eliot, Atkins argues, transforms the essay-writing tradition by re-evaluating its relation to the individual from within.
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Two chapters of Peter Edgerly Firchows book on British conceptions and misconceptions of Germany, Strange Meetings, are relevant to this section of YWES. Sunlight in the Hofgarden (pp. 2355) describes the influence of Munich on T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Rupert Brooke. Firchow focuses on the Marie section of The Burial of the Dead and finds the body of Ludwig II of Bavaria at the bottom of the Starnbergersee, a potent figure for Eliots Fisher King. Brookes experiences in Munich and linguistic capacities in German, Fisher suggests, were broader and more influential than his reputation as a parochial Georgian poet would indicate. Secondly, W.H. Auden and Josef Weinheber (pp. 21946) concerns Kirchstetten, the small town that both poets chose as their final resting place. Auden felt drawn there as an antidote to his experiences in Berlin, marred by the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. Despite Weinhebers Nazism, their shared love of Kirchstettens quiet rural values, Firchow argues, allowed a conciliation between these poets within Audens later poetry. Auden and Eliot also receive notable attention in Ecstasy and Understanding, Adrian Grafes collection of essays on religious awareness in modern poetry. David Summers uses Jean-Luc Marions theories of saturated phenomenon to explore selfhood in Four Quartets in relation to the experience of transcendence (pp. 7183). Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur, Summers maps Eliots narrative understanding of selfhood onto his use of Dantes Divine Comedy: the experience of transcendence in a modern epoch is small by comparison. David Rudrum investigates the apocalyptic imaginings of Eliots The Hollow Men alongside W.B. Yeatss The Second Coming (pp. 5870). The modernism of these poems, Rudrum argues, lies in the way they question the notion of apocalypse as an ending. They unfold, he argues a bleak, terrible, futureless present . . . fragmentary and partial (p. 66), reinvigorating religious poetry in the process. In her account of Audens conversion to Christianity in the same volume, Kathleen Bell describes his turn from thinking about desire and the body in Freudian terms towards a conception of the body as the locus for a politics and theology of virtue and justice (pp. 8410). Auden, she argues, was strongly influenced here by the poetry of Charles Williams, as well as the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. The essay also refers to Hannah Arendt and to The Platonic Blow, an uncollected, explicitly pornographic poem attributed to Auden. Also relevant to this section of YWES is Andrew Harrisons essay on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence (pp. 4657). Harrison questions Lawrences own account of his sharp falling away from religion, describing a more gradual loss of faith that arose from Lawrences university experiences and the death of his mother. The essay offers readings of two unpublished, early poems that make moving connections between home, chapel and community. Six years since the previous volume, 2008 saw the next instalment in Edward Mendelsons monumental edition of Audens complete works, a third volume of his prose, covering the years 1949 to 1955. This material runs from the PageBarbour Lectures Auden gave at the University of Virginia (published as The Enchafe`d Flood), through his substantial output as a reviewer to talks given on the BBC in the 1950s (which appear in an appendix). Mendelsons thoughtful and informative introduction marries Audens prose to his poetry
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as a forum for trying out ideas, but also traces his engagements with particular authors (including T.S. Eliot), his experiments with form, and key concepts such as his specialized understanding of history. Mendelsons annotations illuminate a significant body of Audens writings, diverse and challenging in interests and outlook. His work continues to be a triumph of scholarship and editing. Stephen Bygraves essay, Foucault, Auden and Two New York Septembers (in Morton and Bygrave, eds., Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, pp. 21529), uses Foucaults The Defence of Society to explore the reactivation of September 1 1939 in the wake of the attacks upon the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 (p. 216). Bygrave traces the poems reception following the attack, but also examines its textual history in relation to public events, from the Second World War to Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. Audens poem can usefully, Bygrave indicates, be placed by work by Foucault and Habermas to probe the difficulties of achieving a public voice and the subjection wrought by power (p. 228). James Womacks article Audens Goethe (EIC 58[2008] 33354) sketches connections between the two poets, from allusions to Goethe in Audens poetry, to his translations of Goethe and suggestions of a biographical identification with Goethe. As a translator, Womack argues, Audens engagement with Goethe as a human figure rather than an inhuman figurehead is such that liberties he took in translating constitute a dialogic tribute to Goethes humanity. In Hood, Dickens, Auden and Churchyard Revels (N&Q 55[2008] 43), Rodney Stenning Edgecombe traces the distant affinity between gamesome boys leaping over gravestones in Hoods Hero and Leander and the collective indifference to the vanished individual e des Beaux Arts. explored in Muse e des Beaux Arts in Twentieth Elizabeth Loizeaux also explores Muse Century Poetry and the Visual Arts as part of her investigation of twentieth-century ekphrasis. For Loizeaux, works of verbal art which evoke the visual arts are uneasy about their own status and caught in a complex of feeling generated by the triangular relationship between poet, object and reader. The poems of ekphrasis which interest her are representative, she claims, of continuous and ongoing efforts across the century to break open the possibilities of lyric poetry (p. 9). The chapter on Auden (pp. 6379) explores the ethics of being a bystander: she begins with the concept of ekphrasis as an elegy by a living poet for a dead image, before discussing attitudes towards death. It is a wide-ranging chapter, citing responses to Audens poem from Elizabeth Bishop to Irving Feldman; placing her arguments in context with the work of subsequent poets, such as Seamus Heaney; and exploring the historical context of Audens poem, especially his experiences as a documentary photographer of the effects of war during the 1930s. Auden, she argues, raises the possibility that art may offer a way of attending to death and suffering that can loosen the indifference to others the poem claims as a fact of life (p. 69). Sophie Ratcliffe also interrogates Audens sense of ethical obligation in On Sympathy. She devotes one chapter to a close reading of The Mirror and the
