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The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

2016 Contributors

MEGHAN C. FOX is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Her scholarly interests include modernism, feminist and queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book project on hybridity in literary modernism tentatively titled "'Betwixt and Between': The Liminal Subjects and Hybrid Forms of Modernism." [return to article]

AMY E. ELKINS is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century British and Irish literature as it intersects with visual culture and art. Her in-progress book project, "Crafting Modernity," examines how modern and contemporary women writers deploy art-making as a form of critique that surpasses our usual frames of historical, gendered, and national reference. She received her M.A. from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. from Emory University and has published articles on Virginia Woolf, modernism, and visual culture. [return to article]

NAOMI MILTHORPE is Lecturer in English at the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016). She has published on aspects of Evelyn Waugh’s life, work, and library, most recently in Affirmations: of the Modern, Evelyn Waugh Studies, and the edited collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence (Edinburgh UP, 2015). In 2015-16 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation short-term fellow at the Huntington Library, continuing her project on Waugh, libraries and collections. [return to article]

LAUREN M. ROSENBLUM is a lecturer at Adelphi University. She is a co-editor of and contributor to Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She also publishes on the intersections between feminism, modernism and contemporary life. Her current writing project addresses the relationship of feminism to the do-it-yourself movement. [return to article]

VICTORIA STEWART is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester, UK. She is the author of Women's Autobiography: War and Trauma (2003), Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (2006) and The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (2011). Her new book, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. [return to article]

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Contents of this path:
1. A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh's Book Collection 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.
2. A Stitch in Time: H. D.'s Craft Modernism as Transhistoric Repair 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.
3. "Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth": Hybridity and Sexual Difference in Djuna Barnes's The Book of Repulsive Women 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.”
4. Photography and Gender in Voyage in the Dark and Quartet 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.