Olga Tabachnikova examines Chekhov as a mirror for the transformation of British culture over the twentieth century, from the Bloomsbury Circle’s natural affinity for Chekhov’s prose, to the uphill, against-the-grain climb of the plays onto the British stage, delineating the gradual emergence of Chekhov in the cultural consciousness as a kind of honorary Englishman, whose understated manner, modesty, reserve, and reticence made him the least un-foreign of the Russian literary titans.

Literary and filmic renditions of war are often organized around expressions of heightened sensation and aptitude. Sensation functions as a kind of other or alternative to trauma, a way of figuring the extreme experience of war in terms that, like trauma, separate the soldier from the ordinary citizen. At the same time, civilian texts by writers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Kurt Vonnegut have explored the way sensation and other forms of exaltation, including the sublime, might also characterize the civilian experience of war. This chapter explores the close connection between the motifs of sublimity and sensation in war with other related principles that have characterized twentieth-century literature, considering both combatant and civilian texts. The chapter argues that the moral culture of the twentieth century requires that we acknowledge the shared experience of war across combat and non-combatant lines, and second, that the slippage between these two, and the rendering of exaltation as a value that can be abstracted from war, carries its own moral risks.

In a parallel way, when we move to consider Keynes’s political views and involvement, we find a similar reliance upon the privileged networks of his intimates. In particular the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Keynes, as the two figures of real genius in Bloomsbury, is explored – with insights on the impact that her tract Three Guineas had upon his (much-discussed) memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’. Keynes’s political stance is also examined through his proprietorial influence upon the left-wing weekly the New Statesman, of which Kingsley Martin (a close friend of the late Frank Ramsey) was now the presiding editor. What Keynes wrote about uncertainty in decision-making was as relevant to choices in foreign policy as to the macro-economic universe that he surveyed in his General Theory.

It has long been a puzzle to reconcile two well-known facts: first that the Economic Consequences became the received version on the left for a contemptuous view of Lloyd George; second, that Keynes came to cooperate so closely with Lloyd George in seeking to revive the Liberal party in the 1920s. Their own relationship had begun during the First World War, when Keynes was first drawn into advising the Treasury on key policy issues from 1914. It was in these years that Keynes benefited from the sponsorship of Edwin Montagu, a key minister in the Liberal government. This chapter shows how much Lloyd George’s initial hostility to Keynes on economic policy was the product of a cultural clash between them; also how this came to be resolved (at least temporarily) when Keynes picked up economic insights from Lloyd George’s untutored intuitions. And the chapter draws on the memoir ‘Dr Melchior’, composed by Keynes for his Bloomsbury friends, to illustrate the way that – almost against his own prejudices – he became captivated by Lloyd George’s intuitive mastery of the political process.

This chapter considers three concepts that were central to popular articulations of quantum physics: wave–particle duality, the function of observation in Erwin Schrödinger’s wave-mechanics, and the idea that physics describes an insubstantial world, opposed to the world of common sense. Taking these concepts in turn, it shows that in Woolf’s novels, as well as in scientific radio broadcasts, in the popular science writing of G. P. Thomson, Arthur Eddington, and James Jeans, and in modernist culture more broadly, they become associated with the idea that identity is multiple. The first section, ‘Rays around a Point: Wave–Particle Duality’, examines a passage from The Wavesin relation to accounts of G. P. Thomson’s electron-diffraction experiment, which confirmed the wave–particle duality of matter. The second section, ‘“Its Beam Strikes Me”: Schrödinger’s Wave Equation’, considers the role of observation in limiting identity in The Waves and The Years, identifying resonances with popular accounts of Erwin Schrödinger’s wave function. Tthe last section, ‘“We Ripple in Light”: Insubstantial Selves’, examines the interplay between solidity and insubstantiality in Woolf’s novels and in contemporary popular science.

This chapter takes a broad view of evolutionary theory, exploring the divergent theories that abounded in the modernist period. The first section, ‘Tigers under Our Hats: Alternative Evolutionary Identities’, focuses on comparative anatomy, demonstrating that Between the Acts highlights the resemblances between human bodies and animal forms – and, in doing so, decentres a universalized upper-class, human identity. The second section, ‘“Embryo Lives”: Recapitulation Theory’, considers Woolf’s representations of individual development in The Waves, ‘On Being Ill’, and Orlando – specifically her focus on the continuity between the self and its hereditary past, and on the multiplicities of bodily identity. It demonstrates that the central conceit of Orlando can be linked to recapitulation theory; the novel is a biography of Vita Sackville-West which shows her to recapitulate the lives of her ancestors. The final section, ‘“Unacted Parts”: Creative Evolution’, highlights resonances between Flush and Henri Bergson’s evolutionary scheme, especially his argument that qualities lost over the course of evolutionary development still exist in a ‘latent’ state in the self. It concludes that, in Woolf’s later writing, engagement with the community is a means of recovering the ‘unacted part[s]’ that are lost over the course of a lifetime.

This chapter highlights four (often conflicting) ways in which the scientific, sociological, and literary discourse of the modernist period conceives of radio as constituting identity: by producing a national community, by enabling connections between nations, by extending the bodily nervous system, and by producing a specific kind of individual, the listener. It demonstrates that Woolf takes an active role in conceptualizing and negotiating the future of radio. The first section, ‘Radio Selves’, argues that Woolf’s representations of radio are much more aligned with the idea that radio is a vehicle for internationalism, and the idea that it extends the sensory capacity of the body, than with the conception of a national radio community. The second section considers Woolf’s construction of 'The Listener'. Through an analysis of archival documents about the formation of the BBC’s Listener Research Unit, it identifies resonances between Woolf’s depiction of a responsive audience in Between the Acts and statements by BBC producers promoting the listener’s active participation in the making of radio. The chapter concludes by reading Between the Acts as a utopian fantasy in which thoughts are perfectly communicable and individualities mingle and merge in the ether – a fantasy founded upon the connective power of radio.

