bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Essay as Resistance
Authors: Wittman Kara
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the relation between the essay and the world in terms of resistance. While acknowledging the force of protest movements and of essays whose subject matter is overtly political, it argues that there is also a formal capacity to resist in the essay – irrespective of its political intentions – that can complement other
forms of resistance. The chapter starts from Montaigne and highlights the way his essays and the tradition he established resist through, among other things, their ‘rendering of the transient’, ‘attention to the particular’, inconclusiveness and fragmentation. The essay, then, is presented as a genre whose formal radicality makes it particularly
apposite for interventions with ‘sociopolitical consequence’, including contemporary interventions on climate change, the humanitarian crisis of immigration and racism.
Heretical Hearts and the Infinite Game: Why Teaching the Essay (Still) Matters
Authors: Cowser Bob
Published: September 2023

At least as far back as Adorno, advocates for the classical Montaignian essay have worried about its place in a university increasingly bent toward empirical truth and the compartmentalization of knowledge and away from what Adorno thought of as the ‘whole truth’ available via the informal essay. The contemporary neoliberal American university, with its marketization and commodification of everything, feels like the low ebb. This chapter takes the essay’s current temperature in terms of the author’s own classrooms, sharing the challenges and impediments to
teaching the essay to undergraduates, successful strategies collected from nearly thirty years of doing so. It argues in favor of continuing to work with the essay for the sake of the tradition, the sake of students, and for his own.
The Postwar American Essay, the Liberal Imagination and the Contemporary Essay
Authors: Lopate Phillip
Published: September 2023

The essayistic qualities of ‘skepticism (including self-skepticism),
thinking against oneself, open-ended speculation, freedom, adaptability, avoidance of system and refusal of dogmatism’ align the essay with the values of liberalism. This chapter argues that the essay comes to the fore in several specific moments in history, and one such moment is the period between the end of World War II and around 1970. The proliferation of publication contexts, the rise of the figure of the public intellectual and the spread of liberal ideology contribute to making these decades an ideal flowering bed for the essay. At the same time, the contemporary essay, while still occasionally showing the effects of this liberal essayism, tends to be characterized by a different ‘tone and stress’, often characterized by a sense ‘of wounded virtue and a claim of victimhood at society’s insensitivity’.
The Essay in Asian (American) Contexts
Authors: Kane Louise
Published: September 2023

This chapter is an example of a kind of research that can give further
depth and nuance to the understanding of the essay in the United States because it focuses on essayists whose identity is marked by American but also Asian origins and culture. Kane argues that more global consideration of the genre enables us to see how the form evolved in different contexts and with sometimes different purposes. Specifically, the chapter discusses Asian American essayists writing in English, who played a central role in the emergence of Asian migrant writing and transnational aesthetics. Essayists like Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far and Zhang Ailing explore betweenness as a state of being in its own right, one in which rootlessness, movement and cultural exchange are treated with celebration as well as consternation. The essay, with its specific formal qualities, provides an ideal space for them to negotiate the complex identity politics of belonging and being in the context of migration and movement.
Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present
Authors: Allen Sarah
Published: September 2023

Given essayists’ attentiveness, in a variety of ways and roles, to the human-nature relationship in the tradition of nature writing, the genre of the essay might be well-suited to meet and, perhaps, lead in the contemporary posthuman turn. This chapter explores how essayists have long worried over the binary of self and nature, how they have begun to problematize the concept of nature, and how they have turned today to concerns about the environment. Using the work of Object-Oriented Ontologist, Timothy Morton, as well as essayists like Craig Childs, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Annie Dillard, and reorienting the essay to a couple of reconceptualized practices in the genre – namely, contradiction and presence – this chapter shows how contemporary essayists are using the form to think about the consequences of anthropocentricism and about how we might live differently in the Anthropocene.
Brian Dillon on the Essay
Authors: Wallack Nicole B.
Published: September 2023

Presented in the form of an essay, or a series of essayistic passages in Brian Dillon’s voice, this experimental chapter is an edited and curated version of an interview conducted by the editors of the volume with Dillon. In it, Dillon talks essayism, the contemporary essay, and also about the way Roland Barthes and other literary influences have shaped his development as a writer and as an essayist.
Hospital Visitors and a Hospital for a Whole Family
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara Honarmand
Published: September 2023

