Cosy aphorisms such as “home is where the heart is” have always suggested a universal understanding of home. But home is a subjective concept that defies any homogenous designation. If, as Walter Benjamin told us, a consequence of modernity is the necessary sequestration of ‘bourgeois’ domestic spaces from an increasingly ‘modern’ outside world, such a spatial binarism is notably absent in the works of Irish and British women authors from 1929-1946. On the contrary, in these texts, domestic space has multiple functions, not least of which is its usefulness in exploring concepts of modernity, including the consequences of industrial scale warfare on civilian life. During this time, women authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Nancy Mitford, Evadne Price and Daphne du Maurier respond to the ways in which the ideas of home were in a continuous state of redefinition. They do this for multiple reasons. Factors changing these authors’ perceptions of d0mestic space vary from material, aesthetic, external, broadly philosophical and political. These issues are also sometimes deeply violent, as is seen, for instance, in the burnings of the houses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in the Irish War of Independence, and the destruction of houses by bombing in the London Blitz. This project analyses Irish and British domestic spaces as women authors imagine them after the formal segregation of the two countries with the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922). As both countries move in different political and cultural directions, so too, these authors perceive, do the meanings of home. This changes the ways in which authors construct both the conceptual ideas of home and the material realities of houses in both countries. Congruently, this cross-cultural analysis complicates our understanding of these women authors’ responses to changing meanings of home, women’s issues, and the experience of modernity in the period.

This thesis reads the twentieth-century novel in light of its engagement with multilingualism. It treats the multilingual as a recurring formal preoccupation for writers working predominantly in English, but also as an emergent historical problematic through which they confront the linguistic and political inheritances of empire. The project thus understands European modernism as emerging from empire, and reads its formal innovations as engagements with the histories and quotidian realities of language use in the empire and in the metropolis. In addition to arguing for a rooting of modernism in the language histories of empire, I also argue for the multilingual as a potential linkage between European modernist writing and the writing of decolonisation, treating the Caribbean as a particularly productive region for this kind of enquiry. Ultimately, I argue that these periodical groupings - the modernist and the postcolonial - can be understood as part of a longer chronology of the linguistic legacy of empire. The thesis thus takes its case studies from across the twentieth century, moving between Europe and the Caribbean. The first chapter considers Joseph Conrad as the paradigmatic multilingual writer of late colonialism and early modernism, and the second treats Jean Rhys as a problematic late modernist of Caribbean extraction. The second half of the thesis reads texts more explicitly preoccupied with the Caribbean: the third chapter thus considers linguistic histories of Guyana and the Americas in the works of the experimental novelist Wilson Harris, and the fourth is concerned with the inventive and polemical contemporary Dominican-American novelist, Junot Díaz.

Twentieth-century British literature bristles with words and phrases in foreign languages, fragmentary residues of conflicts between the English-language text and the national languages and cultures that surround it in this era of war and instability. This project addresses the form and function of these remnants of foreign language - what are here called "multilingual fragments" - analyzing and contextualizing them within the historical use of foreign languages in British discourses of national identity and international politics over the course of the twentieth century. Within modernist literature, phrase- and word-length fragments of translated and untranslated foreign language reveal texts' deep engagement with the political conflicts of their time on the level of the letter, enabling authors to express a variety of political ideologies, from the liberal or cosmopolitan to the reactionary or jingoistic. At the same time, these fragments' inherent contrast between foreign language and English context interlace the text with points of rupture, exposing authorial manipulations of language and disrupting any single-minded ideology to reveal ambivalence, ambiguity, and nuance. This study historicizes and expands the long-held conception of multilingualism as a central aspect of modernist commitment to formal innovation, and provides a more comprehensive context for understanding large-scale experimental works. It argues that it is specifically through the disruptive effects of small-scale multilingual fragments - traces of foreign language so slight that they are at once easily overlooked and subtly influential - that modernist texts engage in complex interventions on issues ranging from wartime xenophobia to debates over class, women's rights, immigration, and the afterlife of empire. This project's attention to word- and phrase-length fragments of multilingualism through a series of case studies reveals a more specific, historicized understanding of what Rebecca Walkowitz has influentially termed twentieth-century literature's "cosmopolitan style": first, in demonstrating the centrality of both canonical and minor, extra-canonical authors in the development of new, internationally-oriented multilingual techniques, second, in exposing the breadth of ideologies and complex political discourse that such techniques can facilitate, and finally, in demonstrating how writers use multilingual fragments to reveal the inherent hybridity of all language. This historical and wide-ranging study contributes to current critical discussions in four major fields: twentieth-century British literature, world literature, translation studies, and women's and gender studies. Contrary to past conceptions of modernist multilingualism as benignly aesthetic, exclusionarily elitist, or unilaterally liberal, it demonstrates that multilingualism can be applied in the service of a range of ideologies, and that the inherent instability of fragmentary multilingualism further complicates expressions of political allegiance or affiliation. Further, it expands our understanding of what constitutes "world literature" by making the case for fragmentary, small-scale multilingualism as a vehicle which transports the concerns of world literature - border-crossing conversation, "gaining in translation" - into texts produced in and for a national readership. Finally, it draws together the canons and concerns of world literature and women's and gender studies in order to make the case for marginalized female and homosexual figures as major innovators of multilingual usage, deliberately manipulating multilingual fragments to disrupt and protest the political status quo.

