Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituencies of Writing 1900-30 (Language, Discourse, Society)

Before Modernism Was places modernist writing within the texture of modern history. Texts by Woolf, James, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Malinowski, and others are read through a range of figures that construct and disrupt modern meaning: the ghost that affects the value of your property; the sulky, graceless adolescent; the Pole who may not be Polish; the nervous owner of the dog; the addict and her smoke. Eccentric to its institutions, these figures are central to the constituency of modernism. Before Modernism Was searches for modernism within the textures of modern history. The search takes the reader deep into some of the local historical contexts for modernist cultural production; it is a search for a lost prospect, for a sense of possibility which opens up before us in the act of historical reading. This 'before' is sensed within the haunted properties of the literary marketplace and in the embarrassed and awkward body of the adolescent. It is there in the figure of the rabid dog and of the wandering Polish artist. The prospect is held open by Freud, when he finds that however fully analysed he may be, he cannot quit smoking. The works of Stein, Woolf, Dostoevsky, James, Malinowski, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, and others, are read in relation to these contexts, as these writers and thinkers grapple with the emergence of a fragile sense of historical possibility, and appeal outwards for a constituency to help them realise that prospect Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Preface: Things That Matter......Page 9 Acknowledgements......Page 18 Introduction: Modern History and the Disavowal of Possibility......Page 20 1 Property: The Preoccupation of Modernism......Page 42 2 Boys: Manufacturing Inefficiency......Page 70 3 Poles: The Centre of Europe......Page 93 4 Dogs: Small Domestic Forms......Page 121 5 Smoke: Craving History......Page 154 Notes......Page 186 Bibliography......Page 221 D......Page 237 H......Page 238 M......Page 239 W......Page 240 Z......Page 241

Before Modernism Was places modernist writing within the texture of modern history. Texts by Woolf, James, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Malinowski, and others are read through a range of figures that construct and disrupt modern meaning: the ghost that affects the value of your property; the sulky, graceless adolescent; the Pole who may not be Polish; the nervous owner of the dog; the addict and her smoke. Eccentric to its institutions, these figures are central to the constituency of modernism.