Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Epistolary Modernism reads British and Irish writing of the 1920s through the 1950s with a focus on the way authors use fictional letters and verse epistles to communicate a renewed sense of literature as public speech, even as they saw privacy curtailed and surveillance increased. Letters enable late modernist writers to call attention to the way literature straddles the gap between private experience and public declaration. Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen all use letters to reveal a late modernist belief in literature as an exchange between an author and a reader -- a bridge between times and perspectives -- even as they trouble the possibility of any clear communication or meaning. The implied exchange in letters requires a sense of correspondence: a letter demands both interpretation and a reply. But a letter is always already too late. Epistolary Modernism reads letters as a stand-in for the literary period of late modernism itself, an epoch of writing characterized by a sense of coming too late to history and to literary tradition. The project considers fiction and poetry published in the 1920s through the 1950s in relation to historical and cultural events of the period, arguing that the sense of belatedness and temporal disjuncture letters create fundamentally links the structure and materiality of the text to the social and political concerns of its author. These writers composed literature attuned to historical events and the simultaneously occurring ordinary moment, leading to an increasingly interconnected, and socially-responsible art borne from the historical impasse of the thirties, the Second World War and its political legacy. Letters enable these writers to continue aesthetic experiments while simultaneously addressing politics, society, and the purpose of literature itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death. / text

This dissertation studies literary modernism’s philosophies of nature. It examines how historical attitudes about natural environments and climates are codified in literary texts, what values attach to them, and how relationships between humanity and nature are figured in modernist fiction. Attending less to nature itself than to concepts, ideologies, and aesthetic theories about nature, it argues that British modernism and ecology articulate shared concerns with the vitality of the earth, the shaping force of climate, and the need for new ways of understanding the natural world. Many of British modernism’s most familiar texts, by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, reveal a sustained preoccupation with significant concepts in environmental and intellectual history, including competition between vitalist, holist, and mechanistic philosophies and science, global industrialization by the British Empire, and the emergence of ecology as a revolutionary means of ordering the physical world. “Modernism, Ecology, and the Anthropocene” uncovers these preoccupations to illustrate how consistently literary works leverage environmental ideologies and how pervasively literature shapes cultural and even scientific attitudes toward the natural world. Through the geological concept of the Anthropocene, it brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations that have recently emerged from the Earth sciences and are now increasingly common in the humanities, social sciences, and in wider public debates about climate change. The dissertation’s first chapter, “Connecting Earth to Empire: E. M. Forster’s Changing Climate,” argues that E.M. Forster’s fiction apprehends the global implications of local climate change at a crucial time in environmental and literary history. By relating Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India to his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops,” it attends to the speculative aspects of Forster’s work and presents Forster as a keen observer who foresaw not only the passing of rural England and the arrival of a new urban way of life, but environmental change on a global scale. Its second chapter, “The Call of Life: James Joyce’s Vitalist Aesthetics,” explores the connotations “life” gathers in Joyce’s early fiction and proposes a new reading of his aesthetics that emphasizes its ecological implications by pairing Joyce with his contemporary “modern” vitalism and current new materialisms. The third chapter, “Make it Whole: The Ecosystems of Virginia Woolf and A.G. Tansley,” revises critical conceptions of Woolf as an ecological writer and environmental histories of early ecology by showing how Woolf’s philosophy of nature and Tansley’s ecosystem concept run parallel and represent a shared intellectual project: advocating theories of form and of perception that navigate the tension between holist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and mind. A final chapter, “Landlord of the Planet: H. G. Wells, Human Extinction, and Anthropocene Narratives,” establishes Wells as an early environmental humanist whose ecological outlook evolved with his perception of the rapidly increasing pace of climate change and its threat to the human species. By digging into a rarely-read scientific textbook he co-authored, The Science of Life, this chapter analyzes how the natural world is managed in three Wellsian utopias and traces the development of his writing in concert with ecology. / English

