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The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

Volume 12 | 2016 | General Issue

ARTICLES

A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh's Book Collection
Naomi Milthorpe

A Stitch in Time: H.D.'s Craft Modernism as Transhistoric Repair
Amy E. Elkins

"Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth": Hybridity and Sexual Difference in Djuna Barnes's The Book of Repulsive Women
Meghan C. Fox

Photography and Gender in Voyage in the Dark and Quartet
Lauren M. Rosenblum

REVIEW ESSAY

Under Surveillance in the Space Between
Victoria Stewart

CONTRIBUTORS
Biographies

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This paper examines Evelyn Waugh’s private library, reading his habits of book collection as a particular mode of late modernist practice. In private and public writing particularly during the Second World War, Waugh the book collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant. Indeed, Waugh’s collection practices parallel his satiric practices: both satire and collection are guided by the impulse to discriminate, connoting both the pejorative and elitist senses of exclusion, but also selection, deliberation, and distinction. Waugh’s careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream literary culture proffers a striking case study of the contested cultural landscape of England in the space between, and after, the two world wars. This paper examines Evelyn Waugh’s private library, reading his habits of book collection as a particular mode of late modernist practice. In private and public writing particularly during the Second World War, Waugh the book collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant. Indeed, Waugh’s collection practices parallel his satiric practices: both satire and collection are guided by the impulse to discriminate, connoting both the pejorative and elitist senses of exclusion, but also selection, deliberation, and distinction. Waugh’s careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream literary culture proffers a striking case study of the contested cultural landscape of England in the space between, and after, the two world wars.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) maintained a longstanding interest in the material and artistic history of needlework, a practice that helped her conceptualize, theorize, and overcome traumatic wartime experiences. This essay presents, for the first time, an archive of H.D.’s needlework and demonstrates its relationship to her literary craft. With a new appreciation for the ways in which H.D. turned to needlework as a medium of psychological repair, I show how H.D.’s poetry and prose illustrate processes of survival and psychological coping through metaphors of needlework. Tracking alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Cathy Caruth, I argue that to work through trauma requires innovative techniques, which for H.D. are embedded in craft practices and their ability to access figures of transhistoric significance.
This article argues that Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women challenges dominant representations of female sexuality by transvaluing perversity and endorsing a form of radical alterity. In this text, as in much of her oeuvre, Barnes uses hybridity as a formal and representational strategy for expressing resistance to generic conventions and gendered norms. This recuperative reading of Barnes’s marginalized chapbook demonstrates how the text creates physical and conceptual spaces for her queer subjects and offers non-binary models of gender and sexuality. Furthermore, Barnes’s text allows us to think more concretely about the politics of form and to account more tangibly for gender within Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “minor literature.”
Jean Rhys uses narrative techniques and stylistic devices that are reminiscent of photography. When we read Rhys through a photographic lens, her novels highlight the photographic self-fashioning enacted by types of women, like Rhys, who traditionally fit outside the idealized domestic sphere (i.e. working girls: chorus girls, amateur prostitutes and mannequins; and even writers) and on whom Rhys focuses her novels. Rhys’s characters behave as if they are essentially producing photograph-like portraits of themselves, and achieve temporary stability when they consume, produce and disseminate these images.