Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century

Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-18 The Point of It....Pages 19-38 A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence....Pages 39-55 Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the ‘Postwar-to-end-war World’....Pages 56-73 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia....Pages 74-92 Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction....Pages 93-110 Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase ....Pages 111-129 The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary Numbers in Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day ....Pages 130-147 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the Age of Mechanized Hospitality....Pages 148-167 ‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism....Pages 168-181 Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism....Pages 182-203 Back Matter....Pages 204-226 Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century explores connections between utopian politics and modernism across a wide-ranging selection of twentieth-century literature