Three modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.

Three modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.

This book provides a fresh assessment of the works of British-born poet and painter Mina Loy. Laura Scuriatti shows how Loy’s “eccentric” writing and art celebrate ideas and aesthetics central to the modernist movement while simultaneously critiquing them, resulting in a continually self-reflexive and detached stance that Scuriatti terms “critical modernism.” Drawing on archival material, Scuriatti illuminates the often-overlooked influence of Loy’s time spent amid Italian avant-garde culture. In particular, she considers Loy’s assessment of the nature of genius and sexual identity as defined by philosopher Otto Weininger and in Lacerba, a magazine founded by Giovanni Papini. She also investigates Loy’s reflections on the artistic masterpiece in relation to the world of commodities; explores the dialogic nature of the self in Loy’s autobiographical projects; and shows how Loy used her “eccentric” stance as a political position, especially in her later career in the United States. Offering new insights into Loy’s feminism and tracing the writer’s lifelong exploration of themes such as authorship, art, identity, genius, and cosmopolitanism, this volume prompts readers to rethink the place, value, and function of key modernist concepts through the critical spaces created by Loy’s texts.

A thorough overview of the main genres, important issues, and key figures in women's modernism during the years 1890-1945.

Surveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee's career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee's writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life that involves an entanglement of politics and ethics, which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout his engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Coetzee's politics of life yield a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century; a powerful commentary on our interrelatedness that emphasises finitude and contingency as fundamental to the way we live together.

Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noël Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.