A Concise Companion to Modernism

This concise Companion offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain, focusing on the intellectual and cultural contexts, which shaped it.

• Offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain.
• Helps readers to grasp the intellectual and cultural contexts of literary Modernism.
• Organised around contemporary ideas such as Freudianism and eugenics rather than literary genres.
• Relates literary Modernism to the overarching issues of the period, such as feminism, imperialism and war.

Acknowledgments vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Chronology xi

Introduction 1
David Bradshaw

1 The Life Sciences: “Everybody nowadays talks about evolution” 6
Angelique Richardson

2 Eugenics: “They should certainly be killed” 34
David Bradshaw

3 Nietzscheanism: “The Superman and the all-too-human” 56
Michael Bell

4 Anthropology: “The latest form of evening entertainment” 75
Jeremy MacClancy

5 Bergsonism: “Time out of mind” 95
Mary Ann Gillies

6 Psychoanalysis in Britain: “The rituals of destruction” 116
Stephen Frosh

7 Language: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” 138
April McMahon

8 Technology: “Multiplied man” 158
Tim Armstrong

9 The Concept of the State 1880–1939: “The discredit of the State is a sign that it has done its work well” 179
Sarah Wilkinson

10 Physics: “A strange footprint” 200
Michael H. Whitworth

11 Modernist Publishing: “Nomads and mapmakers” 221
Peter D. McDonald

12 Reading: “‘Mind hungers’ common and uncommon” 243
Todd Avery and Patrick Brantlinger

Select Bibliography 262

Index 266

‘This is the most exciting and vibrant introduction to Anglo-American Modernism yet to appear. ... The Concise Companion to Modernism is bound to become the main textbook for all those who want to understand more deeply the culture of the first three decades of the last century.’ Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"[...] I would recommend this volume to any library with a readership who comes either out of interest, or as students of the period needing to understand the context in which ideas emerged, looking for a way into the text. [...]A select bibliography at the end of the book provides even more options for advanced research, completing a most useful guidebook to some interesting themes." Reference Review

"[McDonald] supplies everything any reader would need to understand the whole social and critical history of modernist publishing." James Joyce Quarterly

David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Among other volumes, he has edited Brave New World (1994), The Hidden Huxley (1994), Women in Love (1998), Mrs Dalloway (2000), Decline and Fall (2001), and The Good Soldier (2002). He has also published extensively on Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and various aspects of literature and politics in the 1930s. He is an Editor of the Review of English Studies and a Fellow of the English Association. This concise Companion offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain, focusing on the intellectual and cultural contexts which shaped it.

The book consists of twelve chapters written by leading scholars, each spotlighting ideas emanating from a particular field which helped to shape Modernism, including eugenics, primitivism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism. Each contributor deals with his or her topic in some depth, but also pays attention to the impact it had on overarching issues. At the same time, the contributors identify contemporary developments in other disciplines, especially art, architecture, music, film, and philosophy, which paralleled developments in poetry, fiction, and drama. Each chapter concludes with a brief guide to further reading.Through reading this Companion, students will gain an understanding of Modernism as a historical and cultural phenomenon, as well as a literary movement.