Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century

Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 1. The Point of It; Douglas Mao 2. A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence; Scott W. Klein 3. Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the Postwar-to-end-war World; Nathan Waddell 4. Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia; Nick Hubble 5. Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in Katharine Burdekin's Fiction; Elizabeth English 6. Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner's The Wild Goose Chase; Glyn Salton-Cox 7. The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary Numbers in Zamyatin's We and Pynchon's Against the Day; Nina Engelhardt 8. The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the Age of Mechanized Hospitality; Shawna Ross 9. 'Seeing beneath the formlessness': James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism; David James 10. Uncovering the 'gold-bearing rubble': Ernst Bloch's Literary Criticism; Caroline Edwards Bibliography

Caroline Edwards, University of Lincoln, UK Nina Engelhardt, University of Edinburgh, UK Elizabeth English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Nick Hubble, Brunel University, UK David James, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University, USA Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University, USA Alice Reeve-Tucker, University of Birmingham, UK Shawna Ross, Arizona State University, USA Glyn Salton-Cox, postgraduate researcher, USA Nathan Waddell, University of Nottingham, UK