The chapter’s focus is on hospital visiting. Various groups visited mission hospitals. This chapter identifies these groups, focusing on patients’ visitors, namely family and friends. From the 1880s onwards, visits from family and friends were increasingly policed in hospitals built in Britain due to fears that guests might introduce dirt and infection. By contrast, missionaries allowed family and friends to visit the patients and even stay in the hospitals in the contexts described here. They developed a novel hospital design to host family and friends known as the ‘serai-system’, which was designed like a caravanserai, an inn for travellers built along the caravan routes in Central Asia. While missionaries observed that the presence of close associates was irksome, they allowed them to accompany the patients because this could bring the mission in contact with a larger number of people.
Medical Missions and Anglo-Russian Rivalry the design of the Kashmir, Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu hospitals to
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara Honarmand
Published: September 2023

The focus of this chapter is on mission, emotions and imperialism. It examines the public views of the CMS missionaries in north-western British India concerning Anglo-Russian rivalry. In their reports, the missionaries recognised the value of their work as worth a ‘regiment’ to the British government. The chapter shows that this claim is comparable to the views of some of the early nineteenth-century missionaries, who talked about the providential purpose of the empire, arguing that the extension of the national church was beneficial culturally, religiously and politically. However, the CMS missionaries did not talk about the spread of Christianity per se, nor the dissemination of the English race or ethical values. Instead, they claimed their work was politically significant because it had been instrumental in obtaining people’s trust or friendship.
Othello , Race, and Serial : The Ethics of a Shakespearean Cameo
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 addresses subtle strategies for centring whiteness as it turns to NPR’s hit podcast Serial (2014), which invokes Othello as an interpretive lens. This chapter considers the importance of narrative framing through Joe Feagin’s concept of the white racial frame. The white racial frame not only shapes the covert, Iago-like focus on whiteness host Sarah Koenig undertakes in the series, but also informs how whiteness frames the topic of race in premodern studies by insisting on the fluidity of race in the Renaissance while ignoring it in modernity. Scholars can thus conveniently argue for the anachronism of studying race in the premodern. By using Serial to illustrate race’s fluidity in the modern era, the chapter prompts a reconsideration of the resistance to locating race in early modernity as well as a more nuanced understanding of how racial history shapes the present’s racial imaginary.
Images of Objectification: Othello as Prop in Kill Shakespeare
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 turns to the comic series Kill Shakespeare (2010–14) to demonstrate how modern Othellos still succumb to the most obvious and perhaps long-standing method for shaping antiblack narratives: stereotyping Black masculinity. The chapter reads Othello’s caricatured depiction through comic books’ vexed history of representing Blackness, Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of “controlling images,” and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s theorization of “the dark fantastic” to argue that the controlling images in Kill Shakespeare are both metaphoric and literal, working together to depict a minimized, pathologized, and therefore particularly colorblind version of Othello. A combination of textual and visual close reading thus illustrates how flattening Othello through stereotyped representation normalizes his supposed pathologies while ultimately positioning him as a prop for the white protagonists’ self-actualization.
Projects and Promissory Notes: The Waiting Rooms of V. S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 continues the interrogation of waiting and colonial time regimes by pairing two novels with intertextual relationships to Heart of Darkness: V.S. Naipaul’s 1979 A Bend in the River and Nadine Gordimer’s 1981 July’s People. This chapter shows that these authors’ constructions of “waiting rooms of history” in the interior of Africa are designed to achieve very different ends. Naipaul is assessed for how he renders the eponymous bend in the river as a waiting room for Salim and other African citizens where, notwithstanding political independence, “not yet” will never become “now.” Gordimer’s novel presents a different view of July’s village as a waiting room, where the spatiotemporal experience of waiting disrupts Maureen’s relationship to time and its lived patterns. The temporal modality of waiting encourages Maureen’s reevaluation of herself in relation to others (her own family, as well as July’s); her final refusal to wait embraces the uncertainty of her position in the new dispensation to come.
‘Strategic Waiting’ and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Conflict
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 examines Njabulo Ndebele’s 2003 The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Ishmael Beah’s 2014 Radiance of Tomorrow in order to assess “strategic waiting” as a temporal modality that can be productively inhabited in service of reconciliation. The novels, set in South Africa and Sierra Leone respectively, were published after Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in both countries reported their findings. Although neither novel suggests that waiting should be inhabited indefinitely, both depict important community-building work being accomplished while characters wait. Ndebele’s novel is structured like a waiting room, where ordinary women discuss their personal histories of waiting until they are ready to embark together on a journey out of the unspecified present moment and into the future. Likewise, the elders of Radiance of Tomorrow wait as they rebuild, and waiting produces time to heal even as it facilitates reconciliation through small, deliberate silences.
Introduction: The Body at Play in Early Modern Texts
Authors: Seymour Laura
Published: September 2023

Introduces the framework of embodied cognition employed throughout the book. Discusses work by cognitive theorists that informed the book’s arguments. Lays out each chapter in the book.
Walking Without God – (Mis) Learning Through the Gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622)
Authors: Seymour Laura
Published: September 2023

