Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to "Archivalism," ed. by Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen, and Erik Tonning (review)

Abstract

H Modernists is a fascinating collection of essays that looks at a range of modernist authors against the backdrop of their time. The book brings together thirteen essays originally presented at a conference held at the University of York in May 2018 in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the prestigious “Historicizing Modernism” series published by the Bloomsbury Academic Press. As such, the present volume fulfils the same aims as that series: to challenge traditional literary-critical work by drawing on documentary and archival sources with a view to providing fresh intellectual perspectives on the work and methods of modernist writers. The new essays in this volume offer in condensed, but no less rigorous, form what the book series to date has done so well: to genuinely break new ground. That the collection is missing an essay on James Joyce is due no doubt to the luck of the draw that comes with conference volumes like this. Nonetheless, readers of the JJQ will not be disappointed by the rich pickings on offer. Aside from two contributions on Virginia Woolf and two on Ezra Pound, there are essays on Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, David Jones, and Katherine Mansfield, on two queer late modernists, Charles Henri Ford and Richard Bruce Nugent, and on the critic Q. D. Leavis. What the volume amply demonstrates is how modernist authors are “historicized,” whether this is in literary-critical, biographical, or practical-editorial terms. Using untapped correspondence at the Beinecke Library, Svetlana Ehtee shows just how deeply embroiled Pound was with Nazi and Fascist figures, while Alec Marsh scrutinizes the letters Pound exchanged with the Fascist poet Olivia Rossetti Agresti (a relative of William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to discover that the “esoteric surface of The Cantos” actually hides a “hard, activist core” that cannot easily be explained away by Pound’s apologists (88). Jonas Kurlberg, too, uses a biographical approach in his analysis of Eliot’s involvement with a group called the Moot who were creating, in the 1930s and 1940s, the intellectual foundations for a Christian cultural revolution. His is an important contribution to the understanding of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, which largely remains in need of specific historical contextualization. Natasha Periyan, by contrast, has written an excellent and subtly argued analysis of the “biopolitics” of intelligence and sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by which she means the political discourses concerned with “optimizing the ‘aptitudes’ of the population” (53).1