bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introductory issues
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: May 2021

Poetry & Money begins with a moment in a creative writing seminar when the question of value in a piece of writing, and in the creative and critical activities being undertaken, is suddenly challenged by being related to a monetary cost. The questions of value and trust raised, which will be recurrent throughout, are identified with reference to Wallace Stevens’s ‘Imagination as Value’ and Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness. They are then adumbrated by considering a reference to a payment for magazine publication in a poem by W. S. Graham. Economic pressures in poetry publishing are further illustrated by looking at the publication of a book of poems translated from Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo in the 1970s. Ideas concerning poetry’s role and social value, as expressed in two poems by Roy Fisher written a few years earlier, are then explored.
Straitened circumstances
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: May 2021

The most immediate reason why poets, like anyone else, may be interested in money certainly includes their being short of it. This chapter brings together poems that are about problems related first to not having money, and needing to request support from more powerful and wealthy persons, then to means-testing when confronted by someone begging, and how such encounters relate to a poet’s own need for financial support, to problems with charitable giving and distance, leading to a discussion of two poems questioning the value of saving and bequeathing nothing but money. The chapter includes discussions of money-related poems or passages from longer works by Chaucer, Jonson, Johnson, Wordsworth, Graves, Loy, Bishop, Brooks, and Larkin.
Indebtedness and redemption
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: May 2021

This chapter initiates the series of central studies which address issues related to some four centuries of poetry and money. It considers the metaphorical use of monetary and financial ideas in seventeenth-century secular and sacred poetry with a coda about an eighteenth-century elegy, focusing its discussion upon Christ’s driving the moneychangers from the Temple. Financial metaphors are identified and interpreted in Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’, in various of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in Donne’s ‘Love’s Usury’, and poems from Herbert’s The Temple. Taking a hint from Donne’s comment on how the last line of a poem ‘mints’ the verse like a hammer blow, it compares and contrasts the forms of ending that these poems achieve. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role played by allusion to Parable of the Talents in ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’.
Circulatory checks and balances
Authors: Robinson Peter
Published: May 2021

The proposal ramified in the previous chapter, namely that the forms of poems can act upon the conditions that they contain, is further explored and exemplified with particular reference to the speed of rhythmic and metrical movement. This is in turn shown to be inversely related to the dictional burden of a poem’s words. The chapter begins by returning to the example of Ezra Pound, and a recent reading of the late Thrones Cantos, a reading which canvases but finally rejects rejects analogies between the numbers of accountancy and those of its poetic metrics. Works by J. H. Prynne, Adrian Stokes, and Geoffrey Hill are then employed to promulgate a conception of poetic rhythm figuring the poet’s technique with regard to language as analogous to a central banker’s means for stabilizing the value of a currency.
On Being Serious
Authors: Wootten William
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyzes the meaning of the phrase ‘new seriousness’ which has been used to characterize The New Poetry. Although the phrase may sound urgent and understandable at first reading, it is situated within a complex web of debts and implications. In the 1960s, the increased emphasis on one sort of seriousness, that of personal sincerity, became important at a time when seriousness as sanctioned by custom, tradition, social norm, oath and obligation became less binding. Marriage, for instance, may have been an exemplary form of an old seriousness, but it was being newly questioned in the lives of the poets. A. Alvarez defines seriousness as ‘the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either conventional response or choking incoherence’.
Sylvia Plath
Authors: Wootten William
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyzes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It notes her tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time — a tendency evident in her contemporaries but is particularly pronounced in Plath. Moreover, this tendency applies even to such a seemingly abstract concept as poetic impersonality, a concept which can easily be depicted in terms of Laingian depersonalisation. With the simplifying wrong-way telescope of hindsight, Plath could be said to have moved from a paradigm of poetic impersonality to a personalised aesthetic of confessionalism or extremism. But in fact many of the intriguing and valuable tensions in her later work proceed from how she is attempting to make use of the material of the latter while still evincing considerable attachment both to the paradigm of the former and to the fashion for the dramatic soliloquy and dramatic monologue, a mode to which she kept returning, even in the last poems of 1963.
‘A Study of Suicide’
Authors: Wootten William
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents a reading of A. Alvarez's The Savage God. The book is not chiefly a literary critical study, but is, in the words of its subtitle, ‘A Study of Suicide’. Moreover, while it contains considerable scholarship upon the subject of suicide, it is by no means an impersonal book. The portrait of Plath and her death at its beginning and the corresponding portrait of Alvarez and his own suicide attempt at its end would, with grim inappropriateness, these days be termed ‘life writing’. As Alvarez switches genres, biography becomes central and the poetry peripheral; Plath's significance to the book is as a case study of a suicide as much as a poet. The Savage God is then the decisive step towards the current position, where Plath criticism is overwhelmingly biographical criticism.
Introduction to the English Edition
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter mentions Michal Oron's account of Samuel Falk, the Ba'al Shem of London, which complicates the conventional characterization of eighteenth-century Britain as the cradle of toleration, reason, liberty, science, and enlightenment. It discusses rational religion and Enlightenment science that discredited magic, superstition, prophecy, and wonders, along with ghosts, spirits, demons, and the like. It also describes well-born Christians and wealthy Jews who turned to Falk to answer questions and solve problems that resisted conventional approaches. The chapter talks about Falk as a charismatic religious figure, a ba'al shem, whose authority flowed from his virtuosity in employing divine names for magical ends rather than expounding Jewish law. It highlights London as the westernmost outpost of European Jewry in the eighteenth century.
Falk’s Activities According to the Diary of Zevi Hirsch
Authors: Oron Michal
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Zevi Hirsch, the son of Isaac Eisik Segal of Kalisz, a shtadlan and a native of Poland who emigrated to London and became Samuel Falk's factotum for about four years. It looks at the diary that Hirsch kept, which recorded his daily life in Falk's household. It was written in faulty Hebrew interspersed with Yiddish and English words, and occasionally with terms that seem to derive from French and German. It also mentions how Hirsch referred to Falk as hehakham, meaning 'the Sage', and 'Admo', an acronym that means 'my master and teacher'. The chapter recounts Falk's life in London from 1747 to 1751, which was marked by poverty and deprivation as Hirsch wrote in his diary that he repeatedly visited pawnbrokers to pawn various household effects and clothes. It points out how Hirsch became an eyewitness to the curses that Falk rained on his wife for her inferior cooking.
The Diary of Samuel Falk
Authors: Oron Michal
Published: May 2021

