In Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics, Charles Ferrall argues that the politics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis were a response to the separation of art from an increasingly industrialised society. Fascism became attractive to these writers because it promised to reintegrate art into society while simultaneously guaranteeing its autonomy. Yet with the exception of Pound and Yeats, these writers all finally rejected fascism, preferring instead to see the aesthetic as a sphere in permanent opposition to liberal democracy, rather than the basis for a new social order. Individual chapters focus on Yeats and decolonisation, Pound and 'the Jews', Eliot and the uncanny, and Lawrence and homosexuality, and Lewis and the Cartesian primitive. Ferrall's account of why some of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century became involved in reactionary politics offers insights into the relation between modernist aesthetics, technology and avant-gardism.
Literature from the 'political' 1930s has often been read in contrast to the 'aesthetic' 1920s. This collection suggests a different approach. Drawing on recent work expanding our sense of the political and aesthetic energies of interwar modernisms, these chapters track transitions in British literature. The strains of national break-up, class dissension and political instability provoked a new literary order, and reading across the two decades between the wars exposes the continuing pressure of these transitions. Instead of following familiar markers - 1922, the Crash, the Spanish Civil War - or isolating particular themes from literary study, this collection takes key problems and dilemmas from literature 'in transition' and reads them across familiar and unfamiliar cultural works and productions, in their rich and contradictory context of publication. Themes such as gender, sexuality, nation and class are thus present throughout these essays. Major writers such as Woolf are read alo
Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.
"This exposT delves into the murder trial of flamboyant musician Eric Mareo and provides an interesting glimpse into social attitudes in New Zealand in the 1930s. Examined are MareoAs conviction for t
In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World W
In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World W
‘I was so young and I couldn’t join up quick enough.’ Private Walter (‘Wattie’) Pukuae Barclay, NZ&A Divisional Headquarters ‘Everybody told us that it’d only last six months. We thought we’d just
This collection of writings stands as an important reflection on the ways in which New Zealanders remember their past—be it through a poem, a waiata, a family photograph, a painting, a half-recalled h
Ranging across literature, music, film, and fashion, the essays collected in this volume do more than simply examine the contemporary and historic Australasian perceptions of China and its people; the