Discusses the picaresque gait in the 2-volume novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604)by Mateo Alemán and its 1622 translation by James Mabbe called The Rogue. Analyses the ways in which walking has moral valence in this novel. Argues that the novel’s embodied imagery of picaresque walking has a more vivid and lasting impact on readers than its moralising words.
Light and Darkness: The Magic Lantern at the Dawn of Media
Authors: Roberts Phillip
Published: September 2023

The magic lantern had been a tool for poor travelling entertainers. This little projector raised ghosts and grotesques, told stories of hardships and imagined new worlds. A lanternist could make the powerful ridiculous and demand that divine punishment intercede to restore natural justice. The lantern once spoke back to power, but all of this changed in 1821, when a Birmingham instrument maker called Philip Carpenter floated the little machine onto the emerging currents of consumer capital. His Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern utterly transformed the medium. The lantern became a safe educational tool, a must-have consumer novelty in middle-class households. The old lanternists found themselves going out of business as their audience refused to pay for a toy they now had at home. Along with a host of other new media technologies, including the Kaleidoscope, Myriorama, Thaumatrope, Praxinoscope, Stereoscope, Heliograph, Daguerreotype and Calotype, the Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern laid the foundations for the media networks of the later nineteenth century. Carpenter’s flash of business insight made a new world; but it also killed the older media practices that preceded it.
Keyword: Performance
Authors: Mee Jon
Published: September 2023

The 1820s witnessed an explosion of new forms of popular entertainment, producing anxieties about the degradation of traditional cultural forms. Subjectivity and social life came to be understood as increasingly performative, with London life in particular often defined in terms of its ‘scenes.’ While literary criticism has traditionally understood the pervasive theatricality of the decade in terms of decline, there was an equal measure of excitement abroad about the possibilities of performance, as much in relation to engineering habits of mind as the new interest in forms of extempore performance and literary effusion.
Keyword: Surveillance
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: September 2023

An early-nineteenth-century coinage from the French, the 1820s were a decade in which surveillance seemed quite suddenly to become a basic principle of everyday life, from the popular success of Paul Pry to Benthamite principles in the prisons. Although Bentham’s panopticon was not widely adopted within the new penitentiaries, there were experiments of various kinds, not least in new penal settlements in the colonies. More generally, surveillance became part of a world in which watching each other and watching one’s self seemed to be an intrinsic part of social and affective life.
Paul Pry and Elizabeth Fry: Inspection and Spectatorship in the Social Theatre of the 1820s
Authors: Lodge Sara
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the 1820s constitute a decade in which increased self-consciousness about public looking and being looked at is key to the performative pleasure of literary texts, visual images and staged entertainments. Self-consciousness about social inspection and spectatorship, however, also produces increased anxiety about inappropriate and excessive looking. One key text in my argument is John Poole’s runaway theatrical hit of 1825, Paul Pry, in which the audience experiences a frisson of transgressive pleasure in Pry’s inordinate curiosity: Pry is a figure both for the offensive ‘peeping’ to which the audience objects and for its own delight in viewing. The proliferation of songs, newspapers and figurines depicting Pry suggests his emblematic cross-cultural power. The second key text is Elizabeth Fry’s Observations on the Siting, Superintendance and Government of Female Prisoners (1827). For Fry, female inspection prevents abuse by male warders and helps to distinguish prisoners committed for offences of varying severity. However, viewing is also part of the orderly ‘machine’ Fry recommends, where prisoners are numbered and ticketed and the treadmill enables the exposure that communal discipline represents. In both texts, surveillance is a form of vigilance and protection, but also a form of punishment in a society investigating the propriety of its pervasive gaze.
Keyword: Emigration
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: September 2023

The 1820s were the decade when assisted migration emerged as a public measure to deal with the population explosion. Also recommended by some as the best means for dealing with economic and political unrest in the difficult years of Peterloo, emigration became central to political debate in the decade, not least because it was seen by some as a deflection from deep domestic difficulties. This new wave of emigration was the foundation of a massive British diaspora which gave license to settlement experiments that deeply impacted indigenous peoples around the globe.
Keyword: March of Intellect
Authors: Sangster Matthew
Published: September 2023

By 1829, when Henry Brougham invoked the schoolmaster in Parliament as an influence more powerful, more modern and more relevant than traditional military force, there was wide agreement that something called the ‘March of Intellect’ was occurring. However, commentators were sharply divided on whether this was a positive or a negative development. This keyword explores these tensions, in which clashing ideologies reflect the vexed process of adaptation to a social change whose ultimate consequences were almost impossible accurately to project.
Keyword: Doubt
Authors: Stewart David
Published: September 2023

