bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

This chapter opens the book in 1909 with a discussion of Stein’s first publication, Three Lives, which, despite its small circulation, attracted much commentary. The chapter explores tensions in the ways this text represents both the right of the author, as a figure of classical liberal democracy, to enter new territory, and the limiting biological terms in which the text imagines its subjects. The chapter argues that this text represents a contradictory movement of reductive expansion in which the desire to extend representation to new subjects in new forms produces a set of detailed classifications designed to fit into a quasi-clinical taxonomy in which inclusion becomes the documenting and regulation of biological types. From there, it moves to the reception of Three Lives, considering the parallel tension in the tendency of reviews to see the text as either promoting the ‘democratic’ expansion of participation, representation and liberated artistic innovation that is imagined for the future or as an example of the aberrant practices of an avant-garde figured as a degenerate strand of literary production.
Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass Democracy
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 extends the discussion of Stein’s 1920s configuration by exploring her presentation, on the one hand, as the limit case for authorship and, on the other, as the ultimate democratic author. The chapter argues that she becomes the focus for anxieties about literary and artistic participation that reflect discussions of the consequences of mass democracy in To-day and To-morrow, with an emphasis on the related issues of mental capacity, education and intellectual disability and often framed as ethical questions about the value of life, or as scientific or pseudo-scientific enquiries into genetic inheritance, reproduction and eugenics. On the other side of the debate, the chapter examines the way Stein is framed as the mind of democracy and the exemplary democratic author, a representation that also echoes and engages with To-day and To-morrow discussions of the positive potential of mass participation. Finally, the chapter considers Stein’s 1928 text Useful Knowledge as a response to this discourse, arguing that the material Stein produces to frame Useful Knowledge as American and democratic makes it an intervention that serves to reassert rather than resist the terms underlying her exclusion.
Writing Virginia Woolf: Autobiographical Fragments
Authors: Reus Anne
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the absence of autobiographical accounts of Virginia Woolf’s professional life. Although A Room of One’s Own and ‘Professions for Women’ can be read as semi-autobiographical, Woolf’s autobiographical fragments, largely written for a more private audience, don’t offer a sustained account of her life past 1910 and reflect an ongoing struggle to leave the Victorian period behind entirely. ‘Reminiscences’ (1907) grapples with clichéd and euphemistic descriptions later dismissed as the worst excesses of Victorian biography; while the artistic ambitions of Vanessa and Virginia remain unspeakable for narrator and subject alike. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in contrast ignores all outward signifiers of professional success but weaves Woolf’s writerly identity into the narrative to assert that writing was her social and biological destiny. However, Woolf also enacts the ways in which her genetic legacies continue to shape her world socially by encoding her Victorian upbringing as an inheritance of femaleness: positing her identity as a woman and a writer as equally fundamental, they remain hard to reconcile.
The Essay as Brinkmanship: Cioran’s Fragment, Aphorism and Autobiography
Authors: Ionescu Arleen
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the Romanian-born French philosopher Emil (or E. M.) Cioran, a key figure in the development of the philosophical essay as praxis in the twentieth century. Starting from considerations from G. Douglas Atkins and Theodor Adorno on the middle position of the essay between fiction and philosophy, Graham Good’s characterization of the essay as a ‘provisional reflection of an ephemeral experience of an event or object’ and Erin Plunkett’s thoughts on the heterogeneity, discontinuity and circularity of the essay, the chapter underlines three of the main features of Cioran’s essay, with an emphasis on one of his main texts, On the Heights of Despair, to whose ideas he constantly returned: the fragmentary, the aphoristic, the autobiographical. While the first two features have a lot in common, hence, they are grouped in a single section, the autobiographical is read through the lens of Good’s and Carl H. Klaus’s reflections on the ‘self’ in the essay as a mode of reading in which the reader becomes a judge who verifies the authenticity of Cioran’s signature.
Science Essays
Authors: Vanderbeke Dirk
Published: September 2023

The combination of the words ‘science’ and ‘essay’ may seem to create an oxymoron. Science strives for strict objectivity, the exclusion of any subjective influence, the pure factuality of the observation and the subsequent results, and a bland rhetoric, all of which are in contrast to the commonly assumed features of the essay, i.e. self-reflection, subjective experience, and eloquence. However, the history of science shows that essayistic writing played a momentous role in the transmission of knowledge and the reflection of the processes of knowledge production. The term ‘essay’ was originally used for various kinds of scientific writing, but later it often marked a departure from the usually rigid format of the scientific paper towards a more open and also more accessible communication. The scientific essay supplemented the scientific paper, addressing larger scientific, philosophical, political, or personal concerns, and there was hardly a scientist of renown in the 20th century who did not write such essayistic texts in addition to their scientific books and papers. The style of such science essays can be quite diverse. This contribution outlines the history and developments of the scientific essay and discuss some particularly interesting examples from physics and biology.
Archival Materials: Essayism as a Process of Witness, Care and Reckoning
Authors: Šukys Julija
Published: September 2023

