Modernism – Page 10 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

F. Scott Fitzgerald left behind one of the most perfect novels ever written, The Great Gatsby: at least, that is the version of many critics. But even Fitzgerald once said, ‘I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.’

Yet Nostromo is a challenging and multi-layered novel, demanding much of its readers, even when compared with the high demand Conrad places on his other fiction. What is Nostromo about, and how should we analyse this classic modernist novel about South American mining, capitalism, and revolution?

May Sinclair’s The Dark Night: The Imagist Verse Novel

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reassesses an experimental work from the 1920s by an underrated author

When he reviewed the published facsimile and drafts of The Waste Land in 1971, the poet-critic William Empson remarked that ‘I would never have believed that the Symbolist programme could be made to work at all, if it had not scored a few resounding triumphs, such as this.’

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

T. S. Eliot’s 1930 poem Ash-Wednesday needs to be viewed as part of the shift in Eliot’s writing towards a more devotional aspect, a shift that would culminate in Four Quartets (1943). The poem, like The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’ before it, had started life as shorter poems: Part II appeared in 1927, Part I in 1928, and Part III in 1929, with the other three sections being written around these.

George Egerton: The Half-Forgotten Modernist Pioneer

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the pioneering and half-forgotten writer of the modernist short story

A bridegroom waits in the hall, while his bride sobs upstairs in her mother’s arms. Married off to an older man against her wishes, the seventeen-year-old Flo leaves home to take up married life with Philip, her husband. Five years later, she makes the journey she has been putting off ever since she got married: she returns home by train and tells her mother that she leads a miserable life married to the repulsive adulterer Philip, who has recently taken off to Paris with a girl from the Alhambra.

A Short Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Virginia Woolf’s classic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) is famously set over the course of just one day, in June 1923. But what is less well-known is that Woolf wrote a second novel also set on just one day: her last novel, Between the Acts (1941). The novel is an example of late modernism, which is a slightly different beast from the modernism seen in Woolf’s earlier novels, such as Mrs Dalloway but also To the Lighthouse.