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Sea, his response to The Tempest (pp. 12368). In this ambitious work, dense with literary insight and philosophical observation, Ratcliffe begins by tackling the question of whether it is possible to feel for or with fictional characters. Roughly, she argues that while this is a possibility, the limits of such sympathetic feeling form the ethical and religious drift of writings by her three central authors, Browning, Auden and Beckett. The limits of literary sympathies remind us of the limits to our daily dealings with human beings. Prospero, Caliban and Miranda play a significant role hereboth within the original dramatic context of The Tempest and in the ways that Ratcliffes chosen authors rework Shakespeare. Allusion, on this account, symbolically registers similarity and difference, proximity and distance between creative minds. Her account of Auden probes his religious thinking in the 1940s and traces verbal and allusive links to Henry James. She understands the dramatic in The Mirror and the Sea as a development from Brownings use of cliche , rhyme and facile forms of speech, Ratcliffe dramatic monologues. Cliche argues with poignancy, function as parables about humanitys repeated failure to acknowledge the difference and strangeness of others. Auden, she claims, espoused an exemplary uncertainty. The year 2008 saw the publication of Thomas Hardys Poetical Matter Notebook in a transcription, edited by Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. This notebook dating from the last decade of Hardys life consists of fragments of poems, recopied notes, rhythmic schemes, fragmentary anecdotes, and excerpts from newspapers. Since the physical copy of the notebook was mislaid in 1952, the present edition is based upon a digitally enhanced copy of a microfilm. The annotations are assiduous yet unobtrusive, and this notebook provides useful insights into the interests and working methods of Hardys final years. Tim Dolin devotes a chapter to Hardys late career as a poet in his slim biography, Thomas Hardy. Short and serviceable, the inset panels of information about dates and authors referred to indicate that this volume is intended for A-level students and undergraduates, and it should serve this purpose well. In The Periodical Context of Thomas Hardys In the Time of The Breaking of Nations (N&Q 55[2008] 5860), Kevin Morrison asserts the interdisciplinary insights of book history (p. 58) as a tool for resolving critical disagreement about whether the poem presents patriotic sentiment or anti-war feeling. The support of the Saturday Review for military conscription, Morrison argues, and its general investment in an optimistic view of the war, mean that Hardys poem should be read as neither for nor against the war but, rather, as multivalent. In Retaining the Phantom: Desire, Sympathy and the Rhetoric of Elegy (THSJ 4:i[2008] 3043), Allison Cooper Davis reads Thoughts of Phena: At News of her Death through Peter Sackss theories of elegy. Citing Petrarch, she argues that Hardys poem finds consolation by exerting imaginative control over its subject matter (Hardys cousin, Tryphena Sparks), thus dissolving the female. This reading is then extended to Hardys later poems about the death of his wife. We should, Cooper Davis argues, be sceptical of the elegiac mode itself (p. 42).
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Anne-Lise Franc ois also tracks the allusive background to Hardys poetry in Not thinking of you as left behind: Virgil and the Missing of Love in Hardys Poems of 191213 (ELH 75[2008] 6388). She traces the implications of Hardys epigraph to Poems of 191213 beyond its reference to the relationship between Aeneas and Dido to Aeneass relationship with his wife Creusa and his failure to turn back for her. Franc ois finds this a powerful figure for Hardys relations with his first wife and for understanding missing as a mode of love and not simply its lack or failure (p. 67). Laurence Estanove draws upon Michel Collet to describe the porosity of voices (p. 33) in Hardys poetry in Voices from things growing in a churchyard: Hardys Verse on Both Sides of the Grave (THSJ 4:ii[2008] 2939). The dead speak in Hardys poems, through gravestones, epitaphs and other less tangible presences. Beyond these horizons, Estanove argues, death is teeming with life (p. 38). In the same issue of the Hardy Society Journal, Lakshmi Raj Sharma offers a close reading of Afterwards which has a very different tenor (THSJ 4:ii[2008] 405). Hardys poem, Sharma argues, asks for his work to be remembered after his death for the detailed quality of its observation of natural phenomena. E.T.H. Teague also investigates Hardys noticings in Hardys Round Moon: An Astronomical Curiosity (THSJ 4:iii[2008] 705), measuring Hardys Seeing the Moon Rise against astronomical records to prove that it preserves a highly specific moment in time. In a glossy new imprint the Hardy Review now incorporates contributions to the Thomas Hardy Associations online discussion group. These usually take the form of a regular Poem of the Month forum, as in discussions of Proud Songsters (THR 10:i[2008] 1236) and Four in the Morning (THR 10:ii[2008] 11017), although the spring volume also reproduces an online discussion of The Impercipient (THR 10:i[2008] 4367). Individual contributions within these sequences tend to be short, so the exchanges recorded are lively, but their content is definitely learned, from lexicological investigations to detailed analysis of the scansion of Hardys poems. Since each of these discussions involves multiple contributors and does not follow a single line of development it is hard to do them justice in these pages, other than to record that they are usually informative and present an optimistic picture of the current state of Hardy scholarship. Among the few critical responses to William Empson from 2008, Paul Bove concludes Poetry against Torture with a chapter on Empson and the mind (pp. finds Empsons intolerance of cruelty and his fierce defence of 11736). Bove lucid critical analysis an exemplary antidote to recent attempts by the US government to legitimize torture within the war on terror. Oleg Gelikmans Cold Pastoral: Werner Herzogs Version of Empson (MLN 123[2008] 114162) begins by examining the ideological structures underpinning documentary film, before shifting to Empsons pastoral and presenting his early film reviews as theoretical precursors to Some Versions of Pastoral. Gelickman applies his analysis of Empsons account of social antagonisms and complex ideas compressed into simple forms to a reading of Werner Herzogs Grizzly Bear. The structures of Herzogs film, he claims, present Timothy Treadwell as a form of fallen pastoral hero. The essay is an odd journey, but it is not without its insights. In Seven Types of Ambiguity and James Joyce (N&Q
