Ford Madox Research Articles

Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

Reviewed by: Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell Dennis Kersten (bio) Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography Jerome Boyd Maunsell Oxford UP, 2018, 304 pp. ISBN 978-0198789369, $28.95 hardcover. In Cynthia Ozick's short story "Dictation" (2008), the female secretaries of Joseph Conrad and Henry James concoct a plan to write themselves into literary history by secretly inserting passages from Conrad in James's stories and vice versa. This never actually happened (although we can never be entirely sure), but early twentieth-century authors did appear in each other's writing, both fictional and nonfictional. As Jerome Boyd Maunsell shows in his new study about the interconnectedness of the lives and life stories of a group of Modernist novelists, these authors reinvigorated the genre of autobiography, often by employing the narratological techniques they had experimented with in their innovative fiction. Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography takes as its main subject the life writing of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Edith Wharton, H. G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis with the aim of "revealing interactions" between them (5). Its seven chapters function as "platforms" from which to view these authors' lives, so the book doubles as (group) biography. Each chapter first discusses the writing process of an author's autobiography or memoir, including his or her views on life writing in general. Then, and this is where the emphasis in each chapter lies, there is a close reading of primary texts with a focus on their story-shaping and/or fictionalizing strategies. Lastly, the chapter pays attention to the reception and afterlives of these texts. Running through the book, and especially in the early pages, is a sense of regret at not being able to get to the "truth," which explains the special interest in how some of the authors' autobiographies excel at "evasion." The opening paragraphs set the tone: they focus on the artificiality of self-portraiture, which offers only "achingly close simulacra" of truth (2; my emphasis). Boyd Maunsell seems to be especially on his guard with his novelist subjects. Surely, these writers will be even more adept at evasion and fictionalization in their autobiographies than others. Their "very métier consists in making things up," he writes in his introduction (3). Portraits from Life is a meticulously researched and thoroughly sourced book, presenting vivid portraits of its main (life) writing subjects in an accessible and engaging style. Despite their level of detail, its chapters are admirably concise and on-topic; they will undoubtedly entice many readers to seek out the largely forgotten autobiographical works by Conrad et al. (and possibly even reevaluate their more strongly canonized fictional oeuvres). The book certainly succeeds in its aim to contextualize the novelists' life writing, and it shows how a study of the creation of their autobiographies and memoirs provides insight into both their private and professional lives. There is a point to be made for the idea that the scrutiny of an author's struggles with his or her autobiography will be most insightful biographically. And it is true, or at least convincingly argued by Boyd Maunsell, that the way [End Page 908] novelists view and write about autobiography is indicative of their poetics, and thus produces a glimpse into their authorship. Indeed, it makes sense to read, for example, Virginia Woolf's essays about the art of biography in conjunction with her reflections on realism and the representation of reality in fiction elsewhere. In fact, in a book about Modernist authors and their fascination with autobiography, it is rather puzzling to find Woolf relegated to the epilogue, even if it initially reads like a discarded "proper" chapter on her autobiographical practice. This choice raises the question of why exactly Portraits from Life focuses on Conrad, James, Ford, Wharton, Wells, Stein, and Lewis. Were they chosen as exemplary life writers, or was their status as canonical authors of fiction the first criterion of selection? In other words, are these the most interesting autobiographers in the 1900–1945 period, or are they the most interesting among the authors whose fiction has been most heavily consecrated since? With Stein, yes...

Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness by Dale Barleben

Reviewed by: Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness by Dale Barleben Jonathan Goldman (bio) STAGING THE TRIALS OF MODERNISM: TESTIMONY AND THE BRITISH MODERN LITERARY CONSCIOUSNESS, by Dale Barleben. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. viii + 176 pp. $70.00 cloth, ebook. Legal matters have long inflected Joyce scholarship, as befits criticism of a subject whose career involved litigations large and small, and who in life and literature repeatedly flagged crime and plotted punishment. The Joyce/legal studies cross-pollination has borne recent fruit, as shown by two 2017 volumes: Joyce in Court by the late Justice Adrian Hardiman and the essay collection Joyce and the Law edited by Jonathan Goldman.1 That it is part of a wider revitalization of literature and law studies is testified to by twenty-first-century works that include Joyce in re-assessments of literary modernism via legal discourse, including the writings of Sean Latham, Celia Marshik, Ravit Reichman, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and Robert Spoo.2 Dale Barleben’s new book, Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness, should have been a tremendous contribution to this burgeoning bibliography. Academically credentialed as an expert in legal studies and literature, Barleben seeks to link the two fields by “propound[ing] a limited theory of the poetics of law and literature that brings together British modern thinking and . . . cultural and critical legal studies” (7). Buttressed by a detailed framework of cultural theory of law, the book offers a confident argument: Modernist writers’ preoccupation with interior mental states [is] . . . analogous to the development of jurisprudence not just at the same time, but decades later. Reading the trials of the British moderns traces the evolution of legal thought and uncovers the ways the moderns helped influence how we understand interior mental states. (4) That is, Barleben’s project is to read modernist British (or British-ish) writers’ encounters with the law and attention to trials as shaping legal discourse, with particular interest in the developing ideas of mens rea—the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing—and actus reus—illegal actions–that suggest the legal subject’s culpability. He uses these readings to posit “[m]odernism’s styles . . . [as] closely connected to the discursive shift in thinking about the internal workings of the mind and identity politics” (21). Barleben astutely deploys the law as an aperture through which to view modernism’s mercurial narrative technique, perhaps its defining gimmick, and the link [End Page 457] between narration and modern interiority. Laudable intentions and compelling claims, these. Unfortunately, the argument’s credibility is crippled by an astonishing omission. Barleben includes chapters about Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Joyce. He thus seems almost completely to forget that modernist literature comprises women authors—as do, by implication, his peer-readers and his editor, named in the acknowledgments as Daniel Quinlan. Barleben dedicates several pages to a quick look at Radclyffe Hall; otherwise, his conclusions regarding British modernism, though generally phrased as some variation of “interpretation of the British moderns” (13) are drawn only from men and thus impossible to take as authoritative. Barleben makes frequent use of women critics, especially Shoshana Felman, Linda Hutcheon, and Judith Butler, but this does not remedy the omission of women modernist authors. Staging the Trials of Modernism starts with a reading of late-nineteenth-century British law as questioning the interior identity of the legal subject, specifically treating the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 as a prelude to its most famous victim and Barleben’s first male modernist, Wilde. Chapters 2 and 3, the heart of the matter, present an implied teleological sequence of case studies, demonstrating that each male author’s experiences with the law guided his literary production. Of Wilde’s three trials, conviction, and imprisonment, Barleben writes, “The law’s invasion of . . . the interiority of the civil subject . . . shook Wilde’s belief in the justice system” (62). He reads the essay qua letter-from-camp De Profundis as a response to this violation, positing Wilde’s exploration and denial of testimony as a crucial text for modernist interior narratives.3 Segueing to Conrad, Barleben posits the nautical assessors...

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Buckmaster John Plotz. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. $35.00. ISBN 9781400887850 In this enjoyable and expansive study John Plotz traces the artistic heritage of "semi-detachedness," a condition he characterizes as the "dual experience" (2) of inhabiting both the world of an artwork and the world in which the artwork exists. In his introduction, he offers two illustrative motifs: first, the moment in The Mill on the Floss when the narrator interrupts our observation of Maggie Tulliver to complain about their numb arms leaning on both Dolcote bridge (in the story) and the arms of a chair (from where they narrate the story). Second, we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between [End Page 179] that world and our immediate surroundings. Plotz's primary focus is the novel, and how novelists use the state of semi-detachedness "to make sense of how consciousness, in life as in fiction, can be located in more than one place simultaneously" (13). Drawing on Franco Moretti's description of the "episodic" nature of fiction and Catherine Gallagher's notion of novels as "believable stories that do not solicit belief," Plotz feels that novels not only encourage escapism and "a release into the pleasures of an invented world," but also solicit from their readers "experiential attentiveness to the way the world is" (12). In chapter 1, Plotz reappraises the disregarded form of the mid-Victorian short story as one which "represents and reflects on readerly semi-detachment" (20). He traces short fiction through early experiments in the late Romantic period (such as those of James Hogg and John Galt) and demonstrates how such works were particularly amenable to articulating an experience of semi-detachedness, concerned as they are with "polydoxy" and "shifting frames of believability" (24). Dickens's early sketches build on this "inbetweenness," and counterpoise "detached empirical knowledge of city life" with "the shadowy spaces of individual feeling" (35): for example "Our Next-Door Neighbour" (1836) "toggl[es] between scientific and sentimental forms of knowledge" (36) in a narrative that develops from a comic taxonomy of door knockers and their owners through a world where such facile classifications are exposed as naïve, to end with a narrative of untimely bereavement. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). Thus after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Oliver Twist contains stories which initially appear to describe somewhere else, but ultimately "appertain" to the characters of the novel. Monks's narrative of Oliver's genealogy begins as the tale of an unnamed child in a remote place and time, but by the end, his auditor Rose has identified herself as one of its protagonists and Monks's place in the main narrative has been explained. However, Nicholas Nickleby contains both forms of interpolated tale, and one wonders how it might fit Plotz's theory–do they work as unrelated experiences, complement each other, or work against each other? And does the reader's awareness of the difference precipitate a different experience? Post Oliver, tales of family lineage become a popular variant of the pseudo interpolated tale for Dickens; Tulkinghorn relates to Lady Dedlock a thinly-veiled version of her own life story, and Pip becomes the audience for several similar familial narratives. Moreover, Pip himself uses such framing stories [End Page 180] to make (erroneous) sense of the events that shape his life, constructing fantasies around Miss Havisham's plans for him. Dickens reappears in Plotz's first "visual interlude," courtesy of his impassioned polemic against Millais's visual realism, which Plotz calls "a revealing moment" (75) and a...

