abstract: Can a critical engagement with subcontinental absurdism complicate a dominant understanding of the literary "languages" of the postcolonial, often understood as progressive, nationalist, and realist? The use of the absurdist register in the work of playwrights Syed Waliullah and Sayeed Ahmad metonymizes the distinctive psycho-affective character of this post-independence moment, while also generating a new aesthetic vocabulary for the literatures of the subcontinent. At what point, what moment, does a crisis of meaninglessness transform itself into an organizing aesthetic principle?

abstract: Through analysis of H.D.’s encounters with Sigmund Freud and Jean Rhys’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight , this article explores how these two modernist writers navigate the complexities of perception, embodiment, and temporal experience. Using theory of mind and other frameworks, I argue that H.D. and Rhys suggest for readers two different ways of understanding perception and the impact of embodied experience, particularly in their attempts to resolve the tensions they present between their own minds and bodies. In tracking these attempts—and their perceived success and failures—the article argues that theory of mind, informed by embodiment, enriches our understanding of these writers’ efforts to reconcile self-perception with external interpretation within the modernist aesthetic.

Abstract: On the face of it, Gale Wilhelm’s obscure 1938 novel Torch-light to Valhalla and Radclyffe Hall’s infamous 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness could not be more different. Torchlight is short, unmistakably modernist in its prose, and ends happily for its queer characters. The Well is long, was deplored by modernists for its old-fashioned aesthetics, and has a gut-punch of an ending. But for all their differences, these books are united in the way they use the clash between modernism and the middlebrow to explore the implications of the marriage plot for queer women, framing marriage as a question of genre. Rather than simply discarding the marriage plot, Wilhelm and Hall incorporate it into new literary forms, exposing the loneliness at its heart. The pedagogical mode of the middlebrow is reimagined in modernist terms, as queerness reveals disjunction, fissure, and changeability to be already present within the marriage plot. These novels offer hope to their queer readers and instruction to their straight ones, rewriting the marriage plot in a way that substitutes hopeful endings for happy ones.

Abstract: This article undertakes a case-study of the production and dissemination of Choix , a literary magazine produced by secret British propaganda agency the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), for distribution in France towards the end of the Second World War. One of many PWE-sponsored cultural publications that circulated in newly liberated Europe in 1944–46, Choix reprinted material by many of the most significant mid-century Anglophone and European authors, including T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Virginia Woolf, and achieved impressive circulation figures in the hundreds of thousands. The magazine therefore provided a major vector by which developments in modern literature and culture were disseminated in countries recovering from war and the relative cultural isolation of occupation. Projecting a highbrow vision of contemporary culture, aesthetically modernist and politically liberal, its producers aimed to re-open lines of literary exchange between Britain and France and to stake a claim for British cultural influence and relevance in postwar Europe. Drawing on the surviving papers of the PWE in the UK’s National Archives, this article illuminates these aspects of the agency’s operations and its hitherto unexplored publications program, contributes significant new information to broader debates in the field of modernist studies, and presents a new understanding of ways in which modern-ist authors and literary works were co-opted as tools of publicity and cultural diplomacy in the mid-twentieth-century.

abstract: Within the short stories of Jean Rhys we can observe her attempting to find a means to write the erotic by using descriptions of the visual arts as a way to explore female desire and sexuality. In these moments of engagement with the visual arts, Rhys finds a way to subvert the supposed "neutrality" of ekphrasis and satirize male depictions of the female body and female desire. Working alongside this satirical intent to critique male artistic practice, we witness Rhys adopting prototypical modernist techniques but using them to describe moments of eroticism. Fragmentation, ellipsis, intense subjectivity, a sense of timelessness—all are revealed by Rhys to have a much wider application beyond depicting the trauma and confusion of early twentieth-century European culture. Instead, Rhys shows how these techniques might be ideally suited to describe female desire.

abstract: This essay sites the mid-career work of British-Irish poet Tom Raworth at the juncture of modernist revival, media change, and the nascent attention economy of the 1970s, reading the typical Raworthian text as the ambivalent or coolly critical remediation of adjacent media. The essay suggests that Raworth’s writing raises two questions that bridge early twentieth-century modernism with the urgencies of the social media moment. Firstly, what is the status and function of poetic language in the context of information excess? And, secondly, how does the late modernist text come to terms with its own complicity in the competition for attentional resources?

abstract: This article explores the display and circulation of furniture and decorative arts between Italy and its African colonies, and discusses the relationship between pieces conceived in the occupied territories, those defined for Italian households, and those envisioned to accompany Italians in their colonial endeavors. The circulation of these different pieces was thought to embody the “expansion of life horizons” characteristic of modernity. However, modernist designers worked alongside ethnographers through the delineation of distinct identities for the inhabitants of the Italian nation and those subjected to colonization, increasingly differentiating who was allowed to engage in the characteristically modern “expansion” and who was forced to remain fixed—as the defining hierarchy of the modern-colonial period.