This essay examines a writer’s own research and writing processes, the place of archives in the essay, and the essayist’s responsibilities to archival subject. Šukys reads the work of Valeria Luiselli, Svetlana Alexievich, and Assia Djebar through the lens of what she calls ‘archival essayism,’ and she considers the crucial role of travel, oral history, observation, and experience in the production of these and other essayistic texts.
Robert Atwan on the Essay
Authors: Ionescu Arleen
Published: September 2023

This chapter is an edited and curated selection of essayistic responses from an interview conducted by the editors of the volume with Robert Atwan about the essay and his involvement in the field. Atwan writes about his experience editing The Best American Essays series; the essay as a genre; and his thoughts about the contemporary essay and the future of the form.
Kaitlyn Greenidge on the Essay
Authors: Ionescu Arleen
Published: September 2023

Presented in the form of an essay, or a series of essayistic passages in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s voice, this experimental chapter is an edited and curated version of an interview conducted by the editors of the volume with Greenidge. Greenidge reflects on the personal and political in the essay; on anger; and on the future of the essay.
Life Before and Outside the Mission Hospitals
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara Honarmand
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines missionaries’ activities before the construction of and outside the mission hospitals. It shows that dispensaries, itineration tours and adapted existing buildings were viewed as instrumental in establishing contacts with larger numbers of people and thus in preparing the ground for hospital work. It expands existing studies that consider these activities at best ancillary to the development of medical missions and integrates them more fully into the story of the establishment of medical missions.
Missionaries and the Development of Novel Hospital Designs
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara Honarmand
Published: September 2023

This chapter questions the assumtion that mission hospital wards were universally meant to demonstrate Christian order and cleanliness. It does so by examining the architecture of the medical missions and practices facilitated through architecture. Situating the architecture of the hospitals in the context of colonial and hospital architecture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it highlightes that missionaries adapted local architectural forms and elements that were fully caught up in the daily lives of the local people and employed and developed a wide range of construction methods as well as different types of hospital plans and ward designs. This runs in counter to the tendency in Britain and other parts of the West to aim for standardisation among all wards and between hospitals. Missionaries drew on the architecture of Islamic four-part gardens or Persian courtyard houses and incorporated details and ornamentations associated with Mughal-era or used construction methods local to the respective regions and found in domestic spaces such as the Kermani arch.
Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

This book reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century – one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development. The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world.
Gendered Timescapes of Waiting: Patience and Urgency in Novels of Disillusionment
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

Whereas chapter 3 focuses on revolutionary waiting, Chapter 4 shifts to the temporalities of waiting after formal independence in novels from Ghana and India. Drawing on the concept of timescapes as a way to capture the interplay between different temporalities and temporal modes in the text, the chapter analyses Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1970 novel Fragments and Anita Desai’s 1963 novel Cry, the Peacock for their representations of waiting in relation to patience and urgency. While any explicit discussion of gender has been absent from timescape scholarship, the novels themselves emphasize their imbrication—especially in regard to representing patience and urgency—which have been traditionally coded as feminine and masculine respectively. The reinscription of masculine national identity in these postcolonial settings after independence creates additional tensions for the women in the novels, and their embodied dramatizations of patience and urgency disrupt the received narrative of disillusionment and its attendant, underlying association of waiting with passivity and femininity.
Truth, Fiction and Breaking News: Theodore Hook and the Poyais Speculation
Authors: Esterhammer Angela
Published: September 2023