Using a draft essay by John Clare as its lodestar, this brief examination demonstrates how the decade’s rage for mapping, measurements and facts created a countervailing discourse of doubt. Literary writers self-consciously struggled to position themselves in relation to a culture in which novel forms of knowledge posited radical new certainties that seemed to undermine previously stable positions. This triggered in observers new forms of fear, wonder, bafflement and self-fashioning.
Butterfly Books and Gilded Flies: Poetry and the Annual
Authors: Dawson Clara
Published: September 2023

This chapter compares the characteristics and properties of poetry published in gift annuals and poetry published in single-author volumes, demonstrating how gift annuals shaped the poetry of the 1820s and influenced the Victorian poetics of the 1830s. The gift annuals were collaborative, multi-generic, expensive, decorative and hugely successful, particularly with women readers. Poems were subordinated to the exigencies of the publishers: they were often commissioned after the engraved illustrations and therefore were perceived to be written on demand rather than emerging from original inspiration. They operated in large part through women’s literary networks and the editors and writers were often female. By contrast, the single-authored volume sought to radiate the aura of the isolated male genius of Romanticism. Mass print culture brought about an intense conflict between marketplace values and the poetic principles associated with Romantic writing – genius, originality, inspiration, autonomy from the market and an intimate relation with a few refined readers. The chapter considers these vexed sets of relations by analysing poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Alfred Tennyson, exploring differences and similarities between gift-annual poetry and single-authored book poetry in order to trace the increasing tension between the materiality of books and the literature they contained.
Thief or Reality : Visual Dialectics on Death Instincts
Authors: Bouska Penny
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Angelidi’s film Thief or Reality (2001), through the psychoanalytical concept of death instincts. Undertaking a broader reading and interpretation of the film’s reference to death and to reflections on death and far from any type of existential interpretation, it examines the aesthetic representation of an instinctual force which is subtle and ‘unseen’ by the psyche, in the film structure. Following a dense and discrepant introduction on the methodology of Freudian theory it interprets the cinematic devises as visual examples of an internal process. Through this approach, Angelidi’s cinema is seen as an artistic mechanism of the obscure workings of the psyche.
The Cinematic Sublime in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Thief or Reality
Authors: Stefanopoulou Evdokia
Published: September 2023

Stefanopoulou reflects on Angelidi’s uncanny structure, with reference to the philosophical concept of the sublime. She interprets Angelidi’s film Thief or Reality, through the paradoxical sentiment of an unmeasurable greatness alongside a powerful feeling of inferiority and submission. Using as theoretical context Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s treatises of the sublime, Stefanopoulou argues that Angelidi’s film articulates a unique cinematic sublimity, enabling the expansion and transformation of
cinematic vision.
Dreyer, Magritte and Other Obsessions: Figural Invention in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Idées Fixes / Dies Irae – Variations on the Same Subject
Authors: Dionysopoulos Kyriakos
Published: September 2023

In this chapter Dionysopoulos places the emphasis on another medium, expressing with the general term ‘figural’ both the figural layout of words and drawings as well as figurative art. The correlation between Angelidi’s cinema and visual art is of great importance and Dionysopoulos underlines this perspective. With a highly appealing and concise writing style, he describes how Angelidi reverses the spatial axes, transforming space dimensions and creating paradoxes of ‘vertical horizons’. In a very particular way, Angelidi incorporates figural and visual content into her thematic variations, creating exceptional narrative artworks.
Introduction Writing about the Hajj through the Centuries
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter presents the key structure and argumentative frameworks of the book. Through critical engagement with the existing literature on Hajj writings, this chapter focuses on mediation as the central function of the literature on Hajj. Mediation is presented as multilayered and multidirectional. In the book, the Hajj writings function as mediating tools between socio-political circumstances and the sense of the transcendent. This chapter also delineates the historical timeline of the Hajj in Bosnia, as well as some common dimensions of the Hajj literature which permeate the writings in different periods, such as its local and global permutations, premodern/modern dichotomy and the meaning-making impulse.
The Roads to Mecca
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter turns to the Hajj as it was experienced during the journey. The Hajj of the Ottoman period was a gigantic project that fostered a number of adjacent devotional practices: owing to their geographical position, Bosnian Hajjis could move from their province to multiple centres, managing their bodies in places of wonder and mundanity. The chapter focuses on the travelogues of Jusuf Livnjak and Mustafa Mukhliṣī which described different facets of the journey by Ottoman Bosnians, as well as on the exhortatory literature which prepared generations of pilgrims and also created a Hajj habitus at home. This way, the Hajj strengthened the relationship between the local Bosnian population and the vast Muslim world beyond.
Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–1945
Authors: Tonning Erik
Published: September 2023