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55[2008] 6872), Matthew Creasy explores the origins of Empsons fascination with Ulysses in his university years and uncovers traces of Joyces influence within the passages chosen for comment in Seven Types. The cover of Poems in the Porch, edited by Kevin Gardner, claims that it will prompt a radical reassessment of [John Betjemans] canon. This is a grand claim for a slim volume of twenty religious poems written for radio broadcast and the fragments of two incomplete poems. In fact, six of these can be found in Collected Poems and seven of them have been published previously but not collected. The other poems were to have been published in a volume entitled Verses from the Vestry, intended to capitalize upon a previous collection (Poems in the Porch), but Betjeman and his publishers considered them too slight. Despite being a self-confessed idler (p. 77) (or perhaps because of it) Betjeman does, however, earn a chapter in John Bales Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature (pp. 7795). Not a work of literary criticism, Bales book seeks to supplement accounts of hostility towards sport with evidence from the arts. His account of Betjeman draws on his poetry and critical writings for biographical purposes, uncovering negative attitudes towards sport from his schooling to his later dislike for its monotonous public architecture. Nevertheless, Bale observes, Betjeman was not above evoking sport in his poetry for nostalgic purposes. Interestingly, Bale also reveals Betjemans love of body-surfing. Unfortunately, no copy of Greg Morses John Betjeman: Reading the Victorians had been made available at the time of writing. The work of Ivor Gurney has received relatively little scholarly treatment in recent years. Pamela Blevinss account of his friendship with Marion Scott, Song of Pain and Beauty, is the first biography of Gurney since 1978. Its narrative is largely determined by Gurneys life: Blevins starts with their meeting at the Royal College of Music in 1911, but then explores Gurneys family background and his education, followed by his enlistment and the sudden blooming of poetic activity in the trenches. She charts his erratic mental health from a nervous breakdown before the war to repeated treatments at various mental institutions afterwards, and explores aspects of his ambiguous sexuality, from intense male friendships to his (unrequited) passion for Annie Drummond, a nurse who treated him at the Edinburgh War Hospital. Blevins emphasizes Gurneys musical career as a writer of songs and composer of settings, but also explores Scotts role in fostering this, especially through her activities as a music critic. The book is a work of devotion in two senses: it documents assiduously the friendship between Gurney and Scott, but is also passionate about its subject matter. For a biography, Song of Pain and Beauty wears it scholarship openly: it is episodic in presentation, placing notes a little obtrusively at the end of its short chapters, breaking up a narrative that is otherwise absorbing. In Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War, Robert Hemmings addresses the output of Siegfried Sassoon after the First World War. A nuanced understanding of nostalgia, he argues, is required to defend Sassoon against accusations of self-indulgence. Hemmings duly charts the place of nostalgia within literary history, medical history and the development of psychology. He explores Sassoons experience of analysis
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with W.H. Rivers in relation to burgeoning psychoanalytic theories of shell shock and war neurosis, before considering his autobiographical poems and prose and his public stance towards the Second World War. Giving due space to Sassoons critics, Hemmingss approach is unusual: rather than defending Sassoon against accusations of narcissism, he looks to Freudian psychoanalysis to account for it. In spite of Sassoons declared resistance to the aesthetics of modernism, Hemmings attempts to recoup his work by making it exemplify a series of modern dilemmas, from a problematic relationship to the past to an uncertain sense of selfhood and a fluid sexuality. Nostalgia figures here, with compelling detail, for the trauma of severance and loss, as well as sentiment. Two biographical studies of Rudyard Kipling were published in 2008 as well as several articles in the specialist journals. William Dillinghams Being Kipling attempts to light up important corners of his personality by scrutinizing the rarely considered short stories and poems in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides [1923]. Although the volume is predominantly concerned with Kiplings short stories, it gives significant consideration to several poems too, particularly The Junk and Dhow (pp. 5860), The Last Lap (pp. 11922) and Ave Imperatrix (pp. 18290). Vested in biographical exploration, these readings are highly sensitive to Kiplings use of rhythm and its relation to the ideological currents and counter-currents of his writings. Charles Allens lively account of the formative influence of Anglo-Indian society upon Kipling, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling offers little in the way of formal analysis of the poems, but does co-opt them into its biographical account. Allen quotes Kiplings poems from their first, newspaper and periodical, sources, tracing early unsigned works. He also supplies interesting contextual information, such as the likely influence of the execution of Private George Flaxman upon Danny Deever. Jad Adamss article Decadent or Hearty? Kiplings Dilemma (KJ 82:cccxxv[2008] 927) largely focuses upon Kiplings novel, The Light that Failed, but gives some consideration to Kiplings early poetry in its attempt to connect him with the Decadent writings of Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. George Simmers begins and ends his account of Kiplings response to the notion of shell shock in his short stories with a brief analysis of the poem The Mothers Son (KJ 82:cccxxvi[2008] 329). Simmers identifies Kiplings faith in the value of sharing stories as one source for the first person in this poem. In the same issue of the Kipling Journal, Daniel Karlin offers an insightful analysis of Tin Fish (KJ 82:cccxxvi[2008] 407). Karlin contrasts the publication of this poem in collected editions of Kiplings poetry with its first, untitled appearance at the head of an article about submarine warfare. Kiplings poem is shown to contain a cruel streak of identification with impassive destruction. The Kipling Journal of September reproduces Patrick Brantlingers Kiplings White Mans Burden and its Afterlives (KJ 82:cccxxxviii[2008] 3958). Originally published in English Literature in Transition (ELT 50:ii[2007]), this article traces the allusive fortunes of Kiplings poem in the form of parodic responses in the 1890s through to recent writings about the current wars in Afghanistan. Finally, Shamus O.D. Wade poses the question Who Was the Better Poet: Kipling or William McGonagall? without
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apparent irony (KJ 82:cccxxvii[2008] 409). Wades choice of poetic examples and biographical anecdotes indicates that he thinks Kipling the lesser man. Curious.