This dissertation reorients the study of British modernism towards the ocean by uncovering modernism’s engagement with a set of ideas about the historical significance of the sea that I term “maritime foundationalism.” A key component of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British nationalism and imperialism, maritime foundationalism held that British history and identity were fundamentally maritime and that the sea, in turn, propelled Britain’s historical development and the course of history in general. Reading works by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot alongside contemporary historical, geographical, and scientific texts, I trace how British modernism developed by incorporating, modifying, and contesting this pervasive maritime-historical ideology. Even as modernist works build on notions of the sea as the foundation of the empire and conveyer of its history, they also disrupt these notions by representing the sea in more unsettling ways, as a testament to the dark sides of maritime-imperial history or an element that threatens to engulf history altogether. Each of my chapters details the literary effects of this interaction of maritime foundationalism and more melancholy conceptions of the sea’s historicity at key points in the intertwined histories of modernism and empire between the 1890s and the 1940s. “The Sea Has Many Voices” thus shows how competing constructions of the sea shape modernism’s historical imagination—the way it defines its present and situates it in relationship to the past.

Procura-se detectar neste trabalho um modus operandi próprio de Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) que permita justificá-lo dentro desta perspectiva que se adota como norte: uma literatura que se desgarra constantemente em seus desdobramentos internos, a saber, uma literatura ameaçada em sua própria lógica estrutural, na maneira como o narrador coloca em perigo sua matéria narrada. Mais do que isso, como a narração entra em colisão com seu criador, aquele que a narra, e como tal processo dá origem a uma porção de desdobramentos dentro ainda da mesma matéria ficcional, o que acaba por guiar o leitor, meio que às avessas, não a uma saída do dilema kafkiano, mas a um novo labirinto que lhe fornece um respiro de sobrevivência. O desgarre é sugerido na maneira como o narrador se desprende do narrado e abandona o leitor em múltiplos e novos becos sem saída - que bastam. Como a fortuna crítica de Kafka é bastante diversificada, a atitude adotada é a de traçar um histórico recortado da imensa bibliografia kafkiana e então filtrála de modo coerente e produtivo. / Our aim in this work is to detect a certain Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) modus operandi in order to vindicate him within this perspective that we assume as guide: a type of literature that detaches, breaks itself out constantly in its process of inner unfolding, namely, a literature threatened by its own structural logic, in a way that the narrator puts his recounting in peril. More than that, how the narration clashes with its creator, the one who narrates it, and how this process brings a lot of unfoldings into being within the same recounting still, that guides the reader, inside out, not to the Kafkaesque dilemma exit, but to a new labyrinth which may provide a surviving breath. This straying is suggested in how the narrator becomes disengaged from what it is narrated, abandoning the reader in multiple and new blind alleys - which all suffice themselves. As Kafka\'s critique is very diversified, the adopted attitude is to outline some of the Kafka\'s enormous bibliography and then coherently filter it.

This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self.

Telling technology explores how modernist literature makes sense of technological change by means of narration. The dissertation consists of three case studies focusing on narrative texts by Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth. These authors write at a time when a crisis of ‘progress,’ understood as a basic concept of history, coincides with a crisis of narration in the form of anthropocentric, action-based storytelling. Through close readings of their technographic writing, the case studies investigate how the three authors develop alternative forms of narration so as to tackle the questions posed by the sweeping technological change in their day. Along with a deeper understanding of the individual literary texts, the dissertation establishes a theoretical framework to discuss questions of modern technology and agency through the lens of narrative theory.