Late Victorian Novels, Bad Dialogue, and Talk

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment that endure into the present. Through examining two late Victorian novels specifically panned for their attempts to include talk's embodied situatedness into dialogue—George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901)—this essay motivates a prior literary historical moment (before dialogue's definitive separation from talk) to consider a continuing verbal bias in our own critical and creative practices. This essay speculates that an embarrassment about embodied procedures continues to underlie our sense of dialogue as a less sophisticated narratological category, and that "best practices" in creative writing problematically erase the body when mandating that dialogue must show interiority or further novelistic action. Ultimately, unlike "orality," talk compels a confrontation with dialogue that brings attention to historical and present ways in which the notion of speech is inseparable from the power dynamics of embodied relation.

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jil Larson Plotz, John. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. US$35.00. Semi-Detached is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is how it taps into our current concern with technology’s fracturing of attention only to direct our thoughts to historical antecedents, encouraging us to wonder, “when have we not been semi-detached?” (17). The book also promotes not only acceptance of simultaneous absorption and detachment, but a complex, appreciative understanding of this state of consciousness, especially given its pertinence to aesthetic experience. In the book’s introduction, John Plotz, professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University, clarifies his central concept by invoking several examples. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, for instance, the narrator emphasizes being at once in the [End Page 620] fictional world and external to it, remarking on his/her arms getting numb from resting on the bridge outside the mill, but quickly revising that image to elbows pressed against the arms of the chair he/she is sitting in, caught in reverie. In an essay on Impressionism, Ford Madox Ford likens this doubled awareness to reflection in a glass that is so bright he can see a landscape through it while also seeing the reflected face of a person standing behind him. Ford found this window glass an apt metaphor for life: “we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (qtd. in Plotz 3). The reflection in the glass can function as a metaphor for the fictional world we see looking forward with an overlay of the real-world personal experiences we see behind us. This is the concept Plotz defines and redefines with playfulness and intellectual zest through nine wide-ranging chapters focusing on novelists, painters, and filmmakers between 1815 and 1930. Plotz is as interested in the artist’s awareness of this phenomenon as he is in the state of doubled consciousness itself. The book does more, then, than note moments of being semi-detached: it traces the artists’ reflections on the experience and their ways of prompting an audience’s reflection, too. George Eliot does so through the momentary disorientation of her narrator in The Mill on the Floss but also by confronting readers with how partial our attention to others is even in the most powerful moments of connection, as in Dorothea’s hard-won empathy for Rosamond in Middlemarch. Readers of novels by Dickens, Eliot, and James are offered vantage points on characters’ consciousness that prompt our own reflection on unreliable memory, lapses in attention, and variable meaning. Plotz challenges Lukacs’s distinction between nineteenth-century realism with its strong social context and modernism with its subjectivist narrative experiments, arguing that Victorian novelists are doing something in between, working within a narrative form that fits neither of Lukacs’s categories. In these novels, the world is neither “event” nor “experience,” but a tangle of both. Plotz draws on Catherine Gallagher’s work to emphasize “fictionality’s cognitive complexity” and how consciousness of experience, past and present, gives shape to episodes or events in the lives of characters and readers alike. One of the early chapters in the book explores the aesthetics of virtual experience through an illuminating discussion of John Stuart Mill’s ideas about reason, imagination, and “conceiv[ing] of other minds in various imperfect ways” (49). The prelude to this chapter, with its complex discussion of the aesthetic theory of Kant, Coleridge, Schiller, and Lamb, brilliantly paves the way for Mill’s ideas about sociability and reading. If imagination is stimulated by what is absent, in Kant’s formulation, then the semi-detached for Mill involved the “mediating intervention of the written word” (55). Reading plays a valuable role in developing moral character and supplementing direct sociability. Plotz humorously illustrates what he means with the example of “excusing oneself from a dinner with Bentham to go upstairs and read some Bentham” (56). For Mill, there was greater liberty in reading than in social interaction because society’s coercive...