This essay explores the rhetorical and performative features of ‘documentary fiction’ through a conjunction of two news-making phenomena: the bestselling fiction and journalism of Theodore Hook and the Poyais scandal. As editor of the political newspaper John Bull, Hook aligned himself with the paper’s founding claim that ‘the test by which we shall try every thing, is Truth’ (17 December 1820) – yet his fictional tales in Sayings and Doings (1824-8) treat the notion of journalistic ‘truth’ with biting sarcasm. At the same time, the Poyais speculation promoted by the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor proved to be a tragic mixture of geographical fact with fictional exaggeration. With the help of published travel guides and newspaper reports, MacGregor raised hundreds of thousands of pounds from British investors and sent boatloads of would-be colonists to their deaths after they embarked for the country of Poyais in central America – a country that existed only in MacGregor’s imagination. Hook sought to expose Poyais as a fraud in John Bull, while in his Sayings and Doings it became a metaphor for the pretensions of late-Georgian society. These texts draw attention to the tenuous boundary between fact and fantasy in the 1820s and the rhetorical and marketing strategies that were used to obscure this boundary.
The Surfaces of History: Scott’s Turn, 1820
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: September 2023

With the publication of Ivanhoe (published December 1819, dated 1820) the career of “the Author of Waverley” took a well-noted turn. The turn was topical, from the recent past of modern Scottish history to the remote past of medieval English history. It was also technical, from a realism that modelled the inner dialectic of historical process to an antiquarian and spectacular fixation on period surfaces. Approaching Scott’s turn through anachronism, a signature technique of historical fiction, this essay understands it as a modulation from the representation of history as deep structural change to a representation of history as mere formal difference. The Elizabethan romance Kenilworth (published January 1821), the essay’s main case study, relocates anachronism from the marker of an organic relation between past and present to a difference within the past that collapses its difference from the present. Rendering (under the sign of Shakespeare) history as literary history, and its content as spectacle and performance, Kenilworth glosses its own work of remediation and opens its own ideological function to interrogation by raising it to the surface of the text.
Keyword: Power
Authors: Mee Jon
Published: September 2023

‘Power’ is introduced using Thomas De Quincey’s famous distinction between power and knowledge, which sets literature up in opposition to science and technology. This keyword makes the case that ‘power’ was more often used in relation to the ‘machinery’ question that Maxine Berg and others have shown was a hot topic for the 1820s. Looking at the controversy surrounding the statue to James Watt proposed for Westminster Abbey in 1824, it thinks about the power of invention as a key issue for the 1820s that extended beyond narrowly literary definitions.
Regional News in ‘Peacetime’: The Dumfries and Galloway Courier in the 1820s
Authors: McKeever Gerard Lee
Published: September 2023

On 28 January 1817, the Dumfries and Galloway Courier led with an editorial explaining that Rev. Henry Duncan was handing editorial control to John McDiarmid, then arriving from the newly-established Scotsman in Edinburgh. In that notice, Duncan outlined the challenges faced by the paper, noting ‘the increasing difficulty of conducting a Newspaper in times of peace and domestic embarrassment’ and contending that ‘in such a period as the present […] the part of those who conduct the vehicle of intelligence becomes more arduous and complicated.’ This chapter addresses the response of McDiarmid’s Courier to this newly ‘complicated’ newspaper milieu. Updating longstanding tensions about literary register in the press for the 1820s, McDiarmid’s Courier took on a newly lyrical voice, not least in a commitment to history, tales, topography and other subjects intelligible under the category of ‘local description’. Periodicals like the Courier played a distinctive place-making role for an emergent world-system predicated in print, with regional space emerging from interactions between local, national and global cultures. However, the 1820s Courier also demonstrated an emphatic commitment to its locale that is characteristic of regional periodicals at large and which underlines the role of the literary imagination in the work of geography.
Keyword: Liberal
Authors: Gardner John
Published: September 2023

‘Liberal’ was one of the defining terms of the 1820s, but it was evoked in a wide range of clashing contexts, connoting variously old-fashioned paternalism, an unevenly emerging economic consensus, reforming zeal, a wide educational purview and smug blinkeredness. This discussion explores these contradictions through examining the term in relation to debates about the spread of and access to knowledge and the emergence of a self-consciously middle-class political constituency, paying particular attention to the expression of these currents in the short-lived literary periodical The Liberal.
(Re)settling Poetry: The Culture of Reprinting and the Poetics of Emigration in the 1820s Southern Settler Colonies
Authors: Atkin Lara
Published: September 2023