A leitura dos produtos deixados por uma viagem nos contam várias histórias, mais do que detalhes da expedição, a forma como o registro foi elaborado nos informa mais sobre o autor, o seu tempo, suas ideias, seus laços. A busca por entender uma época, suas contribuições para a história da arquitetura, das artes, das cidades, das perspectivas formadas num espaço de tempo encontra muitos indícios nas narrativas de viagem deixada por seus personagens. O registro de viagem é compreendido aqui não só como causalidade, mas como momento de produção de perspectivas, de transformação e invenção da história. O registro não é interpretado como notação asséptica, mas em toda a sua fatura, suas escolhas representativas e a expressão que delas decorrem. Dentre essas viagens, a pesquisa toca a experiência brasileira, de modernidade e de alteridades. Uma viagem para muitos viajantes, recortamos o ano de 1924, da incursão a Minas Gerais, de um poeta, um escritor, uma pintora e um arquiteto, como ponto em comum, que marca o início de uma trajetória de pesquisa que esteve presente nas viagens de Blaise Cendrars, Mário de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral e Lucio Costa. Esse marco comum começa a formular visões de um mesmo Brasil, impulsionando ora novas experiências, repetindo o mesmo método, ora pela via da memória, pelo processo reflexivo, que não é, senão, também uma viagem. Interpretar as peculiaridades e a formação de um grupo mais ou menos coeso a partir da participação dos quatro personagens, através da mediação que cada um faz do sistema espaço-registro-experiência. / The reading of the products left by a trip tell us many stories, more than journey details, the way the record was elaborated tell us more about the author, their time, their ideas, their ties. The pursuit for learning an age, its contribuitions for the architecture history, for arts, for the cities, for the perspectives formed in a space of time finds many clues in the trip narratives left by their characters. The travelogues are understood not only as causality, but as moment of forming prospects, of transformation and history invention. The record is not interpreted as an aseptic note não, but in their whole facture, their representatives choices and expressions. Among these trips, the research touches the brazilian experience of modernity and otherness. One trip for many travellers. It was elected the year of 1924, the trip to Minas Gerais, taken by a writer, an intelectual, an painter and an architect, that have a common view which marks the beginning of a research trajectory that has been present in the Blaise Cendrarss, Mário de Andrades, Tarsila do Amarals and and Lucio Costas htrips for many years after these. This common mark begins forming differents views of a same Brazil, propelling either new experiences, repeating the same method, or by the memory way, by the reflexive process, wich is notting but also a trip. Interpret the peculiarities and the formation of a somewhat cohesive group from the four characters participation, through the mediation that each one does about the system: space-recording-experience.

This thesis analyses European themes in the work of the American painter RB Kitaj. It focuses most closely on the 1960s, a relatively under-researched period of his work, certainly compared with the 1970s and 80s, in part because most of the existing literature follows Kitaj's reading of his own oeuvre. Using canvases from the 1960s as examples, the thesis examines Kitaj's concerns with the history of the European Left prior to World War II. Study of these paintings reveals how, even at this early stage of his career, Kitaj conflated autobiography and history. A comparison of Kitaj's published and draft texts, written during and after these paintings were made, shows him altering their meaning according to his current concerns. This, in turn, shows how his revisions influenced later scholars' readings. Furthermore, due attention is given to two important, though often overlooked, bodies of work from the 1960s: the screenprints and the installation made at Lockheed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both reveal a sustained engagement with European themes, such as the Industrial Revolution, Modernism and its legacies, and Jewish history. Whereas Kitaj emphasised the centrality of Judaism to his work throughout the 1970 and 80s, he downplayed his concern with technology and Modernism, although both continued to inform his imagery until well into the 1980s. His shift away from new technology (eg photo-screenprinting) and a Modernist aesthetic, in favour of life drawing, is analysed against contemporary artistic debates in Britain, together with his fascination with the evolving history of the European Left during the 1970s. Kitaj's work reveals a sustained but constantly modulating, at times conflicted, meditation on European history and culture from an American perspective. In the final analysis, however, his engagement with Europe is, perhaps, the result of a spiritual and psychological impulse rooted in his personal and family history.

O objetivo deste trabalho é empreender uma leitura monográfica de Os Quatro Elementos, livro de Murilo Mendes de 1935. A motivação inicial foi o caráter original da obra e a inexistência de investigação crítica a respeito do volume, temas que são abordados mais extensivamente na introdução. A seguir, passa-se à análise detida de alguns poemas do livro, em que se busca identificar alguns dos temas principais da lírica de Murilo Mendes (a religiosidade, o erotismo, a visão mitológica, a influência surrealista, o humor); aborda-se também algumas questões de cunho mais filosófico, mas centrais para a compreensão do poeta, como as da relação entre História e Transcendência. Finalmente, a reflexão incide sobre o caráter original da obra de Murilo Mendes face seus contemporâneos do Modernismo, e intenta explicar o silêncio da crítica relativamente ao livro. / Our work aims at presenting a monographic study of 1935 Murilo Mendes´ book, Os Quatro Elementos. Picking that subject was motivated by original characteristics of the book, and also by the inexistence of critical inquiries regarding the piece. These particular aspects are analysed more extensively in the Introduction. Then, our study moves on to carefully analysing of some poems of the book, in which we try to identify some of the major themes of Murilo Mendes´s poetry (religion, eroticism, mythological aspects, the influence of Surrealism, humour). It also adresses philosophical aspects that are central to the understanding of the poet, such as the relationship between History and Transcendence. Finally, our analysis focuses on the unique character of Murilo Mendes´work in comparison to his Modernist contemporaries using that as means to explain the silence of our literary criticism about this specific masterpiece.