By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Haunted House’, by Virginia Woolf, both is and is not a ghost story. In less than two pages of prose, Woolf explores, summons, and subverts the conventions of the ghost story, offering a modernist take on the genre. ‘A Haunted House’, which first appeared in Woolf’s 1921 short-story collection Monday or Tuesday, can be read here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the pioneers of the modernist short story in English, taking her cue from Russian writers like Anton Chekhov. Below we’ve given a brief beginner’s guide to five of Mansfield’s very best short stories, with links to where each of them can be read online.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was drawn to railway carriages. In her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in which she champions a more ‘spiritual’, impressionistic – what we would now call modernist – approach to fiction, in opposition to the more stolidly materialist approach of a popular writer like Arnold Bennett, she presents us with a hypothetical railway journey, outlining the attitude she would take to an imagined female passenger, ‘Mrs Brown’, and how such an attitude differs from that taken by a writer like Bennett.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) is a long poem by the American-born modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who described the poem as his ‘farewell to London’. It is partly a response to the First World War, but it is more self-reflexively about the artist or poet’s role in the wake of the war: whereas another great long poem of the early 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, would address this issue in only an oblique sense, Ezra Pound’s poem tackles the issue more directly, being an analysis of the role of poetry in a world torn apart by conflict and mass carnage, and about Pound’s own struggle to recover the ‘dead art’ of poetry in the years leading up to the war.
So, as well as being about poetry itself, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is also about WWI and the effect of the war and its aftermath on the generation to which Pound belonged (his earlier associate, T. E. Hulme, had been killed in the war in 1917).
But to understand Hugh Selwyn Mauberley it is also necessary to understand Pound’s fondness for adopting personae – this was the title he gave to his second collection of poetry published in 1909. (It’s somewhat amusing that when Pound published Ripostes three years later, the page at the beginning of the book listing ‘Books by the Same Author’ misprinted the title of Personae as ‘Personal’ – try as Pound might, people were intent on taking his poetry personally!)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ezra Pound’s colossal work of modernist poetry, The Cantos, runs to nearly 800 pages and took him over half his life to write – and even then, he never finished it. Is The Cantos a masterpiece of twentieth-century poetry or an artistic failure? Is it sheer self-indulgent verbiage or an under-read and underappreciated epic for the modern world? We can hardly scratch the surface in this short introduction to Pound’s Cantos, but we’re going to address some of the key aspects of the poem and offer an analysis of its overall aims and features.