Poetry played a vital role in establishing the sense of community inherent in the settler-colonialism of the nineteenth century. This essay contends that localising the poetry of emigration to reflect the conditions of colonial settlement was more than just a question of cultural replication and adaptation. Drawing on a previously unexamined archive of original and reprinted verse from the newspapers of the Cape Colony and Australia (Van Dieman’s Land and New South Wales), this paper reveals the work that reprinted emigration verse did in the labour of community building in which the settler press was actively and vocally engaged during the 1820s. By restoring these poems to their original publication contexts alongside lead articles, correspondence and advertising, this chapter argues that metropolitan emigration poetry could be re-framed by canny colonial newspaper editors through editorial headnotes and judicious juxtaposition. It shows that editors frequently encouraged colonists to read metropolitan emigration poetry against the grain as part of a deliberately constructed counter-discourse that drew the attention of colonial and metropolitan readers to the disjuncture between metropolitan representations of emigration and the material realities of colonial life.
The Decade of the Dialogue
Authors: Fulford Tim
Published: September 2023

One of the defining characteristics of the 1820s was the emergence into cultural authority of the writers who we today think of as first-generation Romantics. Finding themselves newly respected for formerly neglected writing, they sought to rechannel what they had said in the 1790s for the present moment. To do so, they developed a new-model discourse – the dialogue – indebted to William Wordsworth’s The Excursion, but primarily focussed around Robert Southey’s conception of a revealing conversation between past and present. Southey was pre-empted by the appearance of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824), which was soon followed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) and Humphry Davy’s Salmonia (1828) before Southey brought out his Colloquies (1829). These dialogues often modelled for readers how they should receive the writing of the author and his contemporaries while presenting knowledge as a process of mutual questioning between present and past, rather than as the assemblage of facts or formulation of abstract principles the poets associated with a liberal utilitarian hegemony.
Weird Mothers: The Feminist Uncanniness of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Topos
Authors: Walldén Rea
Published: September 2023

In this chapter Walldén explores Angelidi’s feminist work through an avant-garde practice of uncanniness, exemplified by the film Topos (1988). It reveals a very particular side of feminist aesthetics connected to the practice of the avantgarde and secondly, it relates this connection to Angelidi’s personal method in creating the uncanny. This idea, thoroughly developed in this chapter,
condenses the two separate core features of feminism and the avant-garde into an extended mechanism of subjectivity, uncanniness and experimentation.
‘Every Element in a Film Narrates’: The Complex Language of Heterogeneity in Idées Fixes / Dies Irae as a (Feminist) Critique to the Practice of Methodological Categorisation in Avant-garde Film History
Authors: Ieropoulos Fil
Published: September 2023

Ieropoulos discusses the feminist discourse articulated by heterogenous avant-garde methodologies in Angelidi’s first film, Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977). With reference to Adams P. Sitney’s seminal book Visionary Film (1974), Ieropoulos recognises a convergence of antithetical tendencies, making the film both poetic and structural. The two aesthetical methods, despite contrasting each other’s purposes, are brilliantly combined in the film. The poetic style allures the audience into an elusive experience, and at the same time the materialistic structure keeps viewers critical and vigilant. In an elaborate analysis of the film, Ieropoulos reveals how this opposition works by reflecting on Angelidi’s structures of the avant-garde.
Childhood, Desire and Identity in The Hours
Authors: Adamou Christina
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, Adamou looks at the desires and fears shaping one’s identity as the core issue behind the general thematical scheme of the film. She contemplates Angelidi’s cinematic representation of growing up and shaping an identity from childhood to adulthood. With reference to Donald Winnicott’s ideas on the subject, she uses the concept of the objectified child, corresponding to the good or bad child, and adults’ desire for control, violence and sex. Through her examination of the content of the film, Adamou reaches a point where mothering and nurturing oneself seem to be, in Angelidi’s images, the most crucial psychological tasks we can undertake in our lifetime.
Erased Ghost: the Deriddean Spectrality of Angelidi’s Signs in Idées Fixes / Dies Irae
Authors: Mazarakis Ioannis
Published: September 2023

In this chapter Mazarakis, sees the work of Angelidi as an apt illustration of what Jacques Derrida calls a writing-under-erasure scheme. He presents an alternative reading of Angelidi’s methods on defamiliarization and the uncanny, by relating them to the Derridean concepts of sous rature and spectrality. The deconstructive method of erasing terms – like this – reveals the instability of their semantics, and at the same time the expansion of their meaning. What is written and crossed out is both present and absent; it is a presence of the absence of meaning. Interpretations that ignore the unlimited nature of signification are doomed to fail and the simultaneity of cinematic signs as present and absent becomes more obvious in an ambiguous ontological state, where Angelidi’s aesthetics reflect its spectrality.
Antoinetta Angelidi: The Visual Gaze
Authors: Rigopoulou Calliope
Published: September 2023

