Table Of ContentThe ModernisT AnThropocene
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
Series Editors: Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley
Available
Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult
Leigh Wilson
Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts
Sam Halliday
Modernism and the Frankfurt School
Tyrus Miller
Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction
Elizabeth English
Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s
Patrick Collier
Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde
Lise Jaillant
Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light
Emily Ridge
Hieroglyphic Modernisms: Writing and New Media in the Twentieth Century
Jesse Schotter
Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics
Nina Engelhardt
Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman
Daniel Aureliano Newman
Modernism, Space and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London
Andrew Thacker
Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine
Victoria Bazin
Modernism and Time Machines
Charles Tung
Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938)
Cathryn Setz
Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers
Claudia Tobin
The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form
Rachel Murray
Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia
Jon Day
Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film
Robbie Moore
The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes
Peter Adkins
Forthcoming
Modernism and the Idea of Everyday Life
Leena Kore-Schröder
Modernism and Religion: Poetry and the Rise of Mysticism
Jamie Callison
Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman
Jeff Wallace
Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals
Francesca Bratton
Asbestos: The Last Modernist Object
Arthur Rose
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsmc
The ModernisT AnThropocene
nonhuman Life and planetary change in
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
and djuna Barnes
peter Adkins
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© Peter Adkins, 2022
Cover image: Light Coming on the Plains No. II (detail) (1917), Georgia
O’Keeffe, Watercolor on newsprint paper, Amon Carter Museum of American
Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1966.32, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk
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ISBN 978 1 4744 8196 0 (hardback)
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ISBN 978 1 4744 8199 1 (epub)
The right of Peter Adkins to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).
conTenTs
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1 The Matter of Politics in the Novels of James Joyce 31
2 James Joyce and the Revenge of Gaia 62
3 The Beastly Writing of Djuna Barnes 89
4 Sex, Nature and Animal Life in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder 118
5 The Sympathetic Climate of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando 145
6 The Disturbing Future of Virginia Woolf’s Late Writing 170
Fallout: Modernism in the Nuclear Anthropocene 197
Bibliography 211
Index 232
FiGUres
1.1 Letter from George Russell as editor of the Irish Homestead
to James Joyce, July 1904. James Joyce Collection. General
Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University. 41
3.1 The Beast. Djuna Barnes’s original line drawn illustration of The
Beast Thingumbob and Cheerful for Ryder. Djuna Barnes Papers,
Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries. 99
4.1 The Tree of Ryder (frontispiece) from Ryder. Drawn by Djuna
Barnes. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University
of Maryland Libraries. 122
4.2 Pennyfinder the Bull. Drawn by Djuna Barnes for Ryder but
removed at the request of her publishers. Djuna Barnes Papers,
Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries. 129
7.1 Earthrise (1968) by William Anders. Public Domain. 200
7.2 Light Coming on the Plains No. II (1917) (detail) by Georgia
O’Keeffe. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth,
Texas, 1966.32, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art. 201
7.3 Blast, I (1957) by Adolph Gottlieb. Digital image, The Museum
of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, © Adolph and
Esther Gottlieb Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS,
London 2021. 202
AcKnoWLedGeMenTs
This book could not have been written without the support and guidance of
many people. My first thanks go to Derek Ryan, who has been an invaluable
mentor, colleague and friend over the course of the many years it has taken to
write this book. It was his teaching and research that first showed me what
might be gained from thinking beyond the human and for this I am extremely
grateful. I would also like to thank Wendy Parkins for her role in shaping my
research during the formative years of this project and for encouraging me
to think more about the Victorians. I am also extremely grateful to Ariane
Mildenberg and Vike Martina Plock whose generous insights and incisive ques-
tions helped me to see where my argument about the Modernist Anthropocene
worked and where I might think harder.