The socio-political crises of the 1930s greatly intensified the apocalyptic tendencies within modernism. During the 1930s and into the Second World War, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound carried on an extended debate about how this apocalyptic crisis of civilization should be understood and resolved. Pound’s advocacy of a ‘European religion’ in the late 1930s implies an ‘active eschatology’ where the righteous can actually trigger the end of an age of Evil and corruption, and instigate a new age of transcendent goodness. Pound’s increasingly hardened rejection of Eliot’s Christianity as ‘verminous with semitic infections’ provides one index of his radicalisation process. Eliot’s ‘passive eschatology’, by contrast, is grounded in a dogmatic Christian framework of Original Sin, moral struggle in this life, and the ultimate horizon of Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. He came to see Pound’s ‘heresies’ alongside a panoply of other modern errors including liberalism, fascism, and socialism. The essay traces their debate and argues that their contrasting approaches to the apocalyptic is what determined these two writers’ deployment of myth in their work from this period.
The Jewish East End and Modernism
Authors: Grafen Alex
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how large-scale migration from the Russian Empire to Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped London’s Jewish East End as a site of cultural production. Whitechapel, with its mixture of poverty, philanthropy and the competing forces of anarchism, socialism and Zionism, had a distinct social and economic character. It thus rewards attention as a unit of analysis for studying modernism. The chapter analyses how the Jewish East End contributed to the development of the artists and writers who grew up there. It pays particular attention to those who have been grouped under the label the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, including David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, John Rodker and Isaac Rosenberg: how far did identification with Jewishness inform their work and the ways in which their work was received? Finally, the chapter touches on Yiddish literary production in London and proposes that a multilingual account of British literature is necessary for a full understanding of the relationship between Jewishness and modernism in Britain.
Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin
Authors: Mao Douglas
Published: September 2023

This essay examines how subjective turmoil and social concern intersect in some roughly modernist-era representations of Christian faith and doubt. It begins by observing that the word ‘troubled’ can name either a condition of unease about oneself or a state of unease about others. It then examines how in writings by Mary Augusta Ward, T. S. Eliot, and James Baldwin, anxieties attending doubts about God’s existence are eased by certitude about the badness of social conditions whose amelioration offers a path to purpose in life. It considers, in other words, how in these writers, being-troubled in the second sense helps resolve crises of being-troubled in the first sense. The essay closes by showing how attention to this resolution complicates our understanding of modernism’s relation to theodicy, to realism, and to the location of value in what Martin Hägglund calls “this life.”
Modernism, Secular Hope and the Posthumous Trace
Authors: Sherman David
Published: September 2023

This essay argues that modernism invests creative energy in fashioning secular hope for the survival of posthumous traces, as an alternative to religious structures of thought and feeling. In this conceptual overview of the modernist secular imaginary, I track expressions of ideas of human survival in a material, immanent frame. Modernism explores the secular as a new stance toward what can survive. Rather than a repudiation of faith or existential panic, secularization is a normative project: an ethical commitment to fragile human traces against the economic abstraction and political replaceability of persons. Modernism participates in secularization as a creative adaptation to extreme fungibility, a pragmatics of posthumous survival in modernized societies.
This reading of the secular in modernism, as a canny response to fungibility, shows how it works through remaining possibilities for human traces against the mechanical reproduction of disposable personhood in social life. Rather than divine redemption or salvation, secular survival is a story of fragile human traces passing among other humans, in their unreliability and infidelity, for a finite span. This approach refracts Kant’s fundamental question: what may we hope in a secular age? This essay ends with a reading ofWallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”.
C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth
Authors: Wilson Leigh
Published: September 2023

In their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue that the languages of positivism and the languages of myth are entwined in the reified enlightenment. However, much scholarship on myth and modernism continues to assume that they are in opposition. This assumption is made in recent readings of the artificial language, Basic English, created through the 1920s and proselytised for in the 1930s by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. The warnings of Ogden and Richards against ‘word magic’ across the interwar period have been read as evidence of their extreme positivism. In contrast, this chapter shows that the work of both Ogden and Richards is, in very different ways, key in rethinking the supposed split between positivism and myth. It argues that the work of Ogden through the interwar period can be seen as a return to myth as predicted by Horkheimer and Adorno, while the work of Richards propounds a different kind of myth – one which approaches the sense of mediation as the answer to the reification of enlightenment as set out in Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany
Authors: Jensen Graham H.
Published: September 2023

