Wasteland Modernism

This book proposes a renewed myth-critical approach to the so-called ‘wasteland modernism’ of the 1920s to reassess certain key texts of the American modernist canon from a critical prism that offers new perspectives of analysis and interpretation. Myth-criticism and, more specifically, the critical survey of myth as an aesthetic and ideological strategy fundamental for the comprehension of modernist literature, leads to an engaging discussion about the disenchantment of myth in modernist literary texts. This process of mythical disenchantment, inextricable from the cultural and historical circumstances that define the modernist zeitgeist, offers a possibility for revising from a contemporary standpoint a set of classic texts that are crucial to our understanding of the modern literary tradition in the United States. This study carries out an exhaustive and updated myth-critical examination of works by T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Djuna Barnes to broaden the scope of familiar themes and archetypes, enclosing the textual analysis of these works in a wider exploration about the purpose and functioning of myth in literature, particularly in times of crisis and transformation.

This book proposes a renewed myth-critical approach to the so-called ‘wasteland modernism’ of the 1920s to reassess certain key texts of the American modernist canon from a critical prism that offers new perspectives of analysis and interpretation. Myth-criticism and, more specifically, the critical survey of myth as an aesthetic and ideological strategy fundamental for the comprehension of modernist literature, leads to an engaging discussion about the disenchantment of myth in modernist literary texts. This process of mythical disenchantment, inextricable from the cultural and historical circumstances that define the modernist zeitgeist, offers a possibility for revising from a contemporary standpoint a set of classic texts that are crucial to our understanding of the modern literary tradition in the United States. This study carries out an exhaustive and updated myth-critical examination of works by T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Djuna Barnes to broaden the scope of familiar themes and archetypes, enclosing the textual analysis of these works in a wider exploration about the purpose and functioning of myth in literature, particularly in times of crisis and transformation.

Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry

Current debates about birth control can be surprisingly volatile, especially given the near-universal use of contraception among American and British women. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control offers a new perspective on these debates by demonstrating that the political positions surrounding birth control have roots in literary concerns, specifically those of modernist writers. Whereas most scholarship treats modernism and birth control activism as parallel, but ultimately separate, movements, Conceived in Modernism shows that they were deeply intertwined. This book argues not only that literary concerns exerted a lasting influence on the way activists framed the emerging politics of contraception, but that birth control activism helped shape some of modernism's most innovative concepts. By revealing the presence of literary aesthetics in the discourse surrounding birth control, Conceived in Modernism helps us see this discourse as a variable facet rather than a permanent bulwark of reproductive rights debates.

This Companion offers fresh critical perspectives on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land that will be invaluable to scholars, students, and general readers.

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem explores how cultural responses to the trauma of the First World War found expression in the form of the modernist long poem. Beginning with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Oliver Tearle reads that most famous example of the genre in comparison with lesser known long poems, such as Hope Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem, Richard Aldington's A Fool I' the Forest and Nancy Cunard's Parallax. As well as presenting a new history of this neglected genre, the book examines the ways in which the modernist long poem represented the seminal literary form for grappling with the crises of European modernity in the wake of World War I.

In Modernism and Eugenics, first published in 2001, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorization of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an interesting study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.