Classical in/stabilities: Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and the Great War

Widely felt as a chasm in history, the First World War raised in an acute form profound questions concerning the relationship of the post-War present to the past. In the cultural renegotiation that ensued, the place not only of the classical past but of Classics itself as an element of that culture came under scrutiny. If, in the words of H.D., ‘the old order was dead’, and heroic models had failed, what value could still attach to Classics? Confronting this question, modernist writers in Britain and elsewhere proposed a variety of answers. In this article, I examine how Classics is represented and exploited in works by two major modernist authors which look back at and seek to articulate a response to the War: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–8). In both cases, I argue, Classics is at the same time associated with a world of outdated structures, values, and beliefs, and employed as an instrument of the cultural critique which enables that judgement. Thus renewed, and offering itself in these texts to constructive, forward-looking appropriations, Classics demonstrates an adaptive stability that to some in November 1918 might have seemed pure illusion.

May Sinclair’s Literary Criticism: A Commitment to Modernity

Although May Sinclair’s work has tended to be relegated to the periphery of modernism, Sinclair entertained close relationships with many major modernist figures such as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West. A prolific novelist, Sinclair also wrote extensively on ways in which literature could participate in the modern movement, from the Bronte sisters to the Imagist poets, and is perhaps best known for first applying William James’s metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” to literary technique in her analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s first three instalments of Pilgrimage. Additionally, Sinclair’s intensely personal and dynamic critical style is itself a mindful exercise in a more innovative approach to criticism that proves akin to the modernist works that she tackles. Lastly, Sinclair’s criticism of her fellow modernist writers gives us a better insight into the innovation present in Sinclair’s own literary works, and into her career’s trajectory as it moved away from traditional realism to psychological realism. Examining Sinclair’s critical work thus allows us to establish the specificity of her perspective on modernist practices of writing and to re-examine the canons of modernism against the grain of what came to be the accepted definition of avant-garde writing.

The Trauma of Betrayal in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier

Travma teorisini kullanarak edebi metinleri incelemek, bir roman karakterinin travmanin ortaya koyulmasindan iyilesmesine kadar olan farkli sureclerinden gecisini anlama olanagi saglar. Bu calisma Ford Madox Ford’un The Good Soldier (1915) adli romaninda John Dowell’i travmatize olmus bir karakter olarak ele alarak, romanin bir travma anlatisi oldugunu one sunar. Bu dogrultuda, kafasi karismis olan John Dowell’in aldatilma travmasini bastirma, amnezi, gecikmis etki ve afektif hissizlesme gibi travma belirtileriyle sergileyisini inceler. Sonrasinda ise Dowell’in travmatik aldatilma anilarini detayli bir anlatiya cevirerek onlarla basetmeye calismasina fakat travmasina hapsolusuna odaklanir. Boylece, bu calisma travma teorisinin psikoloji alaninda ortaya cikmasina ragmen, The Good Soldier gibi edebi metinleri farkli bir acidan degerlendirme imkani sundugunu onerir. Buna bagli olarak da John Dowell travmatik anilariyla bogusan bir karakter ornegi olarak karsimiza cikar.