This chapter contends that the language of religious experience is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. Against critics who regard the Romantic epiphany as a secular form of revelation, it posits that modernist epiphanies cannot be fully understood in secular terms; they remind us, instead, of modernism’s religious and Romantic inheritances—two of its many vestigial tails. Indeed, definitions of literary epiphanies supplied by critics and by modernist writers such as Conrad and Joyce are consistently framed using the kinds of mystical and conversion discourse reproduced in William James’s influential study of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), even as they register modernism’s documented obsession with the quotidian or the mundane. These correspondences cumulatively highlight not a thoroughgoing project of secularisation, but modernists’ ongoing—albeit highly varied and sometimes unorthodox—commitments to religious imaginaries and ideals. Moreover, the chapter concludes by suggesting that: (1) James’s own articulation of mystical, ineffable experiences without necessary recourse to institutional religious frameworks was actually entangled with literature—specifically, the poetry of William Wordsworth—from the outset; and (2) Varieties, in turn, provided a popular model for modernist and other twentieth-century writers and critics.
The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy
Authors: Kilner-Johnson Allan
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the modernist afterlives of the Theosophical Society, and how the heterodox sympathies and sensibilities of Blavatsky and her followers would stimulate a return of Western mysticism in two deeply influential splinter groups of the early twentieth century: G.R.S. Mead’s Quest Society and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. By 1909, Mead and Steiner had both fallen into disagreement with the Theosophical Society and saw an opportunity to propose a refreshed and repackaged theosophy rooted in the Matter of Britain, Rosicrucianism, and a Christological cosmology.  While each brought their own distinguishing cultural quintessence to the enterprise (Mead took particular interest in the Grail mythos, while Steiner rooted his teachings in the healthy-living communitarian Lebebensreform [‘life-reform’] movement), both epitomised the modernist flourishing of theosophical ideals and the easy trafficking of ideas between mystical discipline and literary creation.  At a time when the threat of war was increasingly difficult to discount, these two substantial outgrowths from the Theosophical Society represented an almost counterintuitive turn away from the spiritual traditions of India and Tibet to the spiritual inheritance of an increasingly fraught Europe.
‘What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder’: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion
Authors: Bowler Rebecca
Published: September 2023

May Sinclair had an uneasy relationship with institutional religious practice, born of her childhood experience of religion, and her escape from its limiting strictures came through much reading in Idealist philosophy. In her two books of Idealist philosophy she constructs a ‘new idealism’ in which the Absolute, the Thing-in-itself, or Spinoza’s ‘substance’ approximate to the Godhead, or in Mary Olivier’s words: ‘the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about. Thinking about him—after the Christian God—was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light’.
In her philosophy Sinclair works to reach a new understanding of what Spinoza’s God could be, and how it could be understood, including a consideration of ‘the new mysticism’ of Evelyn Underhill, with its emphasis on instinctive knowledge of the Absolute. Sinclair acknowledges that mysticism is similar to Idealism in that it is a quest towards an understanding of Reality, but she is anxious to claim that it is an intellectual one: ‘The idea of the Absolute is not primitive. It is a very late and highly “sublimated” idea’.
For Sinclair, then, as this chapter demonstrates, Idealism plus mysticism approximates to a surrogate religion. Her unwillingness to give up on the idea of God finds its rationale in the intellectual ‘quest’ for a metaphysical understanding, with a more intuitive mystical experience of Reality informing that more intellectual enterprise.
Finnegans Wake , Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time
Authors: Erickson Gregory
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, Gregory Erickson focuses on the idea of time as a religious or magical idea and on current engagements with historical ideas of modernist time. The chapter enacts an idea of magical time into the structure of the essay itself, by using short passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as well as fading pages from his handwritten Notebooks; it moves back through Einstein’s theories and H.W. Wells’ Time Machine, the physical ruins of Dracula’s Whitby Abbey, and it also looks at a 1908 article on the fourth dimension. The chapter then uses Joyce’s phrase “four dim mansions” --a pun that appropriately connects Victorian occultism and modern physics with misty castles of the past—to connect to the same phrase in an 1846 short story in The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine that imagines a 15th century Spain. As the chapter weaves in the author’s own experiences of watching fantasy time travel dramas on television, it ponders how ideas travel through time, how “scripture” recreates and destroys, and how actual physical ruins enact, dramatize, and inspire these time traveling stories of ruin and decay. Writing against various theories of the “disenchanted time” of the modern era, Erickson propose that our engagements with these modernist texts instead reveal a form of “re-enchanted time” where the borders between magic, religion, and science are fluid and shifting.
Global Seekers in The Quest : A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion
Authors: Winick Mimi
Published: September 2023