This chapter examines the resonances and the divergences between Woolf’s depictions of the nervous self and those constructed in popular accounts of neurology. The first section, ‘Threads and Fragments: The Integrative Action of the Nervous System’, looks at Woolf’s use of metaphors of unity and fragmentation in Between the Acts, identifying resonances with popular accounts of the nervous system which, extrapolating from Charles Sherrington’s influential work on nervous integration, conceive of the role of the nervous system to be the formation of a unified bodily identity – an identity that is shadowed, however, by the cellular discontinuity of the body. The next section, ‘The Evolutionary Nervous System’, traces resonances in Woolf’s writing with the contemporary conception of the nervous system as an evolutionary hierarchy. While for neurologists the dissolution of the nervous hierarchy is always pathological, in Woolf’s writing it enables an escape from a delimited identity and the construction of a form of self that is materially connected to the natural world. The last section turns to the concept of ‘Sympathetic Vibrations’, demonstrating that in Woolf’s writing, as in modernist culture more broadly, it is used to illustrate the permeable nature of the boundary between self and world.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

In letters to friends and in interviews later in life, Elizabeth Bishop repeatedly made clear her low opinion of critical writing. At the same time, much of her own criticism and review work is audacious, original and witty, particularly the long essays she completed as an undergraduate student at Vassar. She also admired the work of contemporary poet-critics like William Empson and Randall Jarrell and once pitched for the job as poetry reviewer of The New Yorker. Close analysis of her own prose and poetry demonstrates the extent to which her own writing was itself a form of informal criticism. She engaged with and incorporated the ideas and words of literary critics into her poetry throughout her career, rebuffing reductive assessments of her writing as “calm” and “modest.”

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

This chapter follows on from the last to trace the development of the prosthetic modernism discernible at the turn of the twentieth century, as it works through the modernist novel from Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf up to the extended late modernist work of Samuel Beckett. The chapter reads Beckett’s reception of Proustian and Joycean modernism, from his novels of the thirties and forties up to his late work Company and suggests that this reception might best be understood as a poetics of twining. Beckett offers an extended reflection on the ways in which the modernist novel performs a mode of twining, a joining together of mind with prosthetic extension; but he also enacts a specific form of untwining, which demonstrates how the novel has always shown the unbound, the disaggregated, to be a constituent part of the terms in which it conducts its binding properties.

The future development of literary radio studies as a discipline requires moving beyond the lingering (and completely understandable) text-fetishism of its early years. Archival lacunae covering the early years of radio, key years for modernist production – the difficulty of hearing works, let alone hearing them in context – has paradoxically flattened broadcast into script, an elision often perpetuated in scholarship. All this has created a critical environment in which the claim that radio is an intrinsically modernist medium is often supported, in circular fashion, by enumerating the already-recognized modernists within broadcast ranks, or citing the importance of radio as a disseminator of modernist poetry – in other words, eliding the medium itself in order to stress its efficacy as a delivery system. To move beyond the invaluable spadework of the recent ‘boom’, then, requires a more robust methodology for tracing the resonances of radio – an intermedial vocabulary not grounded exclusively in inscription

This chapter considers a range of methods for writing about literary soundscapes. R. Murray Schafer’s seminal coinage of soundscape residually informs current debates about the sonic dimensions of literary form, but the discursive alignment of print and voice and reading and listening is an enduring aspect of the history of modern literature. This history extends from the capacious descriptive ambition of the realist novel through to, and beyond, literary modernism’s experimental ambition to capture the sounds of modern life at a critical moment when an array of recording devices emerged to do what literature could not – record sound in real time. Spanning from Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Bowen, this chapter analyses the various ways writers from the nineteenth century to the present have responded to the sound worlds in which they lived by attending to the distinctive sonic textures of literary language and its unique capacity to channel the rhythms and voices of everyday socially embodied sound.

The sixth chapter, “Gray Modernism,” argues that modernist experimentation with narrative form draws theoretical and disciplinary inspiration from the invention of gerontology and geriatrics as a science. During the twentieth century, aging becomes the subject of clinical interest, a temporal pathology detachable from the body it affects. Similarly, for modernist novels like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, duration becomes separable from the highly charged aesthetic moments it contains. Though Orlando lives through many centuries, she does not grow old; instead, her greatest transformation occurs when her gender instantaneously switches from male to female. The novel creates a divide between the systems of duration and aging on the one hand, and the momentariness and constructedness of identity on the other. By breaking with the conventions that link duration and objective, shared time, Woolf situates aging in an ironic temporality that disrupts the forward press of years.

Aging, Duration, and the English Novel concludes by comparing the affordances of cinema and the novel as they relate to the representation of aging. Emerging near the end of this study’s historical focus, cinema offered new formal possibilities for capturing the process of growing old. Returning to the question of duration through a discussion of Woolf’s, Bergson’s, and Deleuze’s writing on cinema, this section teases out the formal arguments about narrative explored in the previous chapters. In fact, the comparison between cinematic and textual narrative underlines this book’s thesis: that the affordances of form structure historically specific possibilities—affective, social, and political—for older people. The afterword also affirms an expanded version of this thesis by arguing that age—as a biocultural process—serves as a form with its own ability to organize human life and read texts.