In this chapter of the volume, a less well-known aspect of Angelidi’s work is presented for the first time. Calliope (Pepy) Rigopolou, in her unique style, presents the parallel and less acknowledged career of Angelidi as a visual artist. Referring to a time period of almost fifty years, Rigopoulou presents the variety of techniques and materials Angelidi has used to make various artworks such as paintings, collages, objects, performances and projection installations. Drawing from archive material, interviews with the artist, as well as her personal memories, Rigopoulou guides the reader through this obscure part of Angelidi’s creativity.
Interview with Antoinetta Angelidi
Authors: Walldén Rea
Published: September 2023

The chapter presents an interview of Antoinetta Angelidi with a style which is more like a conversation that sometimes becomes interactive, and at other points words and thoughts flow as in an inner monologue. In this interview Angelidi provides important information about her methods, her work with actors, the way she
handles music, sound and noise, as well as her personal fantasies, and her ‘fixed ideas’ which become converted into exceptional images
The Meanings of the Sacred
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

Over the course of a mere two centuries following the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia (1463), scholars such as ʿAlī-dada al-Būsnawī, ʿAbdullah al-Būsnawī and Ḥasan Imām-zāda participated in the creation, upholding and maintenance of the Ottoman Empire’s early modern spatial culture focused on Mecca and Medina. This chapter focuses on meanings given to Mecca and Medina in a range of classical genres such as the fada’il and awa’il. This spatial discourse was created to encourage and inspire people to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and ziyāra and mujāwara in Medina. In this way, these treatises also contributed to the devotional culture of the period, as diverse as it was and marked by imperial, Sufi or scholarly discourses. Their mediative role was layered: between the believers and the transcendent, royal families and holy places, and between early modern Ottomans and their intellectual and spiritual predecessors.
Dis/Connections
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the post-WWII Hajj writings in the works of Hasan Ljubunčić, Husein Đozo, Fejzulah Hadžibajrić and Zuko Džumhur. When studying the discourses on the Hajj in the socialist period, it is possible to discern patterns of dis/connection towards the ritual, as well as coreligionists and fellow pilgrims. As the state framework tightened the media through which the Hajj experience could be expressed and interpreted, the focal point of the Hajj narrative increasingly became about the Yugoslav Muslims themselves. Palestine emerges as a present absence, a disturbing geography on the Hajj route which was visited rarely and simultaneously symbolised both the spiritual unity of Muslims and their perceived weakness and fragmentation.
Bosniaks between Homeland and Holy Land
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter explains how from the highly publicised Hajj journey of 1994 to the annual pilgrimages of the postwar period announced on the local websites of tiny municipalities across Bosnia, the Hajj has obtained unprecedented urgency. The very act of this journey and the performed ritual during the wartime presented a stark break with the past, a very physical and bodily testament of obedience to God, and a straightforward connection to other Muslims who could help Bosnia. This chapter analyses how Bosnia was placed in the center of the sacred geography. And although the rhetoric of the Bosnian struggle has subsided over the postwar years, the centrality of both the holy places and Bosnia for the imagination of Islam as it is lived or supposed to be practiced remains persistent in the Hajj writings.
H.D. and Spirituality
Authors: Vetter Lara
Published: September 2023

More than any other modernist, H.D. made of religion, occultism, mythology, spirituality, spiritualism, and paranormal experience a life-long study.  Her breadth and depth of knowledge about these subjects are unparalleled among her peers, her appetite voracious. Her personal library contained an astounding array of books on a range of subjects, including Eastern and Western mysticism; Swedenborgianism; the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, tales of the Buddha, the Midrash, and the Apocrypha; theosophy and theories of Atlantis; Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, American Indian, and Greek mythology; spiritualism and ghosts; reincarnation; magic, astrology; Tarot, prophecy, witchcraft, fortune telling, cheirognomy, and cheiromancy; parapsychology; Hermeticism; angels and saints; Gnosticism; Katharism and the Kabbalah; and the Amish and Moravian sects.  Offering readings of her poetry and prose engaged with spirituality, this comprehensive overview traces the trajectory of her intensive study of heterodox spirituality from birth to the end of her life, represents the extraordinary breadth of her knowledge, and treats everyday aspects of her practices, including the ways in which the sexual and spiritual are intertwined.
Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence
Authors: Mutter Matthew
Published: September 2023

