This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

This Preface begins with a passage from Pierre Auguste-Renoir’s diary, in which he records the following aphorism: ‘Everything that I call grammar on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: Irregularity.’ Taking Renoir’s idea of irregularity as a starting-point, this chapter sketches out the historical origins of impressionism and gives a brief outline of its formal and thematic variety, before gesturing to its significance as a cultural and stylistic reference point for writers at the turn of the century, including the group of British, Irish and American poets at the heart of the present study.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

The Afterword considers a passage from Clive Bell’s seminal book of modernist art criticism, Art (1914), in which he puzzles over whether to describe impressionism as an art-historical end-point, while also expressing a deeper uncertainty about the ends of impressionism itself. In particular, he returns to the question that had baffled critics at the inaugural impressionist exhibition in 1874, and which has been a source of vexation to scholarship ever since: the question of whether impressionism is imaginative and self-expressive, or imitative and bound to the external world. By following the twists and turns in Bell's thought, the Afterword reflects on the irregular significance of impressionism to the writers discussed in the present study, before gesturing to its continued importance for the writers who followed them.

This chapter begins with reference to Les Murray’s impressiveness as a reader of his own work. It illustrates the distinctiveness and variety of Murray’s poetry, celebrating its avoidance of predictable forms, topics and ideas. The chapter also observes the difference in the reception of Murray’s work in the global North and the global South. It points to the ways in which Murray’s poems don’t seem to end in conventional or predictable ways, but seem unending. The chapter discusses ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ as possibly Murray’s greatest poem, for its all-encompassingness. It cites Murray’s anti-modernism and his membership of the diasporic super-group of English-language poets, including Brodsky, Walcott and Heaney. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the flavour and nature of Murray’s poetry changed in the last twenty years of his life.

This chapter explores how the concept of the collective entered into and helped to shape important works of literature during and after the Second World War. It takes the ubiquitous wartime speeches of Winston Churchill as a key site for articulating the idea of the ‘people’s war’, offering a reading of these ubiquitous texts. In relation to Churchill’s version of a collective wartime identity and experience, the chapter looks at writings by H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, all of whom wrote passionate and deeply felt works that offer their own assessment of the idea of people’s war, or of the collective more generally, as a social project. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that the problem of the collective in wartime is a central one in literary modernism.

This chapter discusses the concept of the visual imaginary and the visualism apparent across all of Kenneth Slessor’s writing, including his war journalism and poetry. It argues that Slessor’s career as a film writer for the popular press is related to the visualism of his poetry and to the history of cinema in Australia. The chapter analyses the relation between the light effects in Slessor’s poetry and the existential state of the poet, including in the elegiac ‘Five Bells’. It concludes with a discussion on the relation between Slessor’s war despatches about World War II in North Africa and the elegy for the casualties of war.

This chapter explores the place and significance of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’ in left-wing literary discourse between the wars, concentrating on the leftwards shift among literary intellectuals in the 1930s. It connects a widespread literary fascination with the idea of a ‘popular voice’ and the notion of popular literary ‘content’ to political shifts in Britain and on the international scene, particularly the rise of fascism and concomitant developments in the cultural politics of the Communist International. It examines the left-wing journal Left Review and a selection of left-oriented poetry anthologies as sites in which questions of the relationship between writers, literary forms, and popular audiences were negotiated.

This chapter identifies Symbolism’s influence on Australian poetry as taking two trajectories. The first, more dominant trajectory traces the Symbolism as emerging from A. G. Stephens’s editorial work and Christopher Brennan’s adaptation of Mallarmé’s doctrine into a metaphysical tradition. The chapter follows its continuation in the poetry of A. R. Chisholm, Randolph Hughes, Nettie Palmer, Zora Cross, the Vision circle, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. The chapter argues that a second, more adventurous and feral trajectory includes Brennan’s most experimental writing, the work of Ern Malley, Patrick White’s Voss, and more recent poetry by Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Chris Edwards.

The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.

This chapter tracks the way the accumulation of capital in the colonial metropole enabled a cross-cultural dialogue among certain poets from the East and the West in London in the 1920s and 1930s, one that gradually diminishes in the postcolonial period. Poetry, in the modernist period, sought to dismantle the binary between authenticity and derivation, a binary which has been given new life in our own moment and has, therefore, blinded us from seeing these poets as participating in a common enterprise, even if it is one beset with many conceptual pitfalls resulting from the colonial relation. Nevertheless, poets as distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Una Marson – and thinkers such as C. L. R. James – wished to construct a universal humanism out of the uneven terrain of imperial modernity, an impulse they shared with such complicated figures as W. B. Yeats and even the violently reactionary Ezra Pound. Ultimately, this unstable humanism gives way to the starker divides of the period of decolonization.