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative by Kim Salmons

Reviewed by: Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative by Kim Salmons Seamus O’Malley (bio) Kim Salmons. Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 127 pp. ISBN: 9783319566221. Scholarly studies of food in British modernist texts can often salivate over their subjects. Readers have recreated the boeuf en daube at the center of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or Ford Madox Ford’s recipe for bouillabaisse in Provence. Even if Leopold Bloom’s breakfast of kidneys are not to our taste, we’re happy for him and appreciate the gusto he brings to his meal. Kim Salmons sets herself a less appetizing project with Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative. Instead of French haute cuisine, or local comfort foods, Conrad’s characters consume rotten tinned meat, hippo, and, most disturbingly, human flesh in “Falk.” Food in Conrad is rarely a signifier of culinary beauty or refined taste; rather, it serves as a vehicle for two of his main themes, humans’ elementary struggles against death, and the empires of Europe. Salmons, who has also written a companion piece, Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Production and Consumption (Palgrave 2017), looks to a few texts where she finds food most prominent: Almayer’s Folly, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and of course “Falk.” The colonial texts, Salmons argues, depict “the ideological environment of an era when food becomes a politically encrypted commodity within a colonial and capitalist market” (4). In Conrad’s works, the empire and its trade networks manifest in the tinned food that sailors eat, the food commodities being produced in the colonies for the British home market, and the changes to local colonial cuisine due to imperial pressures, as in Heart of Darkness, where the native, nourishing millet traditionally cultivated in West Africa has been “destroyed and replaced with maize which could be exported to Europe to provide a cheap means of cereal for the consumer” (33). [End Page 208] The study opens with an historical overview of the role that food played in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Victorian population explosion in cities meant England would forever after rely on foreign food imports (a fact with renewed and urgent relevance via Brexit). While a painting by Constable attempts to position dairy farming as central to English life, by 1900, 87% of butter was imported (22). Such demographic shifts put pressure on imperial trade networks to supply adequate food for the home market, raising concerns about food safety (much meat was imported from Upton Sinclair’s Chicago), and also the political implications of some commodities: in the early nineteenth century, sugarcane had already become a contested symbol of plantation slave labor (28). Such an historical context adds a layer of meaning to the ending of “An Outpost of Progress,” when the two protagonists die in a fight over sugar (29). Inevitably, colonial food networks altered English cuisine. Examples abound, but Salmons points out the prominent place of curry and rice in Jessie Conrad’s A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House (1923), which “represent[s] the swift appropriation of a colonial dish into the English diet in the same way that England appropriated people, customs and their land” (32). The first words of Conrad’s first novel are “Kaspar! Makan!”, a call to dinner to Almayer using the Malay word for “eat.” Salmons notes how this sentence begins a career-long process of using food to think through issues of empire, and her first two chapters on Conrad’s texts investigate how the attempts by European powers to distinguish themselves from their colonies inevitably falter: “The international representation of food in Conrad’s novels erodes the division between East and West” (12). For as Almayer is called to dinner, he dreams of meals he had back in Amsterdam, failing to notice the richness of the local cuisine. Nina, however, welcomes the meal of rice, an act that “confuses the distinction between what is savage and what is civilized” (54). By the novel’s conclusion, “Rice represents life, daily routine, wealth...

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s <em>In Search of England</em>

On Seeing and Being Seen: Beholding Class in Ford Madox Brown’s Work

The main focus of this essay will be the work of the mid nineteenth-century painter Ford Madox Brown, but we will start with a mid twentieth-century account of seeing and of feeling oneself to be seen. The story is well known: the episode in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XI (1964) in which the author recalled seeing a sardine can floating in the sea. ‘[I]n my early twenties or thereabouts …, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at the sea.’1 Thus it was that he set sail with a family of fishermen from a ‘small port’ in Brittany, embarking in the kind of ‘small boat’ that, he suggested, was common before the advent of industrial trawlers: ‘The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share.’2

Music, Noise, and the First World War in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War. In the trenches, Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn, as well as reflection on the utopian project of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art-Work). Ford's tetralogy has a significant contribution to make towards understanding how writers were navigating the impact of noise on music in the early twentieth century.

