Table Of ContentModernism and Nostalgia
Also by Tammy Clewell
MOURNING, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM
Modernism and Nostalgia
Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics
Edited by
Tammy Clewell
palgrave
macmillan
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Tammy Clewell 2013.
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-32659-1
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”:
The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia 1
Tammy Clewell
Part I Bodies
1 Modernism and the Referendum on Nostalgia
in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier 25
Bernard Schweizer
2 Nostalgia, Trauma, and the Aftermath of War:
Siegfried Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers 36
Robert Hemmings
3 You Can’t Go Home Again: Ambivalent Nostalgia in
T. S. Eliot’s Poetry 54
Gabrielle McIntire
4 Matricide and the End of Nostalgia in
Elizabeth Bowen 71
Maren Linett
Part II Locations
5 “Permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation”:
The Country House, Preservation, and Nostalgia in
Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando 93
Sarah Edwards
6 Modernist Urban Nostalgia and British Metropolitan
Writing, 1908–1934 111
Barry J. Faulk
7 Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and
Imperialist Nostalgia 131
Carey Snyder
v
vi Contents
8 “There’ll be no more fishing this side the grave”:
Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air 149
Patricia Rae
9 Dissolving Landscapes: W. H. Auden’s Protean Nostalgia 166
Eve Sorum
Part III Aesthetics
10 Rupert Brooke’s Ambivalent Mourning, Ezra Pound’s
Anticipatory Nostalgia 183
Meredith Martin
11 The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia and the Political
Aesthetic of E. M. Forster 198
John J. Su
12 Nostalgia, Mourning, and Désistance in James
Joyce’s Ulysses 216
Christy L. Burns
13 Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism:
Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh 237
Marina MacKay
Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety 252
Elizabeth Outka
Index 262
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank first and foremost the fourteen contributors to this
book. I am grateful for their good humour and patience in seeing this
collection through to print, as well as the intellectual rigor of their
work. An editor could not have hoped to work with a better group of
scholars. Special thanks go to Marina MacKay for her early enthusiasm
for this project, and to Elizabeth Outka for her groundbreaking work on
nostalgia in the modernist period and for a number of inspiring conver-
sations that led to this book.
This anthology was enriched by the insights of participants in a
seminar on modernist nostalgia at the Modernist Studies Association
Conference in Montreal in 2009. The most difficult task I faced as the
editor was limiting the size and scope of the collection in light of many
fine submissions. I can only hope the essays not included here have
appeared in print elsewhere.
I also wish to acknowledge Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan,
and the anonymous readers who provided insightful feedback on each
chapter. Finally, I thank Mark Bracher for his insightful response to
the Introduction and, especially, for helping me put nostalgia into
perspective.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Christy L. Burns is Associate Professor of English at the College of
William & Mary, USA, also serving interdisciplinary studies in Gender,
Sexuality, Women’s Studies and Film Studies. Previous publications
include Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (2000), and
numerous articles on modernism, postmodernism, film and media stud-
ies. Her current book project addresses the role of sensate experience in
modern to new millennial fiction.
Tammy Clewell is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University,
USA where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British litera-
ture and contemporary critical theory. She is the author of Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her articles have
appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Angelaki, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Postmodern Culture.
She is currently at work on a book project, “Virginia Woolf and Literary
Studies in the Age of the Neurosciences.”
Sarah Edwards is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, UK. Her previous publications include articles in Women’s
Writing, Journal of Gender Studies, Life Writing, Journal of Popular Culture,
Review of English Studies as well as Writing the Modern City: Literature,
Architecture, Modernity (2011; co-edited with Jonathan Charley). She was
the leader of an Economic and Social Research Council seminar series,
Nostalgia in the 21st Century (2010–11) and of a special journal issue of
Consumption, Markets and Culture on the series (2013).
Barry J. Faulk is Professor of Victorian Literature and Cultural Studies in
the Department of English at Florida State University, USA. He is the author
of Music Hall and Modernity (2004) and British Rock Modernism (2010).
Robert Hemmings is Assistant Professor in Arts & Culture and English
Studies at Nipissing University’s Muskoka Campus, Canada. Previous
publications include Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and
the Second World War (2008) in addition to essays on Sassoon, Rivers,
Edmund Blunden, war poetry and material culture as well as nostalgia
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature.
Maren Linett is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University,
USA. Previous publications include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
(2007, 2011), Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader (2009) and The Cambridge
Companion to Modernist Women Writers (2010). She has also published
articles on a variety of modernist writers, focusing on topics such as
Jewishness, trauma, and disability, and is currently at work on her
second book, a disability studies approach to modernist fiction.
Marina MacKay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English
Studies at the University of Durham, UK. Previous publications include
Modernism and World War II (2007), British Fiction after Modernism (2007;
co-edited with Lyndsey Stonebridge), and The Cambridge Introduction to
the Novel (2011).
Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University,
USA. Previous publications include The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and
English National Culture (2012) as well as essays published in the edited
collection Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
(2012). Her articles have appeared in the journals Modernism/Modernity,
Victorian Studies, Victorian Institutes Journal, Literature Compass, and
entries in The Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry, The Blackwell’s
Companion to Modernist Literature, and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics.
Gabrielle McIntire is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University,
Canada. Previous publications include Modernism, Memory, and Desire:
T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008). Her articles have appeared in jour-
nals including Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Callaloo,
and Narrative, and she has published poetry in journals and collections
such as The Literary Review of Canada, The Cortland Review, Van Gogh’s
Ear, and Kingston Poets’ Gallery. She is currently editing The Cambridge
Companion to The Waste Land and working on a book on modernism
and the sacred.
Elizabeth Outka is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Richmond, UK, where she teaches courses on modernism and the
twentieth-century novel. Previous publications have appeared in journals
such as Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL, and Contemporary Literature. Her
book, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified
Authentic (2009), examines the creation and selling of authentic and nos-
talgic images in turn-of-the-century Britain, when writers, advertisers,
and architects began to evoke an authentic cultural realm paradoxically
considered outside the marketplace. Her current book project, Raising
the Dead: War, Plague, Magic, Modernism, draws on magic shows, séances,
early zombie literature, and modernist novels to explore how the twin
