By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), or H. D. as she chose to publish, was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’ by various critics and reviewers. Born in the United States, H. D. made her literary name in London, where she was at the centre of the short-lived imagist movement during the First World War.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness – which formed the basis of the 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now – is one of the first recognisably modernist works of literature in English fiction. Its author was the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, and English wasn’t his first language (or even, for that matter, his second).
As well as being a landmark work of modernism, Conrad’s novella also explores the subject of imperialism, and Conrad’s treatment of this subject has been met with both criticism and praise.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the most celebrated and important modernist novels in English, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best novel. Originally titled ‘The Hours’, a title that Michael Cunningham would retrieve and use for his 1998 novel based on Mrs Dalloway and Woolf’s own life (a book that would in turn be adapted for the 2002 film starring Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose), Mrs Dalloway is at once a powerful response to the First World War and a lyrical exploration of the role of memory itself.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Dead’ is the most critically acclaimed and widely studied story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories written by James Joyce and published in 1914. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ is the title usually given to T. S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s short review was published in The Dial magazine in 1923, and can be read here; below, we offer a few words of analysis of this influential essay by one major modernist writer, about the work of another major modernist writer.