“I have been in an earthquake”: Epistemic upheaval in Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica

Published in 1929, Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics across the spectrum of the British and American literary scenes (among them Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Vita Sackville-West, Cyril Connelly, John Masefield, Hugh Walpole, and Arnold Bennett). At the same time, its readers were generally shocked by its portrait of child psychology (“the mind of the child”). While several critics applauded its realism, the record of its reception suggests that it induced — what one critic referred to as — “a sort of mental panic”. This article considers aspects of Hughes’ “new psychology”, which derived largely from the writings of Freud and the Freudians. Reading the novel and Freud in counterpoint, the argument concludes that — while Hughes constructs A High Wind in Jamaica as a rejoinder to the ideological logic of the imperial romance — in inscribing Freudian “primitivism” it reiterates colonial assumptions about “civilization”.

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain by Anne Helmreich

Reviewed by: Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain by Anne Helmreich Margaret J. Godbey (bio) Anne Helmreich, Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. x + 255, 70 illus., $89.00 cloth. Anne Helmreich's important new book posits that "art was profoundly shaped by radical changes in science and its discourses over the course of the long-nineteenth century" (2). Case studies of select photographers and painters recognized for pursuing new directions in representation reveal how scientific discovery changed the direction of British landscape art. A substantive introduction adeptly provides scholars and general readers alike with the necessary background and cultural context surrounding the often fierce debates that took place in the British art world. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Helmreich rethinks the evolution of British modernism by considering how "artists sought to reinvigorate their practice through lessons derived from science" (5). This approach challenges received histories of art and upends hierarchies of value that place science over art, or painting over photography. Since artist treatises, photographic studies, and scientific discoveries were often first published in the periodical press, Helmreich's extensive research integrates a wide range of sources. This impressive study draws on artists' speeches published in the Times and treatises from familiar periodicals devoted to British painting, including the Germ, Art Journal, and Contemporary Review. She also incorporates articles by painters such as John Brett in Nature and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as articles by photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot in the Literary Gazette and Athenaeum. Her research pays particular attention to the ways Victorian periodicals circulated discoveries in science and [End Page 430] photography, as well as their widespread attention to new developments in the world of art. One of the real pleasures of this work is the opportunity to follow Helmreich's connections between such varied publications as the Journal of the Camera Club, Magazine of Art, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and to trace how she situates each journal within the disciplines. Furthermore, an abundance of color reproductions and numerous examples of early photography are most welcome and exciting. Helmreich has produced a vibrant study that is of great interest to the entire nineteenth-century studies community. Chapter one, "Truth to Nature and the 'Innocent Eye,'" puts William Henry Fox Talbot's early work in photography in conversation with the artwork of Pre-Raphaelite mentor Ford Madox Brown to demonstrate how photographers and artists "aimed to define pictorial representation for the modern age" (23). Helmreich's overview of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood does not center on familiar protagonists or narratives. Instead, she brilliantly explores the intersections between photography, art, and science, specifically geology, to argue that the "relationship between painting and photography . . . was configured not by influence but by shared interests and intersecting discourses shaped by the rise of scientific knowledge" (38). Thus, the Pre-Raphaelite attention to realistic representations of nature and its emphasis on specific detail, as demonstrated in landscapes by John Brett, William Dyce, and William Holman Hunt, emerged not, as has been argued, because of the camera but as a reflection of larger cultural forces that valued close visual observation and inductive philosophy. Therefore, photography and painting, like science, participated in the process of "knowledge formation" (38). Close readings of paintings and photographs reveal artists' attention to perception and their desire to follow John Ruskin's advice to render with precision every aspect of nature. Ruskin, Helmreich writes, was "encourag[ing] the young artists he supported to participate in the increasingly visible and culturally significant practice of scientific observation" (45). Ultimately, painters and photographers determined that an unrelenting emphasis on truth to nature was confining and that images captured via mechanical and chemical processes or by paint and the human hand must be mediated by the unscientific and susceptible human eye. As a result, Helmreich concludes, photographers realized they could not escape the confines of the "picturesque" (70), and painters such as William Holman Hunt determined that realistic representation was not the sole purpose of art; rather, a realistic...

