While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.

New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield identified as a cosmopolite and ‘a stranger – an alien’; she staked her claim to London citizenship through writing the city, while asserting her colonial status and co-opting Maori identity. These multiple identities were playfully self-fashioned, but Mansfield was also interpolated as an outsider by the British state. Mansfield was resident in London during a period of decisive change in immigration politics and policy: from the Aliens Act of 1905 and its classification and expulsion of ‘undesirable’ alien bodies, to wartime legislation designating certain aliens as enemies, and (re)introducing passports, registers, identity books, travel permits, labour permits, and internment, to the declaration that British subject status could be lost by women who married a foreign man, to the expansion of wartime immigration controls in peacetime. This chapter considers literary representations of colonial migration and displacement in and around London, how these shifted during the Edwardian period, and then again during wartime, and how such literary representations shaped and were shaped by a broader national discourse (and discourse of nationality).