Professor Alex Goody

A contemporary collection of scholarly essays exploring the vibrant intersections of modernist studies and critical animal studies

* Presents the diverse range of intersections between modernist and critical animal studies
Includes cutting-edge research contributions from a heterogenous and interdisciplinary range of modernist scholars
* Offers a key research resource for scholars in modernist studies, critical animal studies and cognate areas
* Provides a classroom-ready collection of essays relevant to undergraduate and graduate courses on modernist writing and critical animal studies

The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new, progressive field that raises crucial questions about what it means to live with animals in modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside emerging scholars who, together, revisit canonical figures and decentre the canons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, the contributions work with cultural history and theoretical frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century literature and culture.

Though modernism’s emergence in an environment of techno-cultural acceleration has long been recognized, recent scholarship has deepened and challenged our understanding of the connections between twentieth-century cultural production and its technological interlocutors. In twenty-eight chapters by leading academics, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology re-examines the machines and media that functioned as modernism’s contexts and competitors. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by the theoretical and socio-historical frames of current teaching and research on modernism and technology, this research volume makes a crucial and timely intervention in the field of modernist studies. The scholarly contributions on machines that govern transport, production, and public utilities, on media and communication technologies, on the intersections of technology with the human body, and on the technological systems of the early twentieth century capture the contemporary state of modernist technology studies and chart the future directions of this vibrant area.

Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhood and subjectivity.

Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV seriesWestworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. 

As the title indicates, three themes of perpetual interest in contemporary cultural studies – place, identity, and nationality – converge in this critical essay collection. While proffering varied and sometimes clashing arguments concerning the title themes, the essays and their authors all assert the importance of the creative text in defining, contesting, and understanding place, identity, and nationality in the modern and contemporary globalised world. The critical frameworks of these essays grow out of the groundbreaking literary and cultural studies theory of the past two decades. However, several of the essays map hitherto unchartered territory by engaging with recent works from emerging authors and a director, and providing new insight into the work of established authors. Beyond mapping new academic terrain, the collection is further distinguished by its global perspective with texts and authors from around the world which come together in a unique multinational dialogue.

The collection is divided into three sections. The first, “Women Writers and Nationalism”, includes essays on Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Jo Shapcott, and Leila Aboulela. The second, “National Identity and Contemporary Fictions”, examines the role of contemporary fiction in establishing the respective national identities and histories of Wales and Australia. The third, “Transnational Identities”, analyses Partition literature, migrant women’s literature of France and Spain, and film director Shane Meadows’ take on new forms of nationalism. From India, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the United States, the texts and essays crisscross the globe, exploring the relationships between nationality and identity through film, memoir, poetry, and the novel. Some examine national literatures and identities; others focus on the struggle of the individual, particularly the migrant individual, to define his or her identity within a multicultural, multinational framework. Together, the essays register both collective and individual responses to nationality and illustrate new forms of nationalism and identity in the modern and contemporary world. -- Provided by publisher.

Encompassing writers from Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot to Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein, American Modernism: Cultural Transactions is a comprehensive and informative companion to the field of American literary modernism. This groundbreaking new book explores the changing patterns of American literary culture in the early years of the 20th century, in the aftermath of the great American Renaissance, when the United States was well on its way to becoming the most economically powerful and culturally influential nation in the world.

It brings together some of the most eminent British and European scholars to investigate how the United States’s unique cultural position is in fact the by-product of a range of cultural transactions between the United States and Europe, between the visual and the literary arts, and between the economic and aesthetic worlds. And it presents a stunning re-examination of the social, cultural and artistic contours of American modernism, from the impact of a liberal Scottish speaker on T.S. Eliot’s considerations of Shakespeare to the generic hybridity of Edith Wharton’s writing, from the influence of Oscar Wilde on Hart Crane to the effect of Anglo-European experimentalism on Native American fiction – and much more.

Through close textual and archival analysis, backed up with compelling historical insights, these nine new essays explore the nature and limits of American modernism. They address such topical issues as geomodernism, transnationalism and the nature of American identity; they examine the ways writers embraced or rejected the emerging modern world; and they take a fresh look at American literature in the broad context of international modernism. -- Provided by publisher.

