Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945

240 Pages·2012·2.648 MB·English

by  Rosalyn Gregory, Benjamin Kohlmann (eds.)

Utopian Spaces of Modernism

Utopian Spaces of
Modernism
British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945
Edited by
Rosalyn Gregory
Non-Stipendiary Lecturer at St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
and
Benjamin Kohlmann
Assistant Professor, English Department,
University of Freiburg, Germany
Selection and editorial matter © Rosalyn Gregory and
Benjamin Kohlmann 2012
Individual contributions © contributors 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-30372-0
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-33833-7 ISBN 978-0-230-35830-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230358300
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
Benjamin Kohlmann
Part I Ambiguous Utopianism
2 Socially Empty Space and Dystopian Utopianism in
the Late Nineteenth Century 19
Matthew Beaumont
3 ‘On the Eve of the Fourth Dimension’: Utopian
Higher Space 35
Mark Blacklock
4 Modernism’s Material Futures: Glass,
and Several Kinds of Plastic 52
David Trotter
5 Minor Utopias and the British Literary
Temperament, 1880–1945 71
Jay Winter
Part II Living in Utopia
6 Utopian Bloomsbury: The Grounds for Social
Dreaming in William Morris’News from Nowhere 87
Matthew Ingleby
7 Utopia from the Rooftops: H.G. Wells,
Modernism and the Panorama-City 105
Daniel Cook
8 ‘The Strange High Singing of Some Aeroplane
Overhead’: War, Utopia and the Everyday
in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction 121
Christina Britzolakis
v
vi Contents
9 ‘Hellhole and Paradise’: The Heterotopic Spaces of Berlin 141
Andrew Thacker
Part III Testing the Limits of Utopia
10 The Re-Conceptualization of Space in Edwardian Prophecy
Fiction: Heterotopia, Utopia and the Apocalypse 159
Axel Stähler
11 ‘No Less Than a Planet’: Scale-Bending in Modernist Fiction 177
Jon Hegglund
12 The Unseen Side of Things: Eliot and Stevens 194
Douglas Mao
Part IV Epilogue
13 Two Towers, Plus One: The Ends of Utopia 217
Iain Sinclair
Index 231
Acknowledgements
Some of the essays in this volume are substantially enlarged and revised
versions of papers presented at the conference ‘Utopian Spaces of British
Literature and Culture, 1890–1945’ which we organized at the University
of Oxford in September 2009. We would like to take this opportunity to
thank everybody who participated in the conference.
We are grateful to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for taking on
this project, and to Ben Doyle for his assistance and patience while we
were assembling the volume.
Many thanks also to Adelheid Heftberger and Georg Wasner at the
Vertov Collection, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, for providing the
still from Dziga Vertov’sMan with a Movie Camera.
vii
Contributors
Matthew Beaumontt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at
University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social
Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (paperback edition, 2009), the co-author,
with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialoguee(2009),
the editor of A Concise Companion to Realism (second edition, 2010) and the
co-editor, with Gregory Dart, of Restless Cities (2010). His forthcoming book
is titled The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle.
Mark Blacklock is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, London, work-
ing on a thesis titled ‘The Fairyland of Geometry: Higher Space at the
Fin de siècle’. He maintains a blog at www.higherspace.wordpress.com.
Christina Britzolakis is Associate Professor at the University of
Warwick, UK. She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning
(1999), and of numerous articles on twentieth-century and modernist
literature and culture.
Daniel Cook is Associate Professor at Saginaw Valley State University,
Michigan. He has published essays on Victorian narratives of scepti-
cism, as well as on the late-Victorian gentleman’s library. Currently, he
is researching a book on Victorian preacher-novelists and the ‘scene of
preaching’ in post-Tractarian fiction.
Rosalyn Gregory holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK.
She is a non-stipendiary lecturer at St Anne’s College. Her articles have
appeared in Thomas Hardy Journal and The Journal of William Morris
Studies.
Jon Hegglund is Associate Professor of English at Washington State
University. His first book, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist
Fiction (forthcoming), will be published under the Modernist Literature
and Culture Series. He has published elsewhere on E.M. Forster, Graham
Greene, James Joyce and Hollywood films of the British Empire. His
next work is a book-length project on sound, space and environment in
mid-century film and literature.
Matthew Inglebyhas recently completed his PhD in the cultural pro-
duction of nineteenth-century Bloomsbury, research that forms part of
UCL’s Bloomsbury Project (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). His current
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
research explores nineteenth-century fiction’s encounters with the
metropolis under construction, and follows on from his article about
building plots, which appeared recently in Literatur in Wissenschaft und
Unterricht. He has taught at University College London and regularly
reviews for theTimes Literary Supplement.
Benjamin Kohlmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg,
Germany, having earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford. His
articles, covering different aspects of modernist literature and culture,
have been published or are forthcoming in ELHH, MLNN, RES and other
journals. He is currently completing a monograph on the politicization
of modernism in the 1930s.
Douglas Mao is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore. A former president of the Modernist Studies Association, he
is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998)
and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and
Literature 1860–1960 (2008). He is also the co-editor, with Rebecca
Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (2006) and the editor of the Longman
Cultural Edition of E.M. Forster’s Howards Endd (2009).
Iain Sinclair has lived in Hackney since 1969. His books include
Downriverrr, Dining on Stones, Lights out for the Territoryyy, London Orbital and
Edge of the Orison. He is the editor of London: City of Disappearances
(2006). Among his most recent publications is Hackney, That Rose Red
Empire (2009).
Axel Stählerr is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature in the School
of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. He has published on Anglophone and German Jewish writ-
ing, representations of the Holocaust, intermediality, and the interrela-
tion of literature and fundamentalism. Among his recent publications
are Anglophone Jewish Literature (editor; 2007), Writing Fundamentalism
(co-editor; 2009) and a monograph on literary constructions of Jewish
postcoloniality, Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität
(2009).
Andrew Thackerr is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at De
Montfort University, UK. His publications include Moving through
Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003), The Imagist Poets
(2011) and the co-edited collection, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures,
Cultures, Spaces (2005). He is co-director of the Modernist Magazines
Project, which has so far published The Oxford Cultural and Critical