7. Modern Irish Poetry This was a bumper year for Thomas Kinsella scholarship. Two studies of Kinsellas poetryone by the veteran Kinsella devotee Maurice Harmon and the other by a young academic Andrew Fitzsimonswere published to coincide with the poets eightieth birthday, and both make good use of material from the Emory archive that is home to the manuscripts. It has long been a critical commonplace to hold Kinsella up as a notable yet marginalized Irish poetDavid Wheatleys epithet of Kinsella as dethroned God is emblazoned on the back jacket of Fitzsimonss studya condition that has been attributed to various causes, most usually, to the poets break with traditional formal procedures in the late 1960s and his move away from mainstream publishing. Harmon has long been a champion of Kinsellas work; his 1974 The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella was the first of its type. Bizarrely for a work of critical scholarship, this recent study, Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, opens with a poem dedicated to his subject which celebrates their long friendship and by so doing proclaims Harmons authority as a Kinsella intimate. The issue of certain scholars having privileged close access to their subjects is, to my mind, a problematic one. The poet John Berryman once recalled how the services required by one professor writing a book on Berrymans poetry were such that Berryman not only answered all of the scholars questions for him but even waited on him, pouring his drinks for him while he typed. It is a humorous anecdote, but it nonetheless raises the important issue of critical distance. In this instance, it is clear that Harmon is too close to his subject, and this results in a study that lacks a freshness of approach and a willingness to criticize or question. Harmons respectful study lacks an original synthesizing thesis. Instead it moves chronologically across Kinsellas oeuvre, book by book, and so forms a basic, largely thematic guidebook to the poetry for the casual reader. For a study that insists on the importance of close reading, this almost completely privileges theme over technique; too often we get only vague references to poetic devices, and these seem to serve mainly as indicators of Harmons schoolboy-like adherence to the dictates of close reading. Harmon fails to provide any real insight into the way that Kinsellas collections are designed as sequences, as mosaic-like arrangements, wherein key motifs and images modulate and develop across the developing oeuvre. Thus we get no meaningful sense of how exactly Kinsella is designing for the exact needs. Instead, the same themes are explored ad nauseam with little sense of a rich and intricate expanding poetry. Furthermore, because each chapter begins with an overview of what will follow, the commentary quickly becomes repetitious. Indeed, Harmons vocabulary could also have done with more variation; the word sundering, for example, is employed three times over as many pages.
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Most dismayingly, Harmon refers very infrequently to the work of other Kinsella scholars despite the fact that the books back cover features an effusive tribute from Derval Tubridy, whose 2001 study of the Peppercanister Poems far outweighs Harmons in its contribution to Kinsella scholarship and on whose scholarship Harmon has clearly relied for his grasp of the poets later work. The one selling-point that Harmons study might be seen to have is its inclusion of the translations from Irish. Yet the section on The Tain offers little more than a summary of the narrative peppered with large chunks of unanalysed quotation from Kinsellas translation. In the same chapter, on Kinsellas New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, little more than an outline of the subjects of the poems is given. The next chapters focus on An Duanaire is more successful in that it at least attends to the fact that these are translations of poetry from one language into another. However, in neither chapter are issues pertaining to the act and art of translationpolitical, cultural, artistic or otherwiseaddressed, and Harmon makes no reference to the translations of the same poems that have been made by others. The shortcomings of Harmons study become even more apparent when it is read alongside Fitzsimonss. The Sea of Disappointment: Thomas Kinsellas Pursuit of the Real, in its carefully plotted journey through Kinsellas advancing poetics of disappointment and with Kinsellas belief in poetrys access to the real as guiding principle, is far more sophisticated in its understanding of the work, making for a much-needed contribution to Kinsella studies. What Harmon is content to take as a given Fitzsimons sets out to interrogate at a fundamental level. With his probing and well-supported readings of key poems from across the oeuvre, Fitzsimons corrects reductive readings and too-simplistic narratives of the poets development. Importantly, he illuminates how, contrary to established views, Kinsella was from the first frustrated by traditional formal procedures, and Fitzsimons charts his gradual move into a more organic, though no less crafted, sense of poetic form. The established mode of reading Kinsellas abandoned formalism in the context of what is by now a tired formal versus free verse debate is naive and unhelpful, as Fitzsimons persuasively argues. Related to this is the well-knownalthough not yet substantially examinedfact that Kinsella had been absorbing the work of American modernist poets long before he actually set foot on American soil; he reviewed Stevens and Pound as early as 1956, for example. Yet there is still more work to be done on this area, as Fitzsimons himself acknowledges in his introduction. Robert Lowells breakthrough into free verse in the 1950s is summoned at the opening of the third chapterLowell memorably characterized his earlier poetic efforts as prehistoric monstersbut one feels that Fitzsimons could have gone further here and considered perhaps the ways in which Lowells development may be seen as analogous to Kinsellas. Lowell too, far from renouncing the formal blessed structures of his early poetry for a looser free mode, continued to draw on those well-learned tricks of the poetic trade by using traditional forms such as the sonnet. As with Lowell, then, Kinsella expands his poetic resource instead of simply abandoning formalism, and Fitzsimons is alert to how Kinsella is a measuring artist to the end. The scope of Kinsellas poetry