I was encouraged during the writing of this book by friends and colleagues. In
particular I would like to thank Miguel Alexiades, Matthew Carbery, Ruth Clem-
ens, Emilia Czatkowska, Jenny Davis, Jeanne Dubino, Angelos Evangelou, Tom
Griffiths, Tristan Ireson, Donna Landry, Saskia McCracken, Paul March-Russell,
Rachel Murray, Kaori Ngai, Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Oliver Perrott-Webb,
Aaron Pugh, Jo Pettitt, Craig Ritchie, Carrie Rohman, Flicka Small, Harrison
Sullivan, Caitlin Stobie, Kiron Ward, Declan Wiffen and Michelle Witen. Special
thanks are also due to my colleagues in the Kent Animal Humanities Network
whose insights and conversations were always beastly, in the be(a)st sense of the
word. This book also owes much to my series editors, Tim Armstrong and Rebecca
Beasley, who believed in the project and saw where it could be strengthened.
vii
The ModernisT AnThropocene
And special thanks are also due to Jackie Jones, Ersev Ersoy and Susannah Butler
at Edinburgh University Press, who have been brilliant editors.
Much of this book was researched and written while at the University of
Kent and I am grateful for the institutional support it provided. I am also
grateful to the Art and Humanities Research Council for funding the doctoral
research on which this monograph is based. The Christine and Ian Bolt Schol-
arship funded archival research for my chapters on Djuna Barnes and I am
hugely grateful to them for the opportunities they afforded me. The Univer-
sity of Maryland’s Special Collections library, which holds the Djuna Barnes
Papers, are due special thanks for letting me set up camp in their reading room
for five weeks and I am especially grateful to lead librarian Amber Kohl for her
helpfulness throughout the writing of this book. Thanks are also due to the
University of Delaware Special Collections library and the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
I am very grateful to the Authors League Fund and St Bride’s Church for
permission to quote material from Djuna Barnes’s published and unpublished
writing, and to reproduce her illustrations. They have been supportive of this
project from the start, for which I am truly thankful. Thanks are due too to the
Estate of Emily Holmes Coleman for permission to quote from her correspon-
dence with Barnes. All quotations by Emily Holmes Coleman are Copyright ©
by Estate of Emily Holmes Coleman. I was kindly provided permission to use
Adolph Gottlieb’s Blast 1 by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and I
wish to thank the Design and Artists Copyright Society and the Scala Archives
for assisting me with this. I am extremely grateful to have been granted permis-
sion to use Georgia O’Keeffe’s Light Coming on the Plains No. II for my cover
image by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.
Deep thanks go to my mum, Jane, and dad, Stephen, Rosie and Nathan Jeffries,
and James and Hannah Adkins, as well as Michael, Jane, Ellie and Ami Barnes.
Your unwavering love and support got me here and kept me going throughout.
Thanks also to my grandad, Ross Adkins, as well as Mary Adkins and Rose and
Alfred Morley, who I know would have been proud of me for this book.
Two final special thanks are due. To Wallace, who dragged me out of the
house for walks when it all got too much and whose calming presence kept me
rooted. And to Maddi, without whose love, encouragement and support, none
of this would have been possible. Maddi, thank you.
Earlier versions of material in this book appeared as ‘“There All The Time
Without You”: Joyce, Modernism and the Anthropocene’, in Jeremy Diaper
(ed.), Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Mod-
ernism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2021) and as ‘The Climate
of Orlando: Woolf, Braidotti and the Anthropocene’ in Comparative Critical
Studies. I am grateful to the publishers and editors that permission was granted
to reprint material from these publications.
viii
ABBreViATions
Djuna Barnes
A The Antiphon
CP Collected Poems
CS Collected Stories
LA Ladies Almanack
N Nightwood
NY New York
R Ryder
James Joyce
FW Finnegans Wake
JJL1–3 The Letters of James Joyce
OCPW Occasional, Critical and Political Writing
P A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
SH Stephen Hero
U Ulysses (References appear as episode number plus line number)
Virginia Woolf
BTA Between the Acts
E1–6 The Essays of Virginia Woolf
MB Moments of Being
MD Mrs Dalloway
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