XVModern Literature

Abstract

This chapter has 8 sections 1. General. 2 Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945 Fiction; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. British Poetry pre-1950; 7. British Poetry post-1950; 8. Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Matthew Levay; 2(a) is by Andrew Radford; Section 2(b) is by Michael Shallcross; Section 2(c) is by Chrissie Van Mierlo; Section 2(d) is by Luke Ferretter; Section 1(e) is by Clara Jones; Section 3(a) is by Hannah Tweed; Section 3(b) is by Nick Bentley; Section 4 is by Rebecca D'Monte; Section 5 is by Graham Saunders; Section 6(a) is by Neil Miles Section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; Section 7 is by Matthew Sperling; Section 8 is by Adam Hanna. In 2013 and 2014 modernist studies continued to grapple with questions of periodicity, literary form, media and mass culture, materiality, and the economics of cultural production—in short, some of most vibrant subjects of the past decade. And yet, despite their familiarity, these questions were posed in remarkably original ways, affirming the health of the field overall and suggestive of multiple avenues for future research. Such vitality largely arises from a palpable restlessness in contemporary modernist criticism, animated by a desire to push against established notions of what modernism was (or is), as well as an increasing willingness to acknowledge and explore the tensions inherent within a literary period defined by multiplicity. Inspired by the expansiveness of the new modernist studies—not only its receptivity to the idea of plural modernisms, but also its interest in the modes of production, institutional patrons, national literary cultures, and individual readers that shaped the terms by which a concept like ‘modernism’ was codified—while remaining appropriately wary of modernism’s potential ballooning into something that no longer signifies, scholars today have initiated a thoughtful and thought-provoking conversation regarding these tensions. On the conference circuit, such oppositions took centre stage: the Modernist Studies Association hosted meetings dedicated to ‘Everydayness and the Event’ in Sussex during 2013 and ‘Confluence and Division’ in Pittsburgh during 2014, underlining the organization’s engagement with the paradoxes at the heart of modernist literature and culture. Other associations, meanwhile, shirked modernist binaries in favour of larger, messier critical concepts: the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies hosted its 2014 conference in Helsinki on the theme of ‘Utopia’, arguably one of the most fraught and divisive notions to carry with it the promise of unity, while the second biannual conference of the Australian Modernist Studies Network, held in Sydney in 2014, explored the well-established but still vital concept of ‘Transnational Modernisms’, a phrase in which the precise definition of the adjective is only slightly more stable than that of its plural noun. Thus, the major conferences in modernist studies continued to trouble easy accounts of modernism and modernity by thinking through the contradictions and capaciousness that give those concepts their substance.