War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Modernism, and Psychology ed. by Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes

Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, eds. War and Mind: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Modernism, and Psychology. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2015.186 pp. 70,00 [pounds sterling]. In Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Ford's character, tells Colonel Levin, the thing is to be able to stick to integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets house tumbling over your head (167). Ending collection on this note, Gene M. Moore illustrates for us Ford that gave us who has fascinated each of essayists in this perceptive collection, which is admirably introduced by Ashley Chantier and Rob Hawkes, its editors. Here is list of essays: CHAPTERS OF WAR AND THE MIND: Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, Introduction (1-16). Max Saunders, 'Sex ferocity' and 'the sadic lusts of certain novelists': Sexuality, Sadomasochism, and Suppression in Parade's (17-34). Karolyn Steffens, Freud Madox Ford: Impressionism, Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory, and Ford's Wartime Writing (35-49). Eve Sorum, Empathy, Trauma, and Space of War in Parade's (50-62). Megan Marie Hammond, Fellow Feeling in Ford's Last Post: Modernist Empathy and Eighteenth-Century Man (63-76). Barbara Farmworth, The Self-Analysis of Tietjens (77-91). Alexandra Becquet, War and Mind; Composing Parade's (92-111). Sarah Kingston, The Work of Sleep: Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon (112-26). Charlotte Jones, Representing Shell Shock: A Return to Ford and Rebecca West (127-42). Leslie de Bont, 'I hate soldiering': Ford, May Sinclair, and War Heroism (142-58). Gene M. Moore, Peace of Mind in Parade's (159-70). Two things are unavoidable in writing about Great War. First, there are no individuals to Army's way of thinking. Discipline applies to everyone in uniform no matter what his distinctive character traits or his social connections. Consequently, as the military machine denies the soldier's subjectivity, that very soldier's heroism entails fighting against one's own (150). Second, it is individual soldier who records horrors he experiences in battle that change his way of thinking. Thus cannot rid himself of two excruciating experiences. First, 0 Nine Morgan is hit by shell-fragment and bleeds to death in Tietjens' arms. cannot shake this event from his mind: it haunts him throughout No More Parades. Second, German shell buries in trench mud from which he extricates himself with an exhausting effort that he must similarly employ to rescue Lance-Corporal Duckett, whose face reminds him of Valentine Wannop. This singular event of war thus momentarily returns to woman he loves. If army buries him in battle, Valentine raises him to life. Thus we are unavoidably plunged into considerations of Eros and Thanatos throughout Parade's End tetralogy. Karolyn Steffens shows how moments of death cannot be divorced from moments of love, like Duckett-Valentine moment. Even when O Nine Morgan is bleeding to death, Tietjens' thoughts go to Valentine too: what would she as pacifist make of this horror taking place in lap of man she loves? So Ford's impressionism doesn't end with unspeakable but is absorbed into unutterable: love stronger than death. Max Saunders shows another dimension in scenes of love and death by his acute analysis of sadomasochism in variety of characters in Some Do Not ... like Reverend Duchemin, his wife Edith Ethel, and Macmaster, but especially in Sylvia Tietjens. She embraces it totally in her on-and-off love-hate relationship with Christopher. She whips to death bulldog: a naked white beast ... Obese and silent.... Like Christopher (23). This is simply one prominent instance among others in Sanders' essay which thoroughly analyzes sexual madness, sadism, and assorted violence in Parade's End. …