With special attention to James Joyce, this chapter offers a brief overview of Irish literary production during a period of domestic cultural revivalism, international turbulence, and nationalist political assertion extending from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. Topics covered include Irish political writing and social movements in this era, the different ways in which writers conceived of the Irish situation and British imperialism, modernism and revivalism, and the reception of Irish political and literary writings internationally and in the colonial world more particularly. Writers engaged include George Moore (1852–1933), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), G. B. Shaw (1856–1950), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), J. M. Synge (1871–1909), Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), James Joyce (1882–1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989). The study also sketches in brief outline some of the different ways in which Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature frameworks have conceived of Irish literary production in this period.

The critique of realism dominant in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism. Misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources within the larger frame of discourse of French theory: the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form; general claims about language, representation, and knowledge, making it harder to see the validity of the realist project; explicit attacks on realism, which need to be read as an argument with Lukács and the version of Marxism he represented. It is my hypothesis that the conception of realism as an epistemological problem is rooted these three tendencies, and once those positions are no longer assumed, then it can be shown that realism entails no special epistemological pleading and does not offer or require any particular philosophy of knowledge. Questions regarding realism’s truth should (and, if fact usually do) turn on what is represented, rather than on the claim that it has been represented truthfully. Realism should be understood as a set of conventions that emerge in nineteenth- century fiction and which have been recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Britain, genres such as the imperial romance framed by a white, masculine gaze expressed an imperial confidence that dovetailed with the jingoistic adventurism of high empire. But as interimperial rivalries intensified and anti-imperialist movements gained momentum, the romance’s generic and formal features were unsettled by a range of modernist techniques. While this is often recognized in stories by writers such as Conrad and Kipling, this chapter traces the modernist compressions and anti-imperial connections that run through the adventure fiction of two very different authors writing between 1900 and 1945: John Buchan, an arch-imperialist and politician whose romances and spy thrillers are warped by the threat of emerging interimperial rivalries; and Edward John Thompson, a friend of Gandhi and translator of Tagore whose Indian novels combine the generic residues of the romance with the growing presence of anti-imperial insurgencies. Drawing out these formal compressions with reference to modernist writers such as E. M. Forster, the chapter shows how adventure fictions unraveled through the empire’s final decades.

The book’s introduction outlines its ambition to read literature as a variety of cartography, and presents a technical vocabulary for grasping literature’s role in the changing geo-epistemology of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring Langston Hughes’s creation of literary maps, and introduces the concept of "counter-mapping," a practice of producing knowledge that challenges official geographies. It then sets out to reexamine modernism’s connection to technology by arguing that the spatial ramifications of media and transit technologies imbued early twentieth-century writing with a unique geotechnical aesthetic. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the book aims to map this geotechnical aesthetic across a range of authors from across the dominion of the United States.

This chapter analyzes Bloomsbury’s contribution to modernist visual culture through a study of one of its less central figures, Mary Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s extensive archive provides a benchmark for Bloomsbury’s incursions into modernism. Her illustrated honeymoon journal was jointly written with her husband, St. John, in May 1910, six months before the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition outraged London’s art world. The galleries and paintings that they sought out in Paris as affluent and fashionable tourists contrast with the dealers’ showrooms and exhibitions that Roger Fry visited that autumn to select paintings for his groundbreaking exhibition. The chapter explores Mary Hutchinson’s subsequent patronage of the Omega Workshops and of Bell and Grant as decorators. She wore Omega dresses and jewelry, took her meals at an Omega dining table using Omega plates and dishes, invited the Bloomsbury artists to paint in the boathouse studio at her home in Sussex, and encouraged their radical interior and decorative designs.

The way in which our understanding of and approaches to Bloomsbury have been changed by feminist and gender scholarship is under discussion in this chapter. In the main, however, it addresses the gender politics of Bloomsbury itself primarily through how Bloomsbury artists engaged with feminism and gender in their creative endeavors and in their personal relationships, and how their gender politics accorded with or diverged from what was happening in the broader public sphere in terms of social movements such as suffrage, and cultural institutions such as marriage. The chapter discusses Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster, among others. Far from seeking to present a coherent position among the group, this chapter teases out the contradictory and shifting views of various members. It ends by considering the group’s legacy in terms of whether and how Bloomsbury contributed, artistically and politically, to the reorientation of gender in its day, and ours.

Chapter 1 takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. It contrasts Stein’s love for state lines with the writings of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. By reading contrapuntally between Stein and Zitkála-Šá, this chapter considers autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature. In response to technics of automated transport, the form was retooled by Stein and Zitkála-Šá in ways that make the overlap of US geography and Native space visible as a differential space.