The Wanderings of Modernism
Errancy, Identity, and Aesthetics in Interwar Modernist Literature
Edited by Yasna Bozhkova, Diane Drouin, and Olivier Hercend
Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.
This volume brings together scholars of English-speaking literary modernism, around the notion of wandering, both as a spatial concept and as a broader notion involving the loss of identity and social, political as well as philosophical questions. It addresses the crucial importance of wandering after the First World War, at a time of acceleration in transports and communication, coupled with a sense of fragmentation and loss, which are posited as a crucial set of experiences for modernist artists. The collected articles encompass the material aspects of wandering lifestyles, the social and cultural institutions of modern travels, from tourism to exile, as well as the politics of localization and displacement in a world dominated by imperialism and caught in nationalist and ideological struggles. They explore the interconnections between these forces, on different scales, and the personal and artistic trajectories of canonical modernist figures likes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or William Carlos Williams, and others who have received more recent recognition like Jean Rhys or Katherine Mansfield, as well as lesser-known movements like the American “Hobohemia.” The range of concepts and critical perspectives they invoke, and the way in which these theoretical concepts intersect and connect in fruitful exchanges, provides readers with a vast and fascinating insight into the diversity of modernist scholarship and the new trajectories which it is following, especially in the crucible of French academia.
About the Editors
Yasna Bozhkova is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on intertextual, intermedial and intercultural poetics from transatlantic modernism to the present. Her first monograph, titled Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, was published in 2022 by Clemson University Press. She is also the co-editor of several special issues, including “African American Voices from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present: Establishing/Abolishing Authority” (French Review of American Studies) and “‘The Contour of an Electric Spirit’: Revisiting Mina Loy in the 21st Century” (Feminist Modernist Studies). She has published articles and book chapters on modernist and contemporary poetry and fiction, as well as avant-garde experimentation across the arts. She is a board member of the Société d’études modernistes and of the MSA.
Diane Drouin is a Teaching Fellow (PRAG) at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on the interactions between transatlantic modernism and the European avant-gardes, analyzing more specifically the work of women writers and artists, in a feminist and intermedial perspective. She has published several articles and book chapters on Mina Loy and she is the co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies entitled “‘The Contour of an Electric Spirit’: Revisiting Mina Loy in the 21st Century.”
Olivier Hercend is a senior lecturer at Université Paris Nanterre. His most recent publications include a monograph: Le modernisme au défi de la lecture: Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot (Classiques Garnier) as well as articles and book chapters in French and English, on modernism and literary theory, especially reader-response theory, hermeneutics and post-structuralism. He is also a novelist and dramatist.
Introduction
Part I: Wandering as a Modality of the Modern World
1. Tramps, Bums and Hobos, or the Wanderings of Low Modernism | Benoît Tadié
2. “Moving, Almost Unwalking”: Nomadic Turns and Postwar Returns in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and The Antiphon | Pavlina Radia
3. Claude McKay’s “Magic Pilgrimages” | Louise Kane
4. Poste-restante: the Dislocative Mode of Katherine Mansfield’s Correspondence | Claire Davison
Part II: Coming to Grips with Errancy
5. Remodeling the Modernist Cities: The Migrant Aesthetics of Jean Rhys | Juliana Lopoukhine
6. “It was indeed an absurd expedition”: Fantastic and Provocative Rewritings of the Grand Tour as Outlets in E.M. Forster’s Work | Julie Chevaux
7. Virginia Woolf’s Post-Victorian Nostos: The Poetics of Revenance in To the Lighthouse | Marie Laniel
Part III: Elaborating a Poetics and Politics of Wandering
8. The Politics of Displacement in Joyce’s Writing: The View from the Periphery | Corentin Jégou
9. Wandering as an Act of Political Resistance in William Carlos Williams’s Works | Samantha Lemeunier
10. The Wandering Poetics of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett: Listening (and Looking) Without Localizing | Adrienne Janus
11. The Modernity of Joyce’s Exiles | Jean-Michel Rabaté
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