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is laid out; he is a multifaceted, far-reaching poet and not one tied to any single position. This largeness is missing from Harmons study. Indeed, unlike the far-sighted Fitzsimons, Harmon seems to have a blind spot when it comes to American poetry. There are a mere two fleeting references to Ezra Pound, while William Carlos Williamsthat other great poet who thinks with his poemis completely absent. Resonances of Wallace Stevens cry out to be attended to in Harmons reading of Carraroe, but Stevens is not once mentioned. Reading Harmon reading Kinsella, the reader would be justified in thinking that Kinsella was writing in a hermetically sealed box with only Jung, Dante and Mahler for company. This is particularly ironic when one considers how Kinsellas advocates lament the poets isolation in critical narratives of Irish poetry. Even when Harmon invokes staple figures, such as Dante or W.B. Yeats, his comments betray a lack of acuity. Reading Yeatss roll-call of the main players in the Rising in Easter 1916 back through Kinsellas A Country Walk, Harmon remarks on how, unlike Kinsella who has no tolerance for nationalist violence, Yeats raises his heroes to heroic status. Any sensitive reader of Yeatss ambivalent elegy will take issue with this interpretation. Fitzsimons, reading the same lines from A Country Walk understands that there is something far more complex going on between the two poets and has the insight to bring in other critical voices to open up some of these complexities. The strength of Fitzsimonss approach over Harmons is made evident when Fitzsimons, deeply attuned to the echoes of other writers in Kinsellasuch as those of William Blake for whose overlooked influence he makes a caseuncovers the identity of William Skullbullet as Blake. Harmon focuses on the same lines from the same poem yet misses this link completely and is content to take the customary line (which originated with Tubridy) which has Skullbullet as the cartographer William Petty. Unlike Harmon, Fitzsimons makes excellent use of the insights of other critics and engages with and extends the key critical debates over Kinsellas work, arguing back to some of Kinsellas most audible detractors such as Edna Longley. He too has done his homework when it comes to the political, social and cultural contexts out of which Kinsellas poetry of disappointment is shaped. Fitzsimonss exemplary study must now be built onthere is much more to be said about this major Irish poetand Kinsellas extensive poetics must continue to be examined. The critical writing of poets is always an oblique apologia for their own poems, Justin Quinn, a poet himself, asserts, as part of his critique of Kinsella in his new Cambridge Introduction to Irish Poetry, 18002000. Quinns agenda in writing this survey of two centuries of Irish poetry is made clear in the books opening gambit as he poses a number of questions designed to discomfit any reader who might be sitting too comfortably: What is Irish poetry? is the first of the rhetorical spanners thrown in the works. By the end of Quinns study, these questions still hang in the airno bad thing by any meansbut what has come into focus is the fact that the poetry that constitutes this slippery category is a boundless (or boundary-less) body of work and, whats more, that it has long been so. That the parameters of Irish poetry cannot be fixed by nationality, ideology, creed or classnationalist
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ideology is the authors bugbear throughoutis surely well established by now as we sit assuredly in the twenty-first century with our revisionist and transnational spectacles firmly in place. Quinns concerted effort to leave nationalist frameworks behind and raise complex questions about cultural identity will surely serve to rid undergraduate students of any easy preconceptions, but for the informed reader he too often runs the risk of perpetuating such blinkered views by repeatedly invoking them. Despite the title given to the final chapter, it is clear that Ireland has not disappeared yet, not for this poet-critic anyway. The end result of this approach is that too much Irish poetryroughly that which comes before the point designated by Selina Guinness as the era of the New Irish Poetsis generally typified as stagnant, conservative and weighed down by ideology. For instance, Irelands overwhelming poetic conservatism is impressed upon readers who might have mistakenly regarded Kinsellas technique as ground-breaking. In his bid to break with his predecessors and send a disappearing Ireland packing, Quinn does not sufficiently acknowledge his own generations substantial debts to its enablers and the continuities that exist. Thus, in the final chapter, the linguistic range of David Wheatleys poetry signifies, according to Quinn, a movement away from the usual demarcations of Irish poetry, but it is clear from reading across the expanses of Irish poetry from James Clarence Mangan to Wheatley himselfindeed, Wheatley is quite obviously a poetic descendant of Manganthat there never have been clear demarcations in Irish poetry, that the best of it has always delighted in shape-shifting and boundary-crossing. Elsewhere, Quinn singles out MacNeice as a poet who refused to accept the borders of his country as the borders of his world, yet of what poet worth study is this not true? Quinn is so determined to rehabilitate the reader and push his central thesis that he at times does a disservice to some of the poets under scrutiny. The difficulties of his projectand the attendant frustrations that Quinn must have felt while working through itare apparent. Having just outlined how our understanding of Kinsella continues to be enlarged in a recent study, it is dismaying for this reviewer to see Quinn holding to the one-dimensional view of Kinsella as a neo-nationalist. Also, Quinn has a hot-headed proclivity to dismiss poets without taking other critical appraisals into account. In this way, despite Quinns reliance on Antoinette Quinns scholarship for his discussion of Patrick Kavanagh, he rejects any suggestions of formal radicalism and experimentation in The Great Hungertruculently viewing it as closer in style to Edgar Lee Masterss Spoon River Anthology instead of the more usual model of Eliots The Waste Landwhich she has persuasively argued for. Quinn, never one to suffer fools, is correct to set the limits of Kavanaghs achievement as a handful of poemsthe rest is dismalnonetheless, more could have been said about that poems significance in its time and after, instead of only focusing on its obvious and by now well-examined flaws. It is not that Quinns judgements are wrong, rather that he detracts from his own argument by treating his subjects in such an offhand fashion. Brian Coffey is one of the poets unceremoniously written offhis poetry of vagueness and blandness is barely glanced atas is Francis Ledwidge, who is cast aside for the more trendy J.M. Synge, while W.R. Rodgers and John Hewitt are deemed
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to have been valuable only for the fact that they existed. Blanaid Salkelds poetry is returned unsatisfactory and, as if to confirm its inconsequentiality, the date of publication of her collection The Foxs Covert is given incorrectly. But the most blundering error in judgement comes with Nuala N Dhomhnaill, whom Quinn views as being inferior to her translator into English, Paul Muldoon. That Quinn deems Muldoon a far superior poet is not the problem here. Rather, Quinn goes on to attribute all of the low points in the translations to Muldoons lack of interest in [N Dhomhnaills] original, professing how, ultimately [Muldoons] translations amount to a criticism of her limitations. The degree of negative criticism here is unjustified and, worse, it is wholly unsupported by any readings of her poetry in Irish. What is more, the evidence in favour of N Dhomhnaills achievement as a poet is there, if we need it, in the fact that Muldoon has gone on to translate more of her work; the critically acclaimed The Fifty-Minute Mermaid [2007] testifies to the continuing success of their collaborations. an N Chuilleana in The chapter groupings are not always advantageous. Eile is among the poets lumped together in the chapter Feminism and Irish Poetry, yet it is clear that her work does not belong within such confines and would have fitted much better into, for instance, the chapter on poetry and translation. Again, one wonders why Quinn chooses to perpetuate reductive views and categorizations such as Womens Poetry by herding most of the older Irish poets who happen to be women into one chapter. Medbh McGuckian is another case in point. That said, it remains