A Curious Peril

Abstract

When World War II appeared imminent, the modernist writer known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declined offers of refuge and chose to remain in London. As devastating as this noncombatant experience was, as a Londoner during the Great War H.D. had learned how prolific she could be during periods of war. A Curious Peril attends to the critically ignored fiction and nonfiction she penned in the aftermath of the Second World War, arguing that our neglect of the narrative prose of this period of her career has bolstered an incomplete portrait of her oeuvre. Though H.D. is not typically considered a “political” thinker, this postwar work brings her interest in the otherworldly to bear on the material, political world—the world of imperialism, nationalism, and perpetual war. Abandoning for a short period the ancient classical settings for which she is best known, H.D. is seemingly impelled by the experiences of the early 1940s to produce a spate of writings in which the history of modern Europe takes center stage, writings that are molded into and by innovative and hybrid forms and genres that ultimately critique the ethical paradigms that had guided her before the war. Her postwar work marks a definitive shift from the modernist to the late modernist, gesturing at crucial points to the postmodern. As such, this experimental body of work—born in the trauma of world war, composed by a writer with acutely ambivalent national ties—constitutes a vital case study for current theorizing of late modernism.