This chapter shows how a community of famous (e.g., Pound, Tagore, Underhill) and obscure writers from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America created a self-consciously modern concept of religion that encompassed Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and other traditions in the understudied yet influential periodical The Quest (1909-1931), edited by former Theosophist G.R.S. Mead. This concept of religion was specifically global and worldly: it depicted religious experience as a universal human experience and major “force” in world-historical events such as the Great War. In this discourse, two kinds of transcendence define religion in modernity: 1) a sustained spiritual transcendence of one’s individual self, and 2) a universalizing transcendence of specific religious traditions, experienced as access to a global, all-encompassing tradition that features individual spiritual transcendence. Defining religion this way, The Quest offers, in contrast to an already familiar secularisation narrative, a story of spiritualisation in which modernization entails spiritual intensification marked by the increased importance of spiritual experience to society. Through its periodical form, The Quest offered a means to the kind of transcendent spiritual experience described and theorized in the poetry, fiction, and essays it featured.
‘A Miserable Attenuation’: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt
Authors: Mohua Mafruha
Published: September 2023

‘I wonder if that is what Krishna meant’, mused T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets. Did Tagore’s interpretation of Indian spirituality influence Eliot’s understanding of Krishna? This chapter examines the ways in which Eliot refutes Tagore’s views on religion and spirituality and shows that Eliot’s statements on and analysis of classical European tradition and of the Christian tradition are not separate from his interest in a specific Indian religious tradition. Eliot’s advocation of the ideals of the classical Latin tradition of Europe is also an indication of a specific idea of India cherished by him. Eliot’s interpretation of classicism as emotional discipline and of his disapproval of Tagore’s interpretation of Indian spirituality is influenced by Irving Babbitt who championed the classical sensibility of both Buddha and Christ and presented them as antithetical to the romanticism of Rousseau and Tagore.
Critical?Art
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

Modern art is (or want to be) intrinsically and radically critical. The problem of art based on negation is that the 'radical refusal' has quickly become an aesthetic. And the deconstructive cult of the defect, the cracks, the gaping, the fragmentary, the hesitation, the informal, the interruption, the ‘in-between’, and so on, has turned into recipes. With the return of the image in art - and the positivity of the amount of 'world' the image soaks up - comes the possibility of practising art (again) as an investigation of and free play with meanings.
Entering Lynchtown
Authors: Rauscher Andreas , Hartwig Marcel , Niedermüller Peter
Published: September 2023

David Lynch is now commonly referred to as one of the key ‘auteurs’ of (post-) modern American independent cinema. While the reception of Lynch very often resorts to multiple approaches, intertextual references, or transmedia world-building, his work merits an overall rereading as a transmedia network. Until recently, inter- and transmediality have not been the main themes of an edited collection on Lynch. Taking its cue from Twin Peaks: The Return as the paradox of Lynch’s open-ended Gesamtkunstwerk, this volume seeks to draw together the cinema of David Lynch as a metatextual, intertextual, and transmedial network from an interdisciplinary perspective. Building on research from experts in the field of David Lynch studies as well as novel perspectives from young academics, this collection gathers interdisciplinary international contributions from the fields of American studies, musicology and sound studies, film and media studies, cultural studies and gender studies. The critical exchange between different media and disciplines puts select views from the art life in dialogue with cult television, connects traditional musicology with sound studies, and reconsiders cinema through the lens of cinephilia as a cultural practice. This introductory chapter lays out the scope and contributions of this book.
Singing the Body Electric: Myth and Electricity as Both Sides of a Metaphorical Coin in Twin Peaks: The Return 1
Authors: Strank Willem
Published: September 2023

Neither Twin Peaks nor David Lynch’s work in general have been particularly famous for their narrative achievements. Approaches towards Lynch and Twin Peaks from the camp of the humanities tend to emphasise their aesthetic and symbolic potential. One metaphor that stands out here is that of electricity. This chapter argues that David Lynch’s engagement with the television has linked him to the realm of electricity as a precondition for the small screen. Twin Peaks: The Return inextricably links electricity to semiotics and the mythical. This chapter undertakes a reading of the iterations of electricity in the series that may explain how all these cables, connections and interfaces relate to each other. It holds that the metaphor of electricity is concerned with the ‘inside’ – the inner workings of technology, the molecular causes for power and the mechanical preconditions for audiovisual mass-media to work.
Structures of Female Desire, Control and Withdrawal in Lynch’s Cinematic Work
Authors: Schlösser Lioba
Published: September 2023