that this is a valuable and invigorating study and it should be recommended reading for undergraduates everywhere. Its strengths lie in Quinns remarkable capacity for shrewd and sophisticated close readings of illustrative poems. Quinn is a bracing critic and a vital reader of poetry. Whatever its shortcomings, every reader will find something to argue with here, and so its capacity to stimulate debate must surely stand as a measure of its achievement. Every reader will also learn much along the way. It is, after all, cast as an introduction and it is undeniably a sharply intelligent and eminently readable overview of a perpetually troublesome subject. Quinns frustrations are the readers own. Ireland is well known for its representation of itself in literary terms. Tourists arriving in Dublin airport, before theyve even made it as far as the departure point for the literary pub-crawl, are greeted with images of the countrys best exports, its writers, and, if theyve flown with the national airline, even their seats will have been inscribed with quotations from Irish literary works. It seems to be a uniquely Irish phenomenon. That poetry holds a high office in Ireland was evinced by the establishment of the Chair of Ireland Professor of Poetry in 1998 to manifest the value of poetry within our cultural and intellectual life. The Poets Chair: The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, edited by Paul Durcan, John Montague and Nuala N Dhomhnaill, collects the public lectures given by the first three of these professors of poetry, and each of these essays points up the well-travelled cosmopolitanism and far-reaching nature of Irish poetry. John Montagues contributions focus on his own development as a poet and his formative encounters with American poets and poetry as well as on the hot topic of poetry translation. On the other side of the world, Nuala N Dhomhnaill, in
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her essay Kismet, recounts her defining experience of Turkish culture and how by immersing herself in the Turkish language she came to see the artistic possibilities that her own native Irish language made available. This revealing essay does much to remind us of N Dhomhnaills breadth as a writer and as a citizen of the world who is at home in many languages. Paul Durcan, in the books most engaging and free-wheeling essays, focuses on what would have been at the time three of the more under-rated Irish poets: Anthony Cronin, Harry Clifton and Michael Hartnett. His essay on the latters Sibelius in Silence restores a key poem to critical attention and is particularly rich in the way that it connects Sibeliuss art and dominant themes with those of Hartnett. Overall, this collection makes a strong case for the latitude that Irish poetry enjoys. Conor McCarthy is no less aware of the extensive reach of Irish poetry across space and time. In Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry he provides a lucid overview of Heaneys engagement with the literature of the Middle Ages in all of its forms. Moving through Buile Suibhne, Station Island and Beowulf, McCarthy presents Heaney as a great translator, and as a disruptive crosser of national, linguistic and cultural boundaries who problematizes and complicates neat binariessuch as those between England and Ireland and its languagesand too-easy narratives of tradition. In this way, he expands his outlook to consider the implications of Heaneys look to Scotland and so focuses in the final chapter on Robert Henrysons The Testament of Cresseid. Heaneys retelling of Henrysons work, and the constellation of other languages and literatures that it involvesTrojan material, Chaucer, Shakespeareis given due attention here, although the insights into the poetry in this chapter suffer as they give way to other concerns, and too much space is devoted to plot summaries. More on Heaneys translation itself would have been desirable. The scope of the study is large, but rarely does it lose its way. At all times, McCarthy is attuned to the reach of Heaneys workto the extensiveness of his multivalent word-hoardand to the enriching mutuality that exists between the original poetry and the translations as he mines key poems from across Heaneys oeuvre for their medieval undertow. Indeed, the medieval is shown to have a contemporary resonanceit is, for Heaney, crucial to our understanding of contemporary realityparticularly in the handling of themes of gender, exile, guilt, responsibility and identity and in his engagement with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. By focusing on Heaneys intimate knowledge and deployment of this range of resources McCarthy illuminates important aspects of his poetry and poetics and makes apparent the multiplicity, intertextuality and hybridity of Heaneys work, thus, in turn, broadening the readers understanding of the development of poetry through the ages. Of course, much scholarly work has already been done in this area on Heaneys look to Dante in particularand McCarthys debt to scholars such as Bernard O Donoghue, himself a medievalist, and Neil Corcoran in his essential The Poetry of Seamus Heaney [1998] is heavy indeed. However, McCarthy valuably provides the first book-length study of this integral aspect of Heaneys work and so lays the groundwork for further explorations. Yeats was once described by Louis MacNeice as being like a figure from a fancy dress party; he looked wrong in the daylight. Students coming to Yeats
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for the first time often display the same resistance to his work when faced with its esoteric obscurities, its secret discipline. In his clearly written and student-friendly study Yeatss Poetic Codes Nicholas Grene, himself a lecturer to undergraduates at Trinity College Dublin, provides a useful handbook for student and lecturer alike as, concordance in hand, he undertakes to demystify and decode Yeats by tracing the recurrence of pivotal words across his oeuvre. The most engaging chapter is the first, wherein Grene investigates the significance of Yeatss strategic dating, and misdating, of his poems. This intriguing topic could surely have made for a book-length study in itself. The other most notable chapter is that on voices. When Robert Frost dined with Yeats in 1928 he was struck by how Yeats and George Russell took ordinary conversation and lifted it into the realm of pure literature. Indeed Yeats himself reminded Frost of his own pre-eminence as a poet of conversation: You know I was the first poet in modern times to put that colloquial everyday speech of yours into poetry. I did it in my poetic play The Land of Hearts Desire. Grene marks The Folly of Being Comforted out as Yeatss first conversation poem, and the chapter explores Yeatss play of voices, in dialogue and in conflict, and argues persuasively that Yeats is a great dramatic poet as opposed to a great poetic dramatist. Again, this chapter seems too short, but the student will find it helpfully suggestive. Not surprisingly, as in chapter after chapter Grene systematically traces the appearance of certain words, the approach grows a little wearying with seemingly endless usages of the same word presenting themselves for comment. Also, what strikes one most in the chapter on Yeatss use of tenses and moods is Grenes lack of attentiveness to matters of poetic form; his tendency to privilege sentence structure over poetic structure leaves much more to be said, and his readings of the poems for their sense only (in the main) means that poetry scholars will not be satisfied and will probably find themselves running off to consult Helen Vendlers Our Secret Disciple: Yeats and Lyric Form [2007] to fill this need. Finally, through their attempted decoding all that can be said about Yeatss poems is what we know already; that nothing in Yeats can be fixed. Each word modulates and changes colour across the oeuvre, making for a poetry of shifting symbolism and one that is constantly in flux, in constant change and in conflict. And it is in this, as Grene shows in this diligent guidebook, that the endless pleasure and challenge of the poetry lies. Isaiah Berlin, writing to a correspondent from Dublins Shelbourne Hotel in 1938, details in his letter how, at the very moment he writes, there happens to be with him in the same room two fishermen from the west of Ireland talking of fish while just to his right, a wonderfully majestic W.B. Yeats is very audibly chanting verse in a corner to a young woman. A writer of fiction could not convincingly invent such a scenario and the understandably incredulous Berlin himself wondered at the absurd and sublime quality of this chance convergence. Ronald Schuchards The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts presents Yeats in just such a mode as it takes the reader on an absorbing, keenly detailed field trip across the decades of Yeatss profound involvement in promoting the music of human speech and of the poetry that comes out of it. Pronouncing itself a reconstruction, the study seeks to recover a crucial aspect of Yeatss poetics that has been neglected and
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even disparaged by many of Yeatss most esteemed readers. What Yeats called the art of the troubadour is fundamental to his poeticsto what Grene calls his dramatic poetryand to his development as a writer; it is thus central to the development of modern poetry. This is an inspired subject and one that demanded sustained critical scrutiny of this kind. The early years of what his more sceptical critics termed Yeatss cantillating epidemic are exhaustively traced through London and Dublin, and Yeatss persistence with his theory of an auditory poetics as he shuttles between the two locations inspiring societies of fellow troubadours in each city is strongly felt. It makes for a slow-paced but never tedious reading experience. Every lecture that Yeats gave on the subject of speaking poetry, of the inherent music of the verse, and every performance given to illuminate his developing theory, is assiduously recounted with recourse to witness statements and other carefully investigated source material. Such is the attention to detail in this meticulously researched study that the footnotes often reach De Selbian lengths. Adorned too with high-quality images and photographs, Schuchards book succeeds in re-creating the period, moment by moment, and resuscitating Yeatss art. However, more in these early chapters on how this theory should impact on our understanding of certain poems would have made for a stronger argument and would also have provided relief from the documentary-based reconstruction that dominates. At times, one senses that Schuchard doesnt want other narratives to get in the way of his own story, as when he makes only passing reference to helpful studies such as Brian Devines Yeats: The Master of Sound [2006] on the question of Yeatss use of Irish metres, the amhran and sean nos styles of expression. That said, Schuchards privileging of archival material far outweighs such critical swervings. The study really takes off when we arrive at Minstrels and Imagists and Yeats shacks up with that other troubadour Ezra Pound. After having carefully traced the early developments, this latter section of the book soars, and we are, in the final chapter, treated to reconstructions of Yeats at the BBC directing his troubadours in the art of saying poetry over the radio. Nor is Schuchard averse to enlivening his jam-packed narrative with some very telling in-jokes from the period. Readers can laugh along with D.H. Lawrences parodic imitation of Florence Farrs chanting: Ping . . . wa . . . n . . . ng, and with Pound wickedly renaming the mages tower Thoor Bally phallus. Schuchards thorough, even-handed approach ensures that he leaves nothing out. The abiding image of the poet that emerges, of Yeats humming away to himself as he wrote, beating time with his right hand as he did even on his deathbedalways composing in the sequence of the musical phraseis a lasting one, and it is for this that the reader is most grateful to Schuchards hard graft. This study will be indispensable for all readers of Yeatss work and of modern poetry in general, as it casts much-needed light on this unappreciated aspect of Yeatss poetics, crucially making a new Yeats available in a substantial way and deepening our understanding of both Yeatss art and the changes and developments in modern poetry that it brought about. Another compendious work that sheds light on a lacuna in Irish poetry and Irish studies more broadly is Gerald Dawes capacious anthology Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 19141945. Appropriately, its
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title is taken from the poem Nocturne by the Irish modernist poet Thomas MacGreevy. The fact of the involvement of so many Irish in the First World War in particularan estimated 35,000 were killedhas until recently been part of the nations history of silence and exclusion, and so this anthology may be seen to be carrying out a larger moral imperative by restoring Irelands First World War dead to cultural memory and showing the impact of that moment in poetic terms. That its publication was supported by the Military History of Ireland Trust is a mark of its wider cultural significance. For Dawe, it is the work of Francis Ledwidgea poet who receives short shrift in Quinns surveythat best embodies the tensions intrinsic to Irelands other history, as Dawe terms it. Of course the subject has been addressed in a number of historical studies of the period, and recent works of poetry scholarship have also started to investigate it in poetry. Fran Breartons pioneering study The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley [2000] introduced the subject by attending to the poetry and poetics of six poets predominantly from the north of Ireland, while Jim Haugheys The First World War in Irish Poetry [2002] written very much in the wake of Breartons, takes a more wide-ranging and, it must be said, more diffuse and unfocused view, covering thirty-odd poets, the poetry of too many of whom is far from worthy of such critical attention. Published in 2007, Tim Kendalls tome of essays, The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry is curiously lacking in its coverage of war poetry from the Republic of Irelandas Dawe himself noted in his review of the collection for the Irish Times, only the Troubles of the latter half of the century are treatedand so Dawes own anthology neatly fills this gap. Dawe, in his short, sensitive introduction emphasizes how this is a shared history between Britain, Ireland and the US, and the poetry collected here speaks to this reality. The anthology broadcasts a complex polyphony of voices; a wide range of poets of a diversity of class, race, creed and politics, both combatants and non-combatants, all moved to register their experience in words. Chronologically speaking, we travel from Katharine Tynan to Van Morrison (rounded off with a fitting postscript by Samuel Beckett) as we move through the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the War of Independence, as well as Irelands own domestic conflicts. Of course, as is to be expected in such a comprehensive collection, the poetry is also diverse in terms of standard; not all of the poems presented here are first-rate. One is reminded of Marianne Moores verdict on her famous war poem In Distrust of Merits: for Moore it was not poetry at all but merely protest, for, although it functioned as testimony to the intolerableness of war, formally it was not a poem. What emerges most powerfully, however, in the best poetry here, is the fact of war in everyday life and the shadow it casts long after the historic event has taken place. Derek Mahons punningly entitled The Home Front shows how as a poet born in 1941 he was born into war and has grown up with it. War marks all of our lives, and shapes us, as many of the poems here explore in a myriad ways. One hopes that this anthology will usher in a new critical focus on this period and on the work of unduly neglected poets such as Patrick MacDonogh, Anthony Glavin and, to a lesser extent, MacGreevy himself; his De Civitate Hominum included here is a powerful and troubling meditation on the relation between aesthetics and war, the still
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life of both. Obviously, the presence of war in Irish poetry does not stop with 1945, as this anthology does. This suggests that a sequel may be required. Having briefly noted the limitations of Justin Quinns grouping of Irish women poets under the rubric Feminism and Irish Poetry, I now turn to his Irish Poetry After Feminism, a diminutive collection of critical essays developed out of papers from a 2006 symposium at the Princess Grace Library. In his deft introduction, Quinn as editor puts forward a number of questions, some of which, when read in the light of the essays that follow, seem to openly challenge certain feminist approaches to poetry and so signal the potential pitfalls of this line of attack. Thus, the problematic relation between poetry and critical theory raises its head. Here too, Quinn rightly takes Eavan Boland to task for her prohibitive stance in her Against Love Poetry; there are more nuanced and advanced conversations about malefemale relations to be heard, as Quinn sketches. Having launched a pre-emptive strike in this way, Quinn, with shrewd sleight of hand, exits himself from the proceedings, leaving the contributors to fight it out among themselves as he makes his getaway. Moynagh Sullivan, whose dogmatic essay is positioned first in the book, immediately blacklists Quinn (among others) as an enemy of feminism for his remarks on womens poetry made in the course of a review. Sullivan argues, unconvincingly, for the cultural misogynies evident in Quinns remarks and goes on to list a litany of such critical abuses against Irish women poets. In the next essay, Peter McDonald responds to Sullivans hermeneutics of gender with good sensemindful of the fact that as a male critic he can do no right by devoting his essay to a scholarly consideration of poetic form and the origins of poetry. Not surprisingly, the most successful essays are those which, unlike Sullivans, actually focus on reading poetry and that resist getting mired in the totalizing discourse of feminism; Fran Breartons reading of Mahons First Principles is the best example of this. These essays will no doubt trigger further bouts of heated debate, but too many of them through their own practices display the dangers of reading poetry through the immovable rigidities of, in this case feminist, theoretical frameworks. Lucy Collinss essay is in the right spirit; it sees the possibilities, the new poetic spaces that a selection of younger Irish women poets have made for themselves. On the flipside, Selina Guinness imposes a feminist reading on Vona Groarkes The Annotated Houseas a poem about female masturbationthat continues to baffle this reader at least. For instance, for Guinness, the phrase months heaped in the basement has menstrual undertones. This seems to me a good example of the theorist distorting the poem to fit their theory. The collection ends on a high point with a refreshing take on the subject, as David Wheatley goes in search of the poetry of misogyny in Samuel Becketts poetry and wonders what might a feminist reading of it look like? For all of its many moments of interest, what this collection proves is that feminism in Irish poetry studies trails some way behind its American counterpart, and that an informed and wider-ranging debate still needs to be had. We have to learn how to read poetry with theory in a way that opens up possibilities rather than closes them down with prescriptive, predetermined readings.
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What is the future of Irish poetry? Richard Tillinghast, himself a noted American poet and critic asks this question in one of the essays in his collection of literary criticism Finding Ireland: A Poets Exploration of Irelands Literature and Culture. Tillinghast presents himself as a foreign literary correspondent for non-Irish readers while for Irish readers he hopes to bring a certain freshness to familiar topics. Having put forward a number of disclaimers in this way, what follows is a largely uncritical view of Irish culture and literature delivered with more than a hint of nostalgia for his lost Ireland of the mind. Essays on Heaney and Yeats, although clearly the work of an astute and committed reader of poetry, are also at times a bit bright-eyed and na ve, to quote Tillinghast on his newly-arrived-in-Ireland self. Apart from his praiseworthy attention to Yeatss versification, these essays deal largely with already familiar areas of enquiry. Conversely, his essay on Derek Mahons poetry exhibits the advantages of having one practising poet read another. Best of all is his essay on the Wake Forest Anthology poets. Here, in an all too-rare moment of taking issue, Tillinghast criticizes Jefferson Holdridges claim that Irish poetry should be impersonal and self-mortifying. His opinions of the poets here are wise and perceptive. Despite repeated requests, Liffey Press failed to deliver a review copy of Holdridges The Poetry of Paul Muldoon. However, it is heartening to know that the Muldoon industry is still chugging away and that readers in need of explication are not being left in the dark as the poetry collections continue to mount. Tim Kendalls illuminating and pioneering book-length study of Muldoons poetry [1996] was met with audible sighs of relief from even the closest of close readers; a grateful Helen Vendler hailed it as just the book for readers who are unable to follow Muldoons Joycean game of baffle the reader as it would at last permit American readers to understand the poets basic references. Clair Wills followed suit with her excellent Reading Paul Muldoon, and a further two collections of critical essays ensured that Muldoons readers would not be starved of required reading. Holdridges book will no doubt be of interest to Muldoons growing readership in the United States and to readers of his later poetry collections, song lyrics and essays on poetryWillss study stops with Hay [1998]. From what one can glean from the publicity information, it is clear that Holdridge privileges a broader thematic approach over Willss and Kendalls keen close readings of individual collections, and so his book will most likely serve best as a general overview and introduction for the uninitiated.
Books Reviewed Acheraiou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. Palgrave. [2008] pp. x 250. 45 ISBN 9 7802 3055 2050. Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. Little, Brown. [2008] pp.426 + xxii. 20 ISBN 978 0 316 72655 9.
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