This essay traces a tension between two visions of reality in Jean Toomer’s Cane. The first is a secular, disenchanting disposition, attuned to the relentless materiality of the world and tormented by the apparent dominion of racism and violence. The second is an eschatological orientation that finds signals of transcendence in a world otherwise characterized by brute material power. The essay argues that Toomer’s governing figure for that eschatological vision is the “face,” and that an intimation of the “face” of the real is analogous to the recognition of the world’s beauty. Cane, the essay contends, does not vacillate incongruously between a sentimental mysticism and a secular political realism; rather, it imagines a spiritual ontology that assimilates and overcomes the pressure of material violence.
Modernism and Political Theology
Authors: Andrews Charles
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the complex and contentious field known as ‘political theology’ can be a valuable resource for modernist studies. Political theologians assert that the nation-state retains an aura of enchantment even in supposedly secular modern times where nationalism, capitalism, and militarism remain alluring. Modernism offers a unique site of cultural clashes—between enchantment and disenchantment, among competing utopian visions, and in experiments with aesthetic newness—and modernist works that challenge the allures of the state may be understood as creative acts of theopolitical imagination. Using D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner as case studies, this chapter advocates for productive dialogue between modernism and political theology.
Modernism, Abstraction and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint
Authors: Sim Lorraine
Published: September 2023

Focusing on the writings and sculpture of the British artist Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), with some comparison to the work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), this chapter discusses the intersections among modernism, abstraction, and spirituality. While the genesis of abstract art was clearly tied to spiritual ideas current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that relationship has been suppressed in art history and modernist studies, an elision that has had significant implications for the critical reception of women artists such as Hepworth and af Klint. Variously describing herself as a pagan, a Christian Scientist, an Anglican Catholic, and an atheist, religious faith was central to Hepworth’s sculptural vocabulary and convictions about the affirmative potential of modern sculpture. Similarly, af Klint’s ground-breaking cycle of 193 works, collectively titled The Paintings for the Temple , was quite literally guided by her spiritualism and mediumship. Each bold, visionary, and uncompromising artists, the chapter illustrates how the spiritual underpinnings of Hepworth’s sculpture and af Klint’s painting disrupt canonical narratives about formalism and modernist innovation.
The Modernist Grail Quest
Authors: Radford Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that for the technically experimental interwar writer Mary Butts, as for less stylistically vanguard novelists such as Arthur Machen and John Cowper Powys, Grail lore offered the most compelling means of exploring an array of numinous experiences, feelings, and phenomena. Standard readings of European modernist engagements with the Grail frequently cite a limited and predictable cluster of canonical male authors, such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. In this ‘Authorized Version’ of the modernist Grail quest – synonymous with recent research by Jonathan Ullyot and Leon Surette – the vessel, instead of offering access to a domain of sacred signs, only highlights a want of faith in providential patterning. Scylla Taverner, dubbed ‘damsel’ of the ‘Grail’ in Mary Butts’s 1928 novel Armed with Madness, concedes that while ‘faith was necessary for the knowledge of God’, very few people ‘wanted to believe any more’. It is ironic that the main protagonist appears to lend weight to this ‘Authorized Version’ given that Butts’s oeuvre provides a radically contrasting vision and approach. This chapter shows that Scylla’s opinion is belied by the conceptual verve with which British interwar literature embraces Arthuriana.
The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Authors: Lewis Pericles
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, Pericles Lewis demonstrates how Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain addresses a different side to the modernist preoccupation with myth. Lewis investigates in detail the burial of the dead in Mann’s masterpiece with reference to an earlier study of works by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and several other ‘high’ modernist authors. Lewis argues that Mann sees the novel, as a genre, as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing: it can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, which may or may not accord with official sentiment. After reviewing the role of burial in The Magic Mountain and the works of some of Mann’s contemporaries, Lewis reveals how this novel can help us understand recent critical debates about the role of religion or spirituality in modernist literature. The dialectics of Mann’s greatest novel remain relevant a century later in a still only partially secular age, in which we struggle to reconcile reverence for the dead with a sometimes-forlorn faith in historical progress.
Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism and the Problem of Other Minds
Authors: Spitzer Jennifer
Published: September 2023