This chapter focuses on the intertextual play that marks out Westworld as a distinctive example of Quality TV. The chapter argues that Westworld can be placed in a wider literary-theoretical framework that includes interactive fiction and hypertext which, in turn offers a different perspective on the key questions of the series concerned with the impact of technology on the human. The chapter specifically considers the motif of the maze or labyrinth as synecdoche of the nexus of formal, theoretical and textual explications of nonlinear and interactive and digital narratives that shed light on Westworld’s depiction of its intradiegetic and extradiegetic players or wreaders. By thinking through the history of hypertext, the narratives of interactive textuality and the way both hypertext and Westworld negotiate ideas of (post)human agency in relation to technology, this chapter unearths an alternate lineage for the themes and dynamics of Westworld.

“There is not a person in the literary world who has not heard of, read and some stolen from NIGHTWOOD. The paradox … is … I am the ‘most famous unknown of the century!’” Writing to Natalie Clifford Barney in the 1960s Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) makes a hyperbolic claim about both her 1936 novel Nightwood and her oxymoronic obscurity, but in neither case is she wholly misguided. Nightwood, described on publication as a book that “does not belong to any easily definable class,” is a defining work of the twentieth century but woefully absent on roll calls of the American novel. Barnes has been a marginal figure in the literary canon, a repeated anecdote of expatriate American modernism rather than a writer of influence. Barnes is difficult, what Daniela Caselli describes as an “improper modernist” not easily suiting labels such as “queer,” “feminist,” or “avant-garde,” and her fictional style can still disconcert the most diligent of readers. But Barnes’s major fiction shows that she is much more than a literary anecdote. Exploring Barnes’s career as a writer and novelist it becomes clear that she offers a particular response to the cultural and literary tumult of the early twentieth century and is a unique voice in the history of the American novel.

In June 2004, the Poetry Society heralded the 'next generation' of British poets, listing in their roll-call the likes of Patience Agbabi, Nick Drake, Tobias Hill and Gwyneth Lewis, all poets first published in the previous decade. This next generation followed ten years after the new generation of poets had been announced. The 1994 new-generation list - twenty poets from Simon Armitage to Carol Ann Duffy - was part of the media buzz of the moment in which poetry was, however briefly, cited as 'the new rock 'n' roll'. The resulting media attention did not lead to a huge increase in the sales of poetry collections, but Neil Astley's Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive had already demonstrated that there might be a wide and popular audience for the right kind of poetry package. At present, the awareness and dissemination of contemporary poetry has been expanded to an international scope particularly through internet technology such as the online Contemporary Poetry Review. With innovative presses entering the field (notably Salt Publishing in 2002), undeterred by the low sales rates for individual slim volumes, the contemporary British poetry scene appears quite vibrant and dynamic.

The Modernist writing of Mina Loy, a  visual and literary artist, consistently interro-gates and undermines the linearity and singular spatial logic of the written text. From her early, Futurist influenced, experiments with typography and layout she developed a distinctive and radical feminism. Loy's poem « Virgin 's Plus Curtains Minus Dots » (1915) in particular presents a  textual examination of a feminine 'text' which is at odds with the intentionality and rationality of hegemonic sexual economy. Simulta-neously, at the visual level, the poem offers a  proto-hypertextual exploration of the production of meaning(.1), which further participates in Loy's attempt to exceed the logic of the masculinist production of meaning : questioning the control and restraint offeminity is the theme and the form of the poem. As suggested by the 5ymbols in the title ('plus' and 'minus') Loy proposes a  mode of extra-semantic signification and signals its relationship to bodily economies. The published appearance of the poem offers further (multimedia) opportunities for non-sequential reading (explicitly as a feminist/feminine strategy) as it appears as a double-page spread, faced by a drawing by Clara Tice entitled« Virgins Minus Verse». The double-page extends and recon-.figures the exploration of femininity, sexuality, the feminine body, suggesting 'un-corseted' expression as a  (literalised) trope for the radical freedoms or the new confi-gurations of text and page.

The work of Mina Loy, a well-known contemporary of H. D., Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (who commended her contribution to modernism), has since fallen into relative obscurity. Perhaps one of the reasons for her fall from prominence, aside from the linguistic, semantic and typographical experimentalism of her writing, is Loy’s heterogeneous textual employment of her own life. There is, indeed, an autobiographical aspect in much of Loy’s work, in the Love Songs to Joannes or the novel Insel, for example, but she never offers a straightforward transposition of personal experience nor an assured assumption of an ironically biographical persona.