This course does five things: orient the student with an overview of British modernism 1900-1930s; provide a background for modernist literature torqued toward aesthetics and form (primarily but not exclusively the novel); engage Thing Theory and fashion studies in terms of current critical conversations; allow focus on the work of particular authors (see below); and immerse the graduate student in the brass-tacks world of writing a book review. Our focus is materiality—sans Marx (even as Marxists are most welcome); think of text and textile. Methodologically students should be invested in close reading alongside its application to wider claims.
500-level students will write a book review of a critical monograph on British modernism published since 2025 (chosen by you but approved by me). Graduate students are encouraged to start looking now at advertisements for forthcoming/new books in journals like Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, or more mainstream journals like the LRB or TLS for books of interest to them in the field—email me for advance approval.
Both grad and college students: email me if you’ve already read Virginia Woolf and if so what/which: jb2@uw.edu
Suggested pre-class summer reading for students in need of a general sense of the period: Modris Ekstein's Rites of Spring; more narrowly but also more chi-chi (sic), Juliet Nicholson’s The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm.
Primary texts may include
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Oxford World Classics; Oxford University Press) ISBN: 0192834770
- Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New Directions, ISBN 0-811-201-627)
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1927) Ed. Martin Stannard. (2nd edition; Norton Critical Ed.) ISBN-10: 039392792X; ISBN-13: 978-0393927924
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings, ed. Mary Karr Modern Library Classics, ISBN: 0375759344
- Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918) Penguin USA (Paper); ISBN: 014118065X
- Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-52507-2)
- Evelyn Waugh A Handful of Dust (Back Bay Books) ISBN-10: 0316216267