Rebecca West is not typically identified with spiritualism or occultism. Yet West’s fictions are filled with otherworldly events, apparitions, telepathic readings, and acts of spiritual communion between the living and the dead. Both The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Harriet Hume (1928) portray women protagonists who behave like spiritual mediums or telepaths, projecting themselves into the minds and bodies of other characters. West’s interest in spiritual mediumship and telepathy are tied to an investment in the hidden powers of the psyche and its capacity for interpsychic exchange across physical, social, and psychic boundaries. In this chapter, I argue that The Return of the Soldier and Harriet Hume join the language of modern spiritualism to an investigation of consciousness, in which characters distanced by gender, class, and experience are linked intersubjectively. Yet, as I will also go on to show, the fantasies of psychic access that these two novels present also point reflexively to the potential for unreliability consonant with modernist epistemologies. That is, the optimism about the ability to access other minds and to render those minds transparent is tempered by a modernist sensibility that emphasizes the fallibility of human perception and the limits of subjective knowledge.
Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change
Authors: Callison Jamie
Published: September 2023

This chapter uses the example of the twentieth-century retreat movement to challenge several assumptions about the relationship between secularisation and literary modernism. It shows how institutional religions – in this case of the Church of England – responded to processes of religious change at work through the first half of the twentieth century. The silent retreats developed by the Anglo-Catholic Association for Promoting Retreats (APR) represent an attempt on the part of institutional religion to draw on (and to draw in) the contemporary interest in mysticism and spirituality and to provide it with a religious home within the church. The development of a new religious practice, namely the rise of mass participation in lay retreat, is considered alongside developments in twentieth-century religious poetry as represented by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The chapter argues that transformations in religious orthodoxy are as an important a development in the emerging relationship between modernism and religion as the rise of new religions and the well-documented prominence of no religion.
Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the intersection of liminal spaces and ritual practices in a diverse body of texts from Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison. This chapter draws upon the scholarship of ritual in relation to material religion from Jane Harrison, Kathleen Stewart and Manuel A. Vásquez to explore how these writers illustrate the ways ritual is not tied to transcendence but known in relation to familiar places and experience. Goodison, Hulme and Mitchison have different religious positionings themselves, but all engage with religious tropes and traditions in their work. The chapter engages with a variety of ritual modes, from Mitchison’s imagined reconstruction of ancient history to Hulme’s evocation of Māori traditions, to Goodison’s invocations of Jamaican syncretism. Rivers, shorelines, mountains and the built environment become places for ritualized encounters that speak to the intersection of transcendence and immanence, of alterity and recognition that forms the particular modes of spirituality in this work. These writers have somewhat liminal positions in relationship to modernist studies, although all of them have engaged with the stylistic and genre innovations associated with literary Modernism. Analysis of their work contributes to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the workings of religion in modernism.
‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry
Authors: Bahun Sanja
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues for an approach to modernist production and religion that more emphatically considers ethnographic and experiential particulars—gestures, traditions, customs, material forms, and patterns of behaviour—and treats religions in their inherent on-site interaction. It focuses on Constantine Cavafy’s opus to explore the modernist engagement with different belief systems and their interrelation over longue durée and the effects of the moments of belief transition on embodied experiences of those living through them. Egyptiote Cavafy activates in his poetry poly-faith and interreligious cultural accretions and repeatedly returns to the key moments of integration, transformation, and disintegration of communities and belief systems at his home-site—those in which the Egyptian belief system interacted with the religious beliefs and practices of ancient Hellenes and Judaism, then with Christianity and Islam, and further, the transitional moment in which he himself lived, where the varied models of belief and unbelief interrelated and attached themselves to the political future of Egypt. His poems are read as multi-framed palimpsests of mythic, historical, and religious texts that articulate the varied models of belief-knowledge production and the structure of belief-affects, everyday practices, and bodily reactions that accompany them across more than twenty centuries
‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom
Authors: Mitchell Jennifer
Published: September 2023

From a very young age, Stephen Gordon, protagonist of Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), is drawn to religious imagery as a means of proving her devotion to the object of her affection. Stephen’s reliance on corporeal suffering as a means of proving her worth and devotion—and as a means of finding fulfilment in those rituals—ties together notions of religious sacrifice and masochistic pleasure, setting the stage for Stephen’s subsequent reliance on religious suffering as a means of personal empowerment. As the novel progresses, Stephen continuously incorporates religious imagery to navigate an alternatively tumultuous opposition: between feeling singular and isolated and feeling representative of a collective. Stephen’s recurrent reliance on religion, in this regard, is one example of Hall’s treatment of the subject throughout her canon, wherein such imagery facilitates experimentations with masochistic pleasure and subject formation. Incorporating and expanding on the term ‘masochristianity’ that Amanda Paxton coins in her book on Victorian devotional poetry, this chapter explores the erotics inherent in the connection between Christian ‘self-denial’ and queer masochistic pleasure in The Well of Loneliness while also considering the significance of Christian models of masochism and martyrdom in Hall’s life more broadly.
The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes
Authors: Hadjiyiannis Christos
Published: September 2023

Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood is salient with Christian references, images, and symbols. Although religion is prominently at its centre, however, it is also a very unorthodox and at times blasphemous text. This chapter reads Nightwood with some Byzantine Christian texts that commemorate that lives of ‘holy fools’ and of transgender women. It focuses specifically on the Life of Symeon the Fool by the seventh-century Bishop Leontios of Napolis to argue that, although Nightwood is most certainly not a Christian text, it shares with this and other older texts an ambivalence towards narrative time and gender and other social boundaries. Such an approach to Barnes’s modernism offers a different way into Nightwood and an opportunity to square the novel’s religious mood with its irreverent transgressions, its deep Christian symbolism with its torrential language of extremes. Read with some Byzantine texts, Barnes’s misfits become part of a longer tradition of unreal characters whose freakishness is both engrossing and meaningful. And so to the long list of religious sources lurking behind anglophone modernism, we must add Byzantine texts that commemorate the lives of misfits.
First Ideas on Art, Being Moved and Criticism
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

Works of art do not produce new knowledge, but can intensify the awareness of general truths. For that, one needs heightened attention. To stay with an artwork, to look closely and long, one needs words and thus thoughts. The art work is a whetstone for thinking. Wrapping the work in words gives it a chance to engage with a spectator and to connect it with the world.
Double-Speak
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

Art is always made in (and sometimes for) a circle of intimi, of 'first readers', who know the creator, the genesis history and context of the work, and can recognise material and references that remain unknown to the viewer or reader later on. This implies that a work always speaks 'double’, and even may have a private addressee in addition to the public. This intimate reading, which precedes the moment when the work exists publicly, in the world, continues to haunt all subsequent interpretations, and motivates the 'biographical interest' in the creator. This argument is developed using Paul Valéry's essay Eupalinos and the theatre scene from Hamlet.
Visits Paid to the ‘Imaginary Museum of Musical Works’: David Lynch and the Musical Canon
Authors: Niedermüller Peter
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on musical works from the Western canon (‘serious music’ as one could put it, following Adorno), as they were used in the films by David Lynch. It argues that even though Lynch chooses his sounds and music from a wider variety of sources, he also goes back to Western art music. This chapter taggles the musicological conversations that exist between Lynch’s films and the musical canon. It proposes a motif essential to Lynch’s films, one that is about the realm between the physical and the metaphysical. By way of his vision and his musical choices David Lynch raises questions about the entanglements and limitations of these realms.
The W/hole David Lynch: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Authors: Verevis Constantine
Published: September 2023

This chapter appeals to the w/hole David Lynch – his open set of films and artworks – to argue that those who initially objected to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) thought that the part (the prequel film) would close out the set (the first and second seasons of the television series) when in actuality it worked only to extend the mystery. If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me frustrated its initial audience – especially its Twin Peaks fan base – then this might be because the experience of (serial) repetition is displaced from a closed set or sequence of texts – the connection and continuation of a film prequel and television series – to an open w/hole. In a move away from a holistic (totalising) understanding of sequelisation, one that aligns direct intentionality with an industrial practice that fulfils the promise of another episode, this chapter argues that Lynch constructed his prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, through a systematic rewriting akin to that of a secret remake: the logic of a ruinous prequel.
That Gum You Like Isn’t Going to Come Back in Style: Twin Peaks 1990–1/2017, Nostalgia and the End of (Golden Age) Television
Authors: Zywietz Bernd
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses three interlinked approaches to explain, not Twin Peaks: The Return per se, but a personal relationship with David Lynch’s show. None of these three approaches or perspectives accounts for every single challenging aspect. However, as they are connected via the concept of nostalgia, this chapter is a brief illustration of the value an auto-ethnographic approach could have for analytical purposes in film and media studies.
Tracing the Lost Highway : Mythical Topography in David Lynch’s Los Angeles Trilogy
Authors: Stiglegger Marcus
Published: September 2023

This chapter understands David Lynch’s use of the city of Los Angeles as the creation of a multifaceted ‘hauntological’ and mythical space – a world where realities overlap, where the sacred and the profane meet in performative realms, a mythical topography. In the first section, this chapter defines different categories and concepts of space in narrative cinema. Then it specifies the design and use of a mythical space within a film’s mise-en-scène. Finally, it shows how this concept of the mythical space in film becomes one of the most significant elements in David Lynch’s LA-trilogy: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire.