In chapter three, Andrew Kalaidjian explores the idea of cultural renewal by rethinking its efficacy in literary texts. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries some critics and artists, such as James Joyce, regarded Revival writers and artists as purveyors of a romantic vision of Ireland and interpreted their work as efforts to return to a bygone era of cultural purity. While some latter-day revivalist writers, such as Flann O’Brien and Brian Friel saw the literary revival as compromised by Yeatsian romanticism, others sought in W. B. Yeats’s work a way to move forward without romanticizing the past. The chapter considers literary and cultural texts of the late twentieth century – including Seamus Heaney’s poetry, brochures published by the national turf company Bord Na Móna, the plays of the Field Day Company – as resources for writers in the later twentieth century who sought a foothold in the past during times of sectarian violence.

The modernist encounter with classical tragedy challenges received notions about tragic form and tragic sensibility: that it is incompatible with modernity (George Steiner) and that it is primarily a European/Eurocentric legacy. In engaging with classical Greek tragedy, modernist writers and theatre-makers (from T. S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Ezra Pound, Edward Gordon Craig, and Isadora Duncan, to George Abyad, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and the later postcolonial iterations of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona) create a set of relationships that radically rewrite ideas of influence and tradition and gesture towards an understanding of tragedy as a form of theatricality rather than as a play-text. This theatricality, read in conjunction with primitivism and orientalism, is not a quest for authenticity or for the lost humanism of the classics but helps to construct an experimental laboratory in translation, in performance, and in adaptation. From the Cambridge Ritualists to the later postcolonial readings, modernism helps to revision tragedy as part of world theatre.

This epilogue offers a rumination on the continuing place of the modernist theatre in the plays and performance practices of the latter twentieth century and beyond. It begins with the aesthetic disputes staged within Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, written and set at the cusp of the transition from the modern to the postmodern. The shadow of modernism looms large over Hansberry’s characters, just as it does over many of the plays and productions to follow. From the evergreen influence of the avant-gardists to the long-lasting legacy of a figure like Bertolt Brecht to the perpetual restagings and radical rewriting of works by Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg, the figures and aesthetics of the modernist era permeate and help give shape to the postmodern. Far from a retrograde revolution, modernism may best be regarded as a still-living mode of aesthetic and theatrical practice.

The academic concept of ‘intermediality’ presents a challenge to traditional artistic boundaries, offering a refreshed sense of the relationship between different kinds of media. This chapter relates such ideas to modernism, considering the work of a group of writers who showed a fascination with the stage but primarily achieved fame in genres other than performed drama. It begins by examining a tension within Ezra Pound’s work: his desire to engage with the stage and yet to dismiss the significance of theatre. The discussion then references the work of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, and Kōbō Abe. Ultimately, although ‘intermediality’ is sometimes assumed to apply more specifically to a later historical era of advanced media technology, this chapter shows how intermedial thinking can apply productively to modernist cultural products of the earlier twentieth century.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from ship to shore in order to explore metropolitan writing that captured the distinctive urban-littoral spaces of the Victorian port city. Forging connections between the urban ethnography of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, with accounts of ‘sailortown’ and its attendant ‘waterside characters’ in novels by Herman Melville (Redburn: His First Voyage), Charles Dickens (Our Mutual Friend), and James Joyce (Ulysses), this chapter reveals the urban waterfront to be an important edge space that functioned as both a working-class habitat shaped by waterside industry and an imaginative locus for a range of nineteenth-century writers. The analysis demonstrates that despite its physical location on the edge of the city, and its peripheral status within literary history, the watery city was a site for the production of new narratives of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter studies relations between Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their respective camps, from the early twentieth century through the composers’ later years in California. Beginning with an early moment in which their relations were characterized by curiosity and mutual respect, it sketches the emergence in the 1920s of an opposition between Schoenberg’s expressionism and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. It then examines how this opposition was reinterpreted and codified (if not ossified) in T. W. Adorno’s influential Philosophy of New Music, and in his subsequent writings on both composers. Adorno described Schoenberg’s music as a seismograph that registers tremors of feeling; this chapter reworks Adorno’s metaphor in order to propose that the Schoenberg–Stravinsky–Adorno triad might register tectonic movements of a much larger modernity. Engaging with recent literature on all three figures, it suggests some ways their work might relate to modern regimes of racial difference.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

Schoenberg’s music has always attracted the avid attention of critics. Some ridiculed his music, especially at first, while others came to respond favourably to its modernist demands. This chapter explores trends in the critical reception of Schoenberg as they have varied across time and place, from his initial entry into the Viennese music world in the early 1900s, through the increasingly harsh, often antisemitic rejections he endured in the 1920s and 1930s, to his re-evaluation in the post-war years, particularly in the United States. In addition, it highlights the composer’s reactions to some of the harsher criticism he received.

Since their discovery in the 1960s, Webern’s early compositions have been shrouded in myths. Woven into the rich tapestry of their reception history are many misconceptions and clichés that require careful unpicking. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it examines the methodological criteria and discursive strategies based on which Webern’s early work has been made the subject of scholarly inquiry. Secondly, it unravels how prevailing understandings of Webern’s early work implicitly theorise earliness as a historiographical category and inherently articulate ideas about origins and beginnings. In so doing, this chapter situates the monograph in relation to the multiplicity of interpretations offered by generations of Webern scholarship, while highlighting the heuristic potential that the category of earliness holds, in relation to Webern’s early work and beyond.

The Introduction makes the case for privileging idealism in our accounts of Zola’s thought and writing, and, in turn for recovering the fundamental role it plays as a cornerstone of naturalism’s self-image. Exploring naturalism’s relationship to its chief antagonist can open up new perspectives on two thorny critical questions. First, how to grapple with the gap between naturalist theory, in all its dogmatism, and the experimental, even contradictory, nature of naturalist writing in practice. Second, how to make sense of Zola’s own eventual destination as the author of utopian novels (1899-1902), where the rhetoric of idealism, of the dream, surfaces as the best expression of the writer’s political commitment. Against prevailing accounts of Zola’s ‘late’ fiction as a product of subterranean, emotional, or instinctual impulses, the Introduction reframes Zola’s idealism as a strategic political and intellectual project.

The story of how Joyce moved from an apparently unassuming strain of naturalism in his early fiction to the kaleidoscopic deconstruction of language and form in his final work, is one of the great arcs of world literature. Joyce produced landmark publications that would disrupt and re-imagine the writing of fiction across the globe, while remaining centered on the social conditions of early twentieth-century Dublin. His achievement is staggering: he re-wrote the terms of engagement for modern short fiction, the Bildungsroman, and the novel; he made a critical intervention in the Irish Literary Revival and became a touchstone of modernism; he invented new modes of naturalism and narration; he re-mapped classical and mythical influence on literary form; and, finally, he created his own riotous subversion of the English language. Associated with the heyday of European modernism, rooted in Irish history and culture, engaging in anti-imperial politics, with frank and challenging depictions of bodies and sex, Joyce’s oeuvre, despite censorship and snubbing, has had colossal influence over the past century and more.

The conclusion returns to Charlotte Brontë to consider why Victorian authors might have preferred to explore pre-reflective experiences through episodes of getting lost rather than through the technique of stream-of-consciousness narration. The conclusion also addresses more directly the disturbing resemblance of strategic confusion to the willful ignorance that enables white people to uphold oppressive norms.

A legacy is something inherited by a successor, and in Boulez’s case what he handed down to posterity (his writings, activities and compositions) evolved in complex ways from his own early mentors and influences, particularly Messiaen, along with what the young Boulez determined to be the essential innovations in works that had the greatest unfulfilled potential in the 1940s and early 1950s. Boulez’s own works were naturally part of his legacy but in his later years changes in musical fashion meant that his accomplishments as conductor, writer, teacher of performers and institutional figurehead provided an even more potent example to potential emulators than his actual compositions. His unambiguously modernist sensibility and concern to place serious music at the heart of the prevailing culture brought a remarkable coherence to bear on the rich diversity of his life and work.

This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

Outlines the aims and rationale of this guide to The Rite of Spring, sketching the book’s structure across four parts: The Paris Premiere; Contexts; Performance and Interpretation; and Scholarship. Situates the volume within a scholarly context, exploring how it relates to the enormous quantity of published literature on The Rite of Spring – a literature that can be difficult to navigate, especially for newcomers to the work. Also proposes a new, historically sensitive way of approaching the original 1913 production, combining historical and musical perspectives with a focus on the ballet’s intense corporeal impact as noted by some of the first critics inside the theatre.

The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.