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Reconstructing Sepharad in Istanbul and Salonica 1492–1600
Authors: Gerber Jane S.
Published: May 2021

The chapter highlights the beginning of the reconstruction of Sephardi intellectual and communal life soon after the Expulsion. It gives importance in the two largest cities in the Ottoman empire, Istanbul and Salonica, that sheltered the largest concentrations of Sephardim in the sixteenth century and provided conditions for the emergence of a new transnational people. Salonica's impact on Sephardi reconstruction was primarily cultural and economic, while Istanbul's impact was political and demographic. The chapter discusses the process of constructing a new Sephardi with the 1942 cataclysm serving as a watershed. It also analyses the majority of the Iberian refugees settled in the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century and the small number of Iberian refugees, primarily from among the Conversos of Portugal, who found refuge in the West. Salonica, as the closest Ottoman port to Europe, received the first groups of seaborne refugees in the summer of 1492. It continued to be a favourite destination for Sephardim for approximately a century. Conversely, the Iberian immigrants to Istanbul joined a long-established and diverse Romaniote population, Karaites, and Jews from many corners of Anatolia, the Balkans, and Europe. Ultimately, in both Ottoman cities, the Jewish exiles regrouped and formed new communal associations.
Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism: Sefer Ḥasidim I and the Influence of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates the the differences between Sefer Ḥasidim I (sections 1–152) and Sefer Ḥasidim. No less striking than the absence of retson ha-Borè (the Will of the Creator), asceticism, and other defining themes of the Pietist movement is the parallel absence in SH I of exempla, which abound in the other sections of Sefer Ḥasidim. Over the course of time, different editors appended SH I to various collections of material of Sefer Ḥasidim, always taking care that SH I opened the collection, ensuring that the reader would first encounter not the startling tenets of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz but rather page after page of conventional pietistic discourse on love of God, fear of God, humility, and so on. It is remarkable to what extent SH I and those passages in Sefer Ḥasidim that were in the spirit of SH I shaped the historical image of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. Study of the influence of Sefer Ḥasidim on the subsequent literature of Ashkenaz, whether halakhic or ethical, shows that not only were the new ritual world of retson ha-Borè or the book's radical social teachings wholly without influence, but also that they went literally unnoted.
Pietists and Kibbitzers
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a reply to the criticism on the essay presented in the previous chapter. It focuses on Edward Fram's article, 'German Pietism and Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Polish Rabbinic Culture'. Fram's article shows that German Pietism as a radical religious and social movement was no more influential in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had been in medieval western Europe. In retrospect, it appears that it could hardly have been otherwise. The standard Sefer Ḥasidim, first published, as noted by Fram, in Bologna (1538) and quickly republished in Basel (1580) and Kraków (1581), is a compound work, opening with the conventional pietism of the first 152 sections and continuing with the radical one of the German Pietists. For every passage of radical pietism there is a counter-passage of the conventional sort, the result being that no one could infer from the work any coherent religious position. And, as Fram points out, Polish ethicists and thinkers were singularly uninclined to the distinctive doctrines of German Pietism and never reproduced those passages that expressed the idiosyncratic agenda of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. His conclusions simply extend those of the author about the Middle Ages to eastern Europe in the early modern period.
Methodological Issues
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