Seeing Subjects plots a literary history of modern Britain that begins with Dorian Gray obsessively inspecting his portrait’s changes and ends in Virginia Woolf’s visit to the cinema where she found audiences to be “savages watching the pictures.” Focusing on how literature in the late-19th and 20th centuries regarded images as possessing a shaping force over how identities are understood and performed, I argue that modernists in Britain felt mediated images were altering, rather than merely representing, British identity. As Britain’s economy expanded to unprecedented imperial reach and global influence, new visual technologies also made it possible to render images culled from across the British world—from its furthest colonies to darkest London—to the small island nation, deeply and irrevocably complicating British identity. In response, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and others sought to better understand how identity was recognized, particularly visually. By exploring how painting, photography, colonial exhibitions, and cinema sought to manage visual representations of identity, these modernists found that recognition began by acknowledging the familiar but also went further to acknowledge what was strange and new as well. Reading recognition and misrecognition as crucial features of modernist texts, Seeing Subjects argues for a new understanding of how modernism’s formal experimentation came to be and for how it calls for responses from readers today.

Katherine Mansfield among the Moderns examines Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with three fellow writers: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, and appraises her impact on their writing. Drawing on the literary and the personal relationships between the aforementioned, and on letters, diaries, and journals, this project traces Mansfield’s interactions with her contemporaries, providing a richer and more dynamic portrait of Mansfield’s place within modernism than usually recognized. Hitherto, critical work has not scrutinized Mansfield in the manner I suggest: attending to representations of her as a character in other’s work, while analyzing the degree to which her influence on the aforementioned authors affected their writing and success. Albeit, her influence extends in vastly different ways, and is affected by gender and nationality. While Woolf’s early foray into Modernism is accelerated by Mansfield’s criticism of her work, several of Woolf’s texts – “Kew Gardens,” Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway – are similar in certain respects to Mansfield’s work – “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.” A repudiation of Mansfield, personally, and a retelling of her work are seen in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl and Women in Love. Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point, contain characterizations of Mansfield that undermine her writing, and her person: both are affected by the mythical misrepresentation of Mansfield, created by Murry after her death, known as the “Cult of Mansfield.” Using Life Writing, this study asserts that Mansfield had impact on the writing of Woolf, Lawrence, and Huxley. Taking into account the many issues that surround the recognition of this, among them: gender politics, colonialism, marginality by genre, and personal relations – these all, to varying degrees, prevented critics from acknowledging that a minor modernist author played a role in the undisputed success of three major authors of the twentieth century.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), British Modernist writer whose search for authentic selves in the lives of the characters in her short stories, is reflected in her innovative style of writing in which she examines the interior consciousness of their minds. Mansfield questions the inauthentic lives of the characters, revealing that the roles they play are socially imposed forcing them to hide their true selves behind masks. The stories which have been chosen for this study focus on women characters (and men also) who grapple with societal prescriptions for accepted actions, and are rendered mute as a result. The women characters include all age groups and social classes. Some are young and impressionable (The Tiredness of Rosabel, The Little Governess and The Garden Party), others are married and older (Bliss, Prelude and Frau Brechenmacher attends a wedding ), while there are also middle-aged women in Miss Brill and The Life of Ma Parker. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), British Modernist writer whose search for authentic selves in the lives of the characters in her short stories, is reflected in her innovative style of writing in which she examines the interior consciousness of their minds. Mansfield questions the inauthentic lives of the characters, revealing that the roles they play are socially imposed forcing them to hide their true selves behind masks. The stories which have been chosen for this study focus on women characters (and men also) who grapple with societal prescriptions for accepted actions, and are rendered mute as a result. The women characters include all age groups and social classes. Some are young and impressionable (The Tiredness of Rosabel, The Little Governess and The Garden Party), others are married and older (Bliss, Prelude and Frau Brechenmacher attends a wedding ), while there are also middle-aged women in Miss Brill and The Life of Ma Parker. / English Studies / M.A. (English)