The pairing of mental illness as a weakness and the strength of a classical femme fatale might seem conflicting at first. Mental issues or weakness might be rather associated with the character of the femme fragile. David Lynch turns this concept on its head: he associates his female characters with strength and weakness at the same time. The weakness often derives from mental problems and therefore almost substantiates the strength that comes with it because these women endure so much suffering. Nevertheless, this combination leads to gendered character developments, which this chapter explores by analysing sequences and stylistic devices in the films Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. Moreover, this chapter discusses how female sexuality functions as a projection of the spectator’s own desire, wishes and needs. Female desire in this context often symbolises failure of normative structures, such as the nuclear family, patriarchal structures like monogamous marriage or masculinity as supremacy in family and career, and other normative values and standards. Making use of gender theory and psychoanalytic approaches, this chapter argues that Lynch creates a universe in which well-known narrative structures fall apart and where the ideals of patriarchal society face constant re-evaluation.
The Club Story and Social Mobility: Rules for Readers in Israel Zangwill and Barry Pain
Authors: Fiss Laura
Published: September 2023

Israel Zangwill and Barry Pain, Idlers from very different backgrounds, wrote a series of stories and novels centred in a club. This chapter focuses on the rules of those clubs, often presented as contextual information, and frequently a major plot point as characters who transgress those rules are forced to leave the club. The emphasis on the rules forms a humorous analogy for members of the lower or lower-middle classes aspiring to social mobility and demonstrates the difficulty of navigating social rules.
The Mysteries of Male Friendship: Uncovering the Club in Stevenson, Doyle, Chesterton and Sayers
Authors: Fiss Laura
Published: September 2023

Several writers of detective fiction and suspense portray the club as a more sinister force, one that threatens more organic friendship dyads, such as the one between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. These clubs function more like secret societies and allow the detective to present his skills at reading the city and its people in order to decipher them. The chapter thus provides a limit case for the idea of the club as a model for a community of readers—yet that element remains in these works.
Through a Club Window Wistfully: J. M. Barrie and the Politics of Social Awkwardness
Authors: Fiss Laura
Published: September 2023

J. M. Barrie presents a study in unclubbability, generally defined as an antisocial disposition. The chapter argues that this was a crafted element of Barrie’s persona to circumvent the notion that his social awkwardness might arise from his dramatic rise in social mobility. Barrie’s novels and periodical writings also ring changes on unclubbability, from an upwardly mobile Scottish journalist to a group of antisocial smokers to the clubman narrator of the novel that introduced Peter Pan.
The Earth, Education, and Human Action
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Focuses on the environmental crisis and political responses to it in order to discuss Arendt’s views on nature and planet earth and link them to education and political subjectivity. While her appreciation of the natural world as the material basis of the human condition has been increasingly of interest, her Aristotelian notion of a child as a not-yet-subject and her reflections about the role of education are being critically discussed in both educational and political contexts. These debates are an invitation to rethinking the Arendtian notion of political subjectivity from new theoretical and practical perspectives. We start by recalling Arendt’s description of planet earth in The Human Condition, discussed through the concept of the Anthropocene. When then discuss thinking and judging in education to negotiate the political subjectivity of youth, with special attention to Fridays for Future, and especially its initiator Greta Thunberg, as an example of political action reacting to a situation of crisis.
Post-Truth and the Dawn of Illiberal Democracy
Authors: Grygieńć Janusz
Published: September 2023

The introduction describes the current state of public trust in expert knowledge. It analyses the reasons for the decline in faith in the authority of experts and the relationship between such distrust and the post-truth era and the successes of illiberal democrats. The author of the book argues that, in addition to the causes of the crisis of expert knowledge analysed in the literature, it is necessary to examine one more: that our faltering faith in the authority of science is rooted in the very nature of the relationship between experts and laypeople. If we assume that relations between laypeople and experts always involve the former trusting the latter, it may turn out that post-truth is not strictly a contemporary phenomenon but an unavoidable part of life in a democratic society.
Expertise: Promises, Perils and Limitations
Authors: Grygieńć Janusz
Published: September 2023

The chapter analyses three mainstream definitions of expertise and the theoretical problems each of them brings up. The first definition equates the expert with an academic or theorist. The second takes the practical aspect of applying theory to practice into account (in addition to theoretical knowledge). In this context the chapter discusses the controversies that erupted in connection with the definition of expertise proposed by Alvin Goldman. Finally, the third definition, attributed here to Harry Collins and Robert Evans, emphasises the expert’s practical skills. The chapter argues that the latter approach is saddled with the least theoretical difficulty and at the same time has the most heuristic potential. Its main advantage is that it also allows us to identify experts among those whom we customarily perceive as laypeople.