WHILE I have dealt with Sefer Ḥasidim from time to time, the leading scholar of German Pietism of this generation has unquestionably been Ivan Marcus. His work Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany made a considerable impression when it appeared in 1981. It was and still is widely cited; indeed, one might say without exaggeration that it has, over the years, achieved semi-canonical status....
On Reading Sefer Ḥasidim
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter addresses Ivan Marcus's Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (1981). It looks at his manner of reading and interpreting Sefer Ḥasidim. Marcus insists on the need of often taking such terms in Sefer Ḥasidim as resha'im (wicked people), peritsim (immoral people, einam mehugganim (dishonest people or people who act improperly/immorally), and the like quite literally, and to see in them a reflection of a wayward, indeed criminal, segment of the Ashkenazic community. The Pietists saw the world the way sects do, as being divided into two groups — we and all others. They viewed all non Pietists as being one and alike, whether they were religious or not, and in a limited sense not differing from the Gentiles. This allows all texts in which resha'im, peritsim, and the like are mentioned, whether they refer to actual murderers and wastrels or to scholars and religious poets who opposed the Pietists, to be cited interchangeably as evidence of the exclusivity of the Pietists. It is with this equation and its consequences that one may take issue. The chapter then offers some ground rules that should be employed in drawing inferences from Sefer Ḥasidim.
The Literary Remains of the Gedol ha-Mefarshim
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents an extension of the author's characterization of Ravad of Posquières. It begins by studying the literary remains of the gedol hamefarshim. Passing over the talmudic commentaries, which was discussed in the previous chapter, the chapter examines the few works of Ravad that have come down to us and probes whether they have a coherent, unified text or whether every text of Ravad's oeuvre is 'open' and in flux to this day. Is there nothing stable in his literary legacy? The chapter then looks at the bitter rivalry that developed between Ravad and R. Zeraḥyah ha-Levi of Lunel, the author of the Sefer ha-Ma'or, a rivalry that consumed and embittered much of Ravad's life.
Jewish and Roman Law: A Study in Interaction
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the laws regulating usury (ribbit). In the course of studying ribbit, more specifically, the problem of personal surety in usury contracts, certain peculiar developments in Provençal halakhic thought came to the author's attention which were not explainable by indigenous forces. The geographical distribution of the discussion seemed oddly disproportionate, the fictions too blatant, the types of problem that were raised seemed inappropriate for the period, and the terminology was occasionally alien. The author was compelled to look outside Jewish law for possible stimuli. Placing the Jewish developments within the context of twelfth-century Provençal law shed light on a number of seemingly inexplicable points. The Jewish literature, on the other hand, provided new information about the Gentile law of the time and yielded fresh corroboration for theories of the penetration of Roman law in Provence. However, at the same time this material seemed to point to an earlier date for certain legal developments than is generally accepted. It is these findings that the author wishes to bring to the attention of the scholars of Provençal law.
The Neutral Dead and the Pietist Dead
Authors: Weissman Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the role of the neutral dead in Sefer ḥasidim and shows how the concern for clothing the dead, in its various stages of existence, assumed specifically medieval forms. It also looks at the Pietist practice of burial in a talit with tsitsit, which highlights the singularity of the Pietists' unusually strong attachment to burial in such a garment and reveals an affinity with an ancient Germanic belief and custom regarding the afterlife. The belief that physical objects possessed the power to propel their bearers to Paradise was present in Ashkenazi sources both within and outside the Pietist circle. In this light, various Ashkenazi halakhists viewed specific garments of the dead, such as the tsitsit, as aids in the passage of the soul to the hereafter. These garments were not solely intended, as the talmudic rabbis would profess, for the time of the resurrection. The focus on the period immediately after death, rather than a concern with the World to Come, was a hallmark of the medieval period and one which separated yet again the world of the Pietists from the world of the rabbis of the Talmud.
Writing the Male Rape Survivor
Authors: Field Robin E.
Published: May 2021

The rise of the rape novel featuring female victims inspired the telling of more stories about male rape victims. Just as the early stories about the sexual assault of women portrayed rape as nonexistent, inconsequential, or the fault of the women and girls themselves, the stories of male rape often have belittled the victims and position the male rape victim as an object of derision, scorn, and even amusement. As the revelations of several high-profile sexual abuse cases early in the twenty-first century brought to light the plight of young boys being assaulted by trusted older men, male victims are now being treated with the concern and sympathy that women experienced in the 1970s. The political activism inherent in the rape novel—educating its readers, offering community to the victims, and encouraging social activism and change to societal attitudes—will continue as the stories of male rape survivors are told in greater numbers.
Conclusion
Authors: Mann Joseph Arthur
Published: May 2021

The conclusion provides a broad retrospective on the arguments presented and defended throughout the book. In addition, it also offers avenues of future research on the topic of musical propaganda in early modern England. For example, it suggests the presence of musical propaganda campaigns presenting moral instruction to individuals during the Elizabethan era, especially thorough broadside ballads. It also suggests a propaganda campaign prosecuted through the musical Birthday and New Year’s Day odes for William and Mary during their reign.
Feeling Shadows
Authors: Hagen Benjamin D.
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses primarily on “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), Woolf’s unfinished memoir, to reconceptualize the term “moments of being” as pedagogical accidents. The chapter also links Woolf’s pedagogical interest in the moment as a unit of present time to the development of her aesthetic ontology, her vocation as a writer, the importance of feeling and sensation to her thinking, and the critical sensibilities she and her sister Vanessa develop as young Victorian women. The author connects these features of Woolf’s sensuous pedagogy to her early experience teaching at Morley College, drawing significant correspondences between “A Sketch of the Past” and her early vivid report on teaching history at this institution.
Orienting Desires, Guarding Love
Authors: Hagen Benjamin D.
Published: May 2021

This chapter expands the analysis of Chapter 2, turning to The White Peacock (1911), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) to redress an oversight in Lawrence’s reception: the absence of a queer Lawrence. The chapter reads three respective relationships in these novels as instances of what Sedgwick calls “queer tutelage,” a pedagogical relationship associated with care, protection, love, and deviation from reproductive and familial logics and norms. Though Lawrence’s characters never sustain their queer attachments or loves, these three exciting and painfully brief experiments demonstrate Lawrence’s careful narrative attention to sexual and processual (re)orientations that model three different problematics: sustaining an erotic friendship and mutual guardianship into adulthood; affirming a love that seems resistant to general models or norms; and maintaining a resilient resistance to the normal and an awareness of the pernicious / generative links among shame, sex, education, and the future.
The Cunard Line
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

The chapter investigates Cunard’s identity as a poet, the challenges she faced as a woman poet, and the early publications of Outlaws (1921), Sublunary (1923), and Poems (Two) (1925). Marcus also explores Cunard’s involvement with the anti-war poetry anthology Wheels, her founding of The Hours Press, and the reception of her work by a male-dominated press. The author also discusses the early impetus behind her collection Negro Anthology and her political activism during the Spanish Civil War on behalf of poets from Harlem, Cuba, and The West Indies.
The Artist as Antichrist
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

The chapter provides a close reading of “Answer to a Reproof,” and Cunard’s reputation as a poet who rejected Western culture as she strove to define herself in relation to it as an outlaw. The chapter suggests Cunard uses the figure of Thamar, in the role of Antichrist, “as mistress of sexual excess, embodying female agency in the extreme,” as muse. Marcus also gives an analysis of Cunard’s representation in film and other media as a femme fatale and Ezra Pound as an early influence and male mentor, she would grow suspicious of and go on to reject.
Between Men
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

Beginning with T.S. Eliot’s death and Cunard’s poem reflecting on their relationship, the chapter examines Cunard’s reputation and representation as it grew out of Eliot’s deleted portrayal of Cunard as Fresca in The Waste Land and later via scurrilous accusations of plagiarism in relation to her long anti-war poem Parallax. The chapter rereads Parallax from a feminist perspective, while unpacking Eliot (and Pound’s) misogyny, in general. Marcus also explores Cunard’s relationship to Henry Crowder, the publication of “Henry-Music” by the Hours Press, the radical left, and her launching of Samuel Beckett’s literary career.
Closet Autobiography
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

This chapter gives a close reading of memoirs Cunard wrote about the Irish novelist, George Moore, who became a father figure for her, and novelist and travel writer, Norman Douglas. Marcus investigates Cunard’s refusal to write about her lovers, next to her published remembrances of two older homosexual eccentrics, whom she looked on as literary mentors. The chapter also provides a genre analysis of confessional writing, autobiography, biography, and memoir.
White Nympholepsy
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

The chapter is an investigation into and meditation on whiteness, purity, and cleanliness, as the author contextualizes Cunard’s development and childhood surrounded by the literary circle her mother, Maud “Emerald” Lady Cunard, fostered and encouraged. Marcus uses Moore’s Confessions, Manet’s painting Le Linge (the laundry), and Cunard’s relationship to her mother to explore women’s poverty, the role of women as muses to male artists, and Cunard’s identification with homelessness and exile.
Intellectual Nomads
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

Alongside her analysis of Cunard’s memoir of George Moore, Marcus reads her 1954 account of travel writer, Norman Douglas, within the contexts of exile, English primitivism, and the exploitation of antiquities abroad by representatives of Western culture. The chapter examines the funding of ex-Surrealist Michel Leiris and his Djibouti Expedition to collect African art and artifacts alongside Cunard’s unfunded and publicly excoriated intellectual and literary project to collect Black voices and cultures in the Negro anthology. Marcus also addresses Cunard’s problematic reading of accusations against Douglas of pedophilia and a text “torn between the desire to tell and the desire to hide the secrets” of his life and her own.
White Women, Black Books
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by two government grants to live and study in Nigeria in the same year as Negro’s publication, 1934. Marcus interrogates Leith-Ross’s treatment in the study of the Women’s War, or the “Aba Riots” as the British were anxious to diffuse the memory of their rebellion against colonial rule and oppression. The chapter focuses on the collective work of Negro and the challenges Cunard faced in bringing to the public a project that was unauthorized, unfunded, and surveilled.
The Lady Composer Steps Out
Authors: Brister Wanda , Rosenblatt Jay
Published: May 2021

Dring’s early career is traced through her commissions for BBC radio and television broadcasts, of which the most significant is The Fair Queen of Wu, a ballet for singers and chamber ensemble with choreography by Felicity Gray. During these years, her first publications appeared, with an emphasis on piano music (for solo piano and two pianos) and her Three Shakespeare Songs. Dring’s music was also performed in recitals, including her recently published piano works and a selection of her songs (published and unpublished). The most favorable reviews are found for her Festival Scherzo (“Nights in the Gardens of Battersea”), written to commemorate the Festival of Britain. Also discussed is her one-act opera, Cupboard Love, the music written for the Christmas plays produced by Angela Bull’s Cygnet Company, and her first performance as a singer at the RCM’s Union “At Home.” A fine example of Dring’s cabaret style is found in the discussion and analysis of her song, “The Lady Composer.” In her personal life, the chapter documents her marriage to Roger Lord, his career as a musician (principal oboe in the London Symphony Orchestra for thirty-three years), and the birth of her son, Jeremy.
Epilogue The Lady Composer Rediscovered
Authors: Brister Wanda , Rosenblatt Jay
Published: May 2021

“She thought remains were of little importance.”

—Roger Lord, letter of May 30, 2007

On June 22, 2004, one of us (Wanda) enjoyed a visit with Roger Lord at his home in Dorset, at which time she was able to discuss with him the life and career of his first wife, Madeleine Dring. The conversation turned from her life to her death, and he was asked, “Where is Madeleine buried? I would like to go place flowers on her grave.” Lord replied, “I don’t know if she is still there. We only leased the grave for twenty-five years.” Gravesites are at a premium in London and are often leased and turned over for later use. He continued “But I can tell you what I inscribed on her marker.” At the time of this exchange, twenty-seven years had passed since she died. But Lord did not forget about the question. In a letter of May 30, 2007, he writes: “P.S. You ask about tomb inscription & where. Madeleine was buried in Lambeth Cemetery.”...
“Messages of Peace”
Authors: Goldman Jane
Published: May 2021

This chapter uncouples the binary opposition between peace and war to consider a number of unbridled notions of peace through close attention to its deployment in a rich nexus of Woolf’s writings. Proposing a Woolfian peace more properly understood as otium (a classical Latin term commonly translated as peace) with a queer twist, this chapter argues that Woolf, in collaboration with the intersectional pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, offers a way of thinking through what it might mean to live, work and write peacefully. Offering a number of close and attentive readings, including a genetic account of the 'messages of peace' passage that straddles sections 9 and 10 of 'Time Passes' in To the Lighthouse, and the traces of Catullus that can be found in The Waves, this chapter demonstrates the presence of a radical and louche, ancient and avant-garde otium at work in Woolf’s writing.
Reason, Ridicule, and Indifference
Authors: Andrews Charles
Published: May 2021

This essay provides suggestions for integrating the interdisciplinary field of peace studies and literary analysis by attending to rhetorical strategies in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction. The field of peace studies often relies on the social sciences and data-driven analytics, borrowing from the humanities only for vague ideas like “inspiration” and “creativity.” Andrews argues that the Woolfs’ rhetorical form offers additional resources to peace-activist writers. With a nod to the “political formalist” turn of scholars such as Caroline Levine and Joseph North, Andrews examines the ways that the formal features of the Woolfs’ writing enact their antiwar politics. Leonard Woolf insisted that his strategies for antiwar internationalism were based in reason rather than utopianism, and his prose style displays that “reasonableness” by using the tropes of western, academic argumentation. By contrast, Virginia Woolf’s circular, elliptical, and repetitive style in Three Guineas resists the combative, western academic models in which opposing views are demolished through rhetorical assaults and stockpiles of evidence. The Woolfs were united in their use of ridicule, a device that sometimes seems antithetical to nonviolent speech. Ridicule, however, holds the potential to be the art of “making ridiculous,” of pointing out the absurdity and foolishness of over-inflated, self-serious political views or actors. In this capacity it is a rhetorical form that deflates and redirects political extremity without rising to the level of its violence. As Andrews shows, the Woolfs’ writing suggests a range of options for peace-activist writing today and their rhetorical sophistication extends our capacities for a pacifist imagination.
An Ethics of Wartime Protest
Authors: McNees Eleanor
Published: May 2021

Reacting to the Armistice of November 11, 1918 in her diary, Virginia Woolf reported seeing a “fat slovenly woman” on the train from Richmond to London and commented that “she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way...” (D 1:216). Of Peace Day, July 19, 1919, designated as the official celebration of the peace, she later remarked how the “poor deluded servants” had taken the bus to see the decorations left over from the celebratory parade. She stated, “I was right: it is a servants [sic.] peace” (D 1:294). In spite, however, of these patronizing and slightly derogatory comments about servants’ crowd mentality, Woolf initially chose to present both the Great War and the Armistice through individual servants’ eyes in the Time Passes interval in To the Lighthouse and in the 1914 and 1918 chapters of The Years. The lurching Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse and the hobbling Crosby in The Years are not among the sordid celebrators Woolf criticizes in her diary. Instead, their painful efforts to persevere regardless of war or peace reflect Woolf’s criticism of a jingoistic and patriarchal patriotism that panders to the lower classes.
Adapting Gérard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s narrative structures of focalization, this essay considers Woolf’s ethical struggle as a novelist to articulate private and voiceless alternative perspectives through the servant characters. McNees traces Woolf’s successive revisions of both novels from holograph to published edition in which she substantially reduces the servants’ roles to render them less effectual as alternative reflectors of war and peace. Against critical analyses that consider Woolf’s revisions as mainly aesthetic, the essay argues for an ethics of revision in which Woolf critiques her own methods of manipulating the servants’ views of war and peace to produce an authentic alternative to the paternalistic public version. Examining the revision process of both Time Passes and the first “expurgated chunk” of The Years, McNees suggests that Woolf’s efforts at focalization through Mrs. McNab and Crosby ultimately fail because, as Woolf herself states in “The Niece of an Earl” (1928),, “...it is impossible, it would seem, for working men to write in their own language about their own lives” (E 5:132). Nevertheless, Woolf’s attempt to cross this divide to register a perspective otherwise silenced and obscured deserves the qualified praise she rendered Meredith.
The Disintegration of Sense and Bodies in Pain
Authors: Detloff Madelyn , Pohlhaus Gaile
Published: May 2021

In this essay, Detloff and Pohlhaus examine Virginia Woolf and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on the precarious nature of sense and certainty as a counterpoint to Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the rhetoric of war in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. In her introduction, Scarry cites Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” to exemplify a crucial premise of her argument about pain’s propensity to “bring[] about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (4). “Whatever pain achieves,” Scarry argues, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4). Through a more extensive analysis of “On Being Ill” than Scarry affords, along with a reading of Woolf’s later essay, “Craftsmanship,” Detloff and Pohlhaus illuminate a distinction between Woolf’s position and a central premise of Scarry’s theory –the presumed unsharability and near inexpressibility of pain. The essay argues that Woolf was not necessarily describing a fundamental incapacity of language to express pain, but rather a social practice of failing to attend to pain and therefore failing to develop the lexical tools to express the pain adequately. If this is the diagnosis, what is called for is a shift in attention (a shift in aspect perception, to follow Wittgenstein) from the inexpressibility of pain to our collective lack of attention to pain.
Wittgenstein, himself a veteran of World War I who saw plenty of “bodies in pain” at the front, proposes a different view of the relationship between pain and knowing from Scarry. Following Stanley Cavell, Detloff and Pohlhaus understand the relation between the voice of the ordinary language philosopher and the skeptic in Wittgenstein’s Investigations to be neither dismissive, nor matter of fact. As Cavell notes, the ordinary language philosopher must take the skeptic seriously if she expects herself to be taken seriously and “In all cases [the] problem is to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstances within which a human being gives voice to [their] condition” (240). For this reason, Detloff and Pohlhaus approach the differences between Scarry, Woolf, and Wittgenstein not with the aim of proving one right over the other, but rather in order to find insight in the tension between them as a means to attend to and acknowledge others’ pain.
“Real Loyalties”
Authors: Råback Jenni
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the themes of sibling love and loss in the context of war in The Voyage Out and Night and Day. Taking its cue from Juliet Mitchell’s claim that lateral kin relations are both significant and under threat in time of war, the chapter aligns Woolf’s thinking about siblings with relevant ideas of lateral kinship. Disruptions to lateral relationships are increased in war-time, and such experiences of loss and love are pivotal in Woolf’s early novels. The Voyage Out takes the war-time tragedy Antigone as a central intertext and in so doing emphasises the topicality of ruptured sibling relations. Prior to its political resonance in Three Guineas, Antigone facilitated Woolf’s treatment of sibling loss in her first novel. Highlighting siblings also allows for a reading of Night and Day as a war-time novel; the novel’s refusal to platform the war parallels the pacifism of Vanessa Bell, who the protagonist Katharine Hilbery is modelled on. The placing of a strong female character, divorced from public social life, at the centre of the war-time novel is an early example of Woolf’s pacifism and her related resistance to patriarchy. Woolf’s first two novels are rarely associated with war, but this chapter demonstrates their sensitivity to central experiences in war—the losing, loving and othering one’s peers—and the necessity of acknowledging the important place of siblings in the origins of Woolf’s thinking about social and political life.
Thoughts on Flowering in an Air Raid
Authors: Sparks Elisa Kay
Published: May 2021

This chapter brings to light how Woolf’s work transitions from treating flowers as representational emblems to deploying them as complex metonymical chains of self-deconstructing, proliferating, and reconstructed scenes of meaning. Drawing attention to the extensive botanical references to apples and to poppies throughout the breadth of Woolf’s oeuvre as examples of the complexity of her vegetal vocabulary, especially as it relates to attitudes towards peace on the eve of war and life in the face of invading death, this chapter suggests we find a Woolf whose view of the natural word was central to her ideas of war and peace.
Between Aesthetic and Political Theory
Authors: Pollentier Caroline
Published: May 2021

This chapter interrogates the utopian troping of Virginia Woolf's pacifism through a theoretical, historical, and rhetorical perspective. At a time when peace projects were condemned as utopian, Woolf’s choice to mobilize utopian tropes was not ideologically neutral. The chapter will first map out the utopia/reality divide that structured the interwar fields of international relations, focusing on the theoretical debate opposing Leonard Woolf to E. H. Carr. A similar unease around utopias became manifest in the interwar literary field, as the upsurge in peace utopias coincided with a growing critique of utopian fiction. This chapter argues that this aesthetic and political polemic between fact and fiction was at the core of Woolf’s writings on peace. Close readings of Three Guineas and "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" will show how Virginia Woolf deconstructed the duality between "utopia and reality" that polarized pacifist discourses of the time. In a mock-utopian tone quite distinct from serious fictional peace projects, Woolf critiqued planned utopias of world peace, such as those devised by H. G. Wells, but also moved away from Leonard Woolf's political idealism. Beyond any fixed oppositions between idealism and realism, between "fact" and "dream," she renegotiated the materiality of hope by repurposing press cuttings and other "fragmentary notes" into archives of the future.
Intersections
Authors: Allen Judith
Published: May 2021

Investigating the intersections of propaganda and Just War theory, this chapter delves into the significance of the power of propagandism to ‘manufacture consent’, and for people to resist those influences and use their voices to resist, to think critically, and to expose the financial gains of warmongering. Exploring the complicated nature of propaganda and Just War theory as presented in Woolf’s Three Guineas and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, alongside Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime (1928) and Edward Bernay’s Propaganda (1928), Allen offers a way of reading Woolf as a theorist of peace whose message remains just as relevant in the contemporary moment of twenty-first century war and violence as it was in her own lifetime.
Radical Hope as Protest
Authors: Dikova Stanislava
Published: May 2021

Virginia Woolf’s pacifist commitments prevented her from fully endorsing militant political protest as a productive strategy for emancipation. This orientation is grounded in her belief that violence preserves the ideological structures of oppression and fails to achieve real and positive social change. Instead, her thought and writing explore alternative modes of agency as outlets for more radical emancipatory possibilities. Through a reading of The Years (1937), a historical novel written under the threat of an impending Second World War, this essay traces Woolf’s enquiry into the mechanisms of patriarchal state oppression and the everyday sites, practices, and encounters through which it operates. Using Sara Pargiter as a case study, it probes Woolf’s assertion that women’s status as outsiders is the entry point through which dominant power relations can be challenged and new forms of social freedom negotiated. Building on José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of “queer futurity”, with its attendant notions of critical idealism, utopia and hope, it argues that Woolf’s everyday pacifist-feminist aesthetic is significant for formulating a future-oriented critique of institutional practices of control over bodies and agents who do not conform to normative standards of personhood.
“Such density of furniture defeats imagination”
Authors: Schauss Martin
Published: May 2021

Sceptical of the dichotomous narrative on literary objects that draws a strict line between “realist” commodity affluence and a “modernist” devotion to the integrity of “things,” this essay looks at Samuel Beckett’s post-war prose to find the dregs of bourgeois realism sedimented in the aftermath of two world wars, and the “modernist” promise to the object ridiculed. Beckett’s texts can be seen to incorporate a literary and mimetic object-world that is largely spectral, unreconciled with itself. The tramp’s object-encounters in the stories and novels oscillate between the “realist” cluttered room and “modernist” objects, whose integrity, ludicrously, seems to be at stake at the very moment the “self” disintegrates. Insisting instead on the literal, economic side of the tramp’s material depletion, this essay extracts the tension between the objectified social content of realism and the deadened cliché of the modernist “thing.” At stake is not so much Beckett’s critique of two aesthetic categories as a recognition that neither had an unproblematic relationship with the object in the first place.
Tradition and the Test-Tube Baby
Authors: Bowlby Rachel
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers a modernist juxtaposition of scientific creativity and creative science, the focal point of which is the persistence of the hybrid expression “test-tube baby” to designate possible or actual results of new reproductive technologies. This phrase encapsulates the jarring and juxtaposition of different descriptive and performative levels, as twentieth-century technologies imagined and sometimes achieved the mutation of human reproduction into a matter of careful chemistry. The new art-science of psychoanalysis conceptualized human mentalities in the language and the transformational logic of chemistry. Writers often likened their own effects or modes of production to quasi-scientific procedures for making the new, whether flamboyantly “experimental” or studiedly lab-based. The chapter concentrates in particular on passages from the work of T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf.
The Fabric of Home
Authors: Bahun Sanja
Published: May 2021

This essay focuses on the ways in which a humble piece of cotton cloth reconfigured the idea of the object as such, into one characterized, dually, by its own making process and by its orientation towards the unforeseeable use. The essay engages two distinct modernist artistic utterances that articulated, and bore witness to, this changed relationship towards objects and links them to an effort to rearticulate the affect of home in modernism. My case studies are the series of drawings Paul Klee executed on cheesecloths in the 1920s-30s, and Varvara Stepanova’s textile designs while at work at the First State Textile Factory in 1924. The essay suggests that both artists, their expressive and ideological dissimilarities notwithstanding, perceived in the piece of cotton cloth a “comrade”—that is, an active, animate participant in the creation process, itself a procedure of metabolizing experience which involves the replication of geometric forms and lines of threaded cotton or burlap. Juxtaposing the textile tremors in Klee’s paintings and Stepanova’s designs unearths a hidden axial point in which the modernists’ perception of home, as a physical environment, projective phantasy and constitutive emotion, changed, and our perception of key experiential categories such as objects and object-making transformed.
Computer Science for (Live) Modernism(s)?
Authors: Kane Louise
Published: May 2021

This chapter frames little magazines and periodicals as modernist objects which are often preoccupied with their own materiality in a distinct and unprecedented manner. To illustrate this principle, I argue that the little magazine represents the textual equivalent of what is known in the field of Computer Science as a metaobject, a part of a computer system that has the power to modify and update itself via a process known as reflection. While the production of a book—the typesetting, printing, and assemblage or ‘gathering’ of pages tended to take place out of the sight of their writers, the limited economic funds of a little magazine meant that their editors had a direct role in the print process. Drawing on examples from global periodicals including the British Rhythm, the Japanese periodical Shirakaba, the American Crisis and Little Review, I argue that it is periodicals’ status as metaobjects that makes them modernist. Their editors’ material choices and continued self-conscious references to the magazine as object (often with a set object) produce uniquely subjective, live reading experiences which characterize magazines as indelibly modern. Their modernisms—able to be experienced just through reading the magazine – are therefore timeless and can be replayed again and again.
Limbswish
Authors: Bozhkova Yasna
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her intermedial poetics revolves around an unprecedented intrusion of quotidian objects and mass-produced commodities in art and poetry, while her hybrid forms radically redefine both the visual artwork and the poem and do away with the boundaries between different kinds of artistic objects. This chapter situates her artistic practice in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, while making important distinctions between them. Although the Baroness’ assemblages have been eclipsed by Duchamp’s work, she came up with a strikingly original poetics that is literally “ready-to-wear,” integrating singular arrays of objects into her radical self-performances which work toward developing new genres such as a living body assemblage or a body performance poem. This chapter argues that in Baroness Elsa’s “ready-to-wear” poem-objects unravels a radical and ironic craft which inextricably welds together the consumer product and the unique artwork.