Beasts in the Jungle: Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn

Beasts in the Jungle:Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn Daniel Hannah (bio) The "animal question"—the question of how to read and respond to the ontological, epistemological, and moral status of nonhuman animals—has become, as Sherryl Vint notes, the "pressing political question of our times."1 Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the screw to the writing of Henry James, finally asking us to take seriously the beastly quality of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903). This article seeks to situate such recent work in a broader account of James's investment in animality, one that can be traced through a range of his fiction and nonfiction writings, especially his major novels The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Golden Bowl (1904); in each instance, my argument traces suggestive correspondences between Henry James's animal imaginings and William James's theorizations of the encounter between human consciousness and nonhuman instinct, theorizations that engaged with contemporaneous philosophical and political debates about the status, the instrumental value, and the suffering of nonhuman animals. Where Joshua Schuster finds only "limited formalizations of the animal" in modernist literature, formalizations that tend to displace "[a]ctual animals" with "a certain kind of reductive caricature of modernist 'animality,'" James's fiction suggests an alternative path for the emergence of modernist prose as his writing self-consciously recoils from the risks of rhetorically emptying out the animal as a figure for human modernity.2 My argument begins, however, by querying some of the critical assumptions that have led to the recent focus on the tale of John Marcher and his beastly destiny; [End Page 371] we should pause before claiming James as, in Bateman's words, "queerly environmentalist."3 While James's writing is alert to the danger of objectification inherent in a language of animality, it also insistently troubles the kinds of ethical detachment that, at times, guides analytic approaches to thinking about the animal. James's fiction often turns on its ambiguous treatment of the imaginative overlap between a distancing that would recognize the ethical obligations posed by the animal in all its otherness and a detachment that allows for that animal other's violent erasure.4 While my primary focus in this article is on the narrative processes by which James worked through the "animal question" in fiction, it is worthwhile to note the peculiar flavor of the narratives that gathered around his relationships with animals during his lifetime. James's acquaintances were prone to make connections between the Master's late manner and his attentions, and inattention, to companion species. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) tells a delightful tale of a walk with James, John Galsworthy, and James's dachshund, Max in which the Master halts, "plant[s] his stick firmly in the ground," in "order to round off an immense sentence," only to discover at the sentence's end that Max had "passed between [their] six legs again and again, threading his leash behind him"—Heuffer declares "we must have resembled the Laocoon, but when Maximillian had finished the resemblance must have been overwhelming."5 Bay Emmett noted both her cousin Henry's propensity "to express his thoughts, unanswered" and his delightfully silly worship of his dog, "little Peter": "Cousin Henry seizes him & brushes him hard & then hugs & kisses him, talking to him all the time in a way that is so silly that I have to die laughing."6 Violet Hunt tells the story of James's animated talk while holding her niece's Persian kitten: "He quite forgot the poor beast, which was too polite and too squeezed between the upper and the nether millstone of the great man's hands to remind him of its existence, and I dared not rescue it until the sentence on which Mr James was engaged was brought to a close—inside of half an hour" (Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master, 123). Where Hunt feared James's forgetting of the very beast before him, E. S. Nadal recalls a scene in which James invoked his "dachshund bitch" as an active participant in their risqué conversation...

The Ordinary Celebrity and the Celebrated Ordinary in 1930s Modernist Memoirs

With an examination of a number of memoirs by and about modernist authors and artists published during the 1930s, this article raises questions about the complex relationship between the high-art subjects of these volumes and the popular forms of gossip and celebrity anecdote that make them marketable to a broad new audience for modernism. First revealing how literary life writing of the 1930s establishes its place in the historical developments of the genre, from “table talk” to autobiography to celebrity gossip, the article then argues that a key tension at the heart of memoirs by modernist writers is between the celebrated or elevated subject matter and the ordinary or everyday approaches of the modernist aesthetic. In some memoirs, particularly those authored by celebrity modernists themselves, including Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis, the high-art subject matter is framed by mundane matters and the daily lives of the exceptional artists, placing genius authors in the most generic situations. In other cases, as with work by Robert McAlmon and Malcolm Cowley, the celebrity figures with whom the memoir writers come into contact are made to look effectively ordinary, thereby deflating the celebrity value achieved through publicity and literary reputation based on the cultural value of the author. The combination of popular celebrity gossip and the modernist interest in daily life thus draws together the high and the low, the aesthetic and the popular, repackaging the modernist experience for a new audience.

A Conversation with Martin Stannard and Barbara Cooke

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. He read for his first degree in English at Warwick (1967-70), before taking an MA at Sussex University, and a DPhil at Oxford. Professor Stannard’s two-volume literary biography of Evelyn Waugh (1986, 1992), and his biography of Muriel Spark (2009) are essential reading for Waugh and Spark scholars, and are each studies in the value of historical contextualisation for appreciating the literary oeuvre of a writer. Stannard’s 1995 Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford’s modernist novel, The Good Soldier, similarly brings context to bear through his rigorous textual editing, annotation and critical apparatus. Stannard is currently the Principal Investigator for the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project, which is supported by a grant of £822,000 from the AHRC, and which will see Oxford University Press publish 43 scholarly edition volumes of Waugh – the first of which appears next year. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Waugh’s death.Dr Barbara Cooke also teaches at the School of English at the University of Leicester. She received a BA and MA from Warwick (dates), and a PhD in Creative and Critical writing from the University of East Anglia for her interdisciplinary thesis Oil Men: the Twinned Lives of Arnold Wilson and Morris Young. Dr. Cooke is Research Associate for the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, providing a vital link between the project's 23 editors, of which she is one, editing Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning (1964).