This book addresses the development of 'civil' anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Britain, a crucial and often critically neglected strand of anti-Jewish rhetoric that, prior to 1934, was essential to the legitimization of proto-fascist political and literary discourses, as well as stylistic practices within literary modernism.
British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime excavates British late modernism's relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. As a wartime between, but distinct from, those of the First World War and the Cold War, Second World wartime involves an anxiety that is both repetition and imaginary: both a dread of past violence unleashed anew, and that of a future violence still ungraspable. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—this volume contends that Second World wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It offers a synoptic, wide-ranging look at writers on the home front, including Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Rose Macaulay, through a variety of genres, such as life-writing, the novel, and the short story. It also considers an array of cultural and archival material from photographers such as Cecil Beaton, filmmakers such as Charles Crichton, and artists such as John Minton. It shows how figures harnessed or exploited their media's temporal properties to formally register the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection, oftentimes fashioning the war as a memory, even while it was taking place. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book's overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.
Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience. Combing through Stein’s scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein’s epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein’s experimental “voices” poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compares the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews. Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein’s legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein’s work.
This book explores how fin de siècle Britain and Britons displaced spatially-charged apprehensions about imperial decline, urban decay and unpoliced borders onto Jews from Eastern Europe migrating westwards. The myriad of representations of the ‘alien Jew’ that emerged were the product of, but also a catalyst for, a decisive moment in Britain’s legal history: the fight for the 1905 Aliens Act. Drawing upon a richly diverse collection of social and political commentary, including fiction, political testimony, ethnography, travel writing, journalism and cartography, this volume traces the shifting rhetoric around alien Jews as they journeyed from the Russian Pale of Settlement to London’s East End. By employing a unique and innovative reading of both the aliens debate and racialized discourse concerned with ‘the Jew’, Hannah Ewence demonstrates that ideas about ‘space’ and 'place’ critically informed how migrants were viewed; an argument which remains valid in today’s world.
The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis offers fresh insight into the fascinating and controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Accessible to students and scholars alike, this Companion illuminates key areas of Lewis's life and career. Written by a team of leading experts, this book examines Lewis's work in light of contemporary concerns with radical politics, feminism and queer perspectives, and the effects of mass media. Individual essays further illustrate the author's early leadership of the British artistic avant-garde, his varying later phases as a writer and painter, and his radical and changing political views, in addition to his complex views on gender and race, his relation to philosophy and theology, and his idiosyncratic practice of cultural criticism.
Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.
This book reconsiders standard narratives regarding Austrian émigrés and exiles to Britain by addressing the seminal role of Sigmund Freud and his writings, and the critical part played by his contemporaries, in the construction of a method promoting humanized relations between individual and society and subjectivity and culture. This anthology presents groundbreaking examples of the manners in which well-known personalities including psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, sociologist Marie Jahoda, authors Stefan Zweig and Hilde Spiel, film director Berthold Viertel, architect Ernst Freud, and artist Oskar Kokoschka, achieved a greater impact, and contributed to the broadening of British and global cultures, through constructing a psychologically effective language and activating their émigré networks. They advanced a visionary Viennese tradition through political and social engagements and through promoting humanistic perspectives in their scientific, educational and artistic works.
A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, focusing on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of modernism during these years. A stimulating and coherent account of literary modernism in England which emphasizes the artistic achievements of particular figures and offers detailed readings of key works by the most significant modernist authors whose work transformed early twentieth-century English literary culture Provides in-depth discussion of intellectual debates, the material conditions of literary production and dissemination, and the physical locations in which writers lived and worked The first large-scale book to provide a systematic overview of modernism as it developed in England from the late 1890s through to the late 1930s
