Re-Reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830-1950

257 Pages·2022·1.765 MB·English

by  Louise Kane

Re-Reading the Age of Innovation
The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From
new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion,
gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded
in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into
Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework
that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary
newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working
across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters
in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot
air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism
evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide
range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad,
Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew,
Elías Mar, and Walter Francis White—the chapters in this collection
re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by
division and divide but by collaboration and community.
Louise Kane is Assistant Professor of Global Modernisms at the University
of Central Florida. She is a General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford
Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series and
Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,
art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social,
technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians
and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and
cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities;
and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals,
commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology,
gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex,
socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that
address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome.
Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels,
graphic novels, and film will also be considered.
Titles include:
Illegitimate Freedom
Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940
Gaurav Majumdar
Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism
Heroes of Their Own Lives?
Tristan Donal Burke
Strange Gods
Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel
Timothy L. Carens
Re-Reading the Age of Innovation
Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830–1950
Edited by Louise Kane
Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End
Edited by Diana Maltz
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035
Re-Reading the Age of
Innovation
Victorians, Moderns, and Literary
Newness, 1830–1950
Edited by Louise Kane
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Louise Kane; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Louise Kane to be identified as the author of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-04359-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-04362-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19162-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
List of contributors ix
Introduction 1
LOUISE KANE
PART I
Inventing and Innovating: Science, Technology, Formal
Experiment 21
1 The Sky as Heterotopia in Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf 23
CLAES E. LINDSKOG
2 The Rise and Fall of the Century Illustrated Monthly
Magazine (1881–1930) 36
JAYME YAHR
3 Balloonomania: Flying Machines, Periodicals, and the
Trajectory of World Literature 48
LOUISE KANE
4 A Metaphysical Theater: Abstract Painting, Color
Music, and Futurist Experiments in Avant-garde Film 63
CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND
PART II
Changing Landscapes: Empire, Trade, Ecology 79
5 Histories Yet to Come: Adventure Fiction and the
Ideologies of Free Trade 81
KEITH CLAVIN
vi Contents
6 Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 97
CAMELIA RAGHINARU
7 Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief in the Poetic Landscapes
of Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot 111
ANNA BEDSOLE
PART III
Navigating Feeling: The Self, Empathy, Human Character 125
8 F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore:
The Aesthetics of Sympathy and Texts of Transition 127
KATHRYN LAING
9 Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind in Walter Francis
White’s The Fire in the Flint 141
MASAMI SUGIMORI
10 A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac, and
Catholicism in Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at
Prayer” (1900) 158
NANCY VON ROSK
PART IV
Blurring Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality, Desire 173
11 “Disposed to Daring Innovation”: New Modernism,
New Woman Fiction, and New Motherhood 175
ELIZABETH PODNIEKS
12 “Sometimes I Pose, but Sometimes I Pose as Posing”:
Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 190
NICOLA DARWOOD
13 Parsing Between-ness: Love, Looking Backward and
Forward, in Charlotte Mew’s Short Fiction 203
KRISTEN RENZI
Contents vii
14 The Spirit of Contemporary Life: Icelandic Queer
Modernism 217
ÁSTA KRISTÍN BENEDIKTSDÓTTIR
Afterword 233
REGENIA GAGNIER
Index 237
Acknowledgments
Editing a book is never a simple task, and this volume has been no excep-
tion. However, the process was made far easier by several people, not least
the brilliant contributors whose essays represent the result of painstaking
drafts and revisions, countless research trips to archives and libraries,
and, most importantly, a desire to “keep calm and carry on” even when
events like the global pandemic posed unprecedented challenges. Special
thanks go to Deborah Mutch and Dennis Denisoff for their continued
encouragement and advice on honing the volume’s focal frame, along
with Ruth Berry, Bryony Reece and Michelle Salyga at Routledge, and to
Regenia Gagnier for her poignant Afterword. I would also like to express
gratitude to the various librarians, archivists, and curators who have
helped to make this volume a reality. My wonderful colleagues at UCF
have provided invaluable support and advice, particularly FX Gleyzon,
Anna Jones, Trey Philpotts, and Dawn Trouard. Finally, but certainly
not lastly, thank you to those closest to me—Mum, Cory, Richard, and
Alan Thorne—for your patience, understanding, and helpful suggestions
as I worked on this book.
Contributors
Anna Bedsole pivoted to life in the corporate tech world after completing
her dissertation on Gothic girlhood in Anglo-Irish novels and earning
her PhD degree. The same skills acquired in the PhD journey, of com-
plex problem solving and negotiating thorny gender dynamics, con-
tinue to serve her well, and she looks to continue to pursue her interest
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts as an independent scholar.
Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir is Lecturer in Icelandic literature at the
Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of
Iceland, and Co-Editor of the journal Skírnir. Her current research
focuses on contemporary Icelandic literature and literary history,
queer literature, and queer history.
Keith Clavin received his PhD degree in Victorian Studies from Auburn
University. His primary research examines the contact zones between
Victorian literature and Latin American economies. He has written on
the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the visualization
techniques of British economists. He maintains secondary interests in
narrative theory and contemporary cinema and has published on these
topics in Textual Practice and Oxford Literary Review. He is currently
teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nicola Darwood is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire.
Her research interests include early twentieth-century women writers,
specifically the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Stella Benson, children’s
fiction, Anglo-Irish literature, and the Gothic. She has published work
on Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Benson, and Nancy Spain (her monograph
The Loss of Innocence: the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen was published
in 2012) and is the Co-Editor (with Nick Turner) of “Have Women
a Sense of Humour?”: Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction, Co-Editor
(with W R Owens and Alexis Weedon) of Fiction and “The Woman
Question” from 1850 to 1930, and Co-Editor (with Alexis Weedon)
of Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations. She
is a Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and
Co-Editor of The Elizabeth Bowen Review.