I will put my cards on the table—I never wanted to edit a Companion—to Virginia Woolf or any other writer. In fact, companions scare me. They create the appearance of coverage or the definitive word on any particular topic or subject. The very notion of a “companion” presumes familiarity, comradery, or friendship—or at least the prospect of these relations. Handbooks, even at their most perspicacious, invite us to think the topic can be made ready “to hand,” and often must find ways to make that possible—excising the unfamiliar, the far flown, or the foreign. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, admittedly, a 1999 volume updated more than five years ago, barely ventures outside Anglo-American writing, except by reference to Picasso, Freud, Marx, et al., and rarely moves outside of the period between the last decade of the 19th century and WWII. I wonder, what happens to a writer like Gustave Flaubert in these models— or that painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire? What happens to the writers in the colonies, whose lack of access to cultural and economic power often means they don't “do” modernism or modernity until the second half of the century? In an effort to make these volumes less about traditional categories of coverage, Cambridge has begun to issue companions that look more like conventional essay collections, such as The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, or a recent one I've contributed to: The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. This is a good impulse, but it is hard to know why these should still be called “companions,” when those are, by their own definition, “a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.” Not to pick on Cambridge—Wiley Blackwell has also started to make more topical and less generic companions, like the Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, now in its second edition. This looks like a terrific book, with a whole section on “Race and Colonialism,” and another on “Performing Sexuality.” But I fear that companions are crowding out other work in the field, making it harder to publish groundbreaking monographs or other adventurous work that doesn't purport to provide a general overview.

In this talk I explore some examples of photography, poster art, and film from the Spanish Civil War and their implications for reading Woolf's Three Guineas (1938). These aesthetic responses from Spain underscore the connections between war and private life that Woolf enumerates in Three Guineas, and help us see how the kind of total war that took place in Spain merged the home and battlefronts, demanding new ways to understand the combined front of twentieth-century warfare. The photographs and propaganda images that depict this kind of merged or total war arena employ the transformation of the city into the scene of war for emotional effect and mobilize the figures of women and children in deeply problematic ways. Looking at these materials can help us to understand Woolf's struggle with the brutal images coming out of Spain and her effort to substitute not only a different set of photographs but also an alternative way of viewing. In particular, this talk will explore the way that Woolf's manipulation of structures of address in Three Guineas and her use of what the film-maker Joris Ivens called “personalization” helps counter the univocal, teleological and emotionally manipulative perspective of war propaganda while working to revise and refocus our understanding of the scene of total war.

In these cultural products we can also see the boundaries among war reporting, art, and propaganda being contested. The Spanish Civil War put particular pressure not only on categories of home and battle front, but also on the possibility of separating polemic from war narrative, photographs, or reportage. Yet the high degree of self-reflection, ironic detachment, and openness of form that characterizes modernist narrative, may mitigate against the most extreme effects of propaganda. Looking at Three Guineas in connection with multi-media responses to the war helps show how Woolf's manipulation of the structure of address in Three Guineas —her foregrounding of her address to the letterwriters, her constant self-reference, her acknowledgement of her scrapbooks or her pile of photos—becomes crucial to her ability to avoid the emotionally manipulative perspective of war propaganda.

Henry James is difficult to locate. That is to say, he exists in the library, in the databases, in the critical literature, under many locations. There is the American Henry James, the European Henry James and the international Henry James. In 2003 the Henry James Review devoted a special issue to ‘Global James’. We append categories to his work, calling some ‘the New York stories’ or ‘the American essays’, and more always remains to be said about his ‘international theme’. Early critics often presumed that James turned his back on America, while contemporary scholars wonder about his late-career concern with the land of his birth, as evidenced in The American Scene. All along, we wonder, how and where does James matter?

On the other hand, I want to argue, the difficulty of attempting to locate James, or to place him in relation to a national context is precisely the point, and one of the reasons why we continue to read and reread him today. That is, James’s writings participate in the development of notions of cosmopolitanism, within both the US and Europe, that remain influential today, and that undergird contemporary discussions of national culture, cosmopolitanism and globalization. Without wrenching James from his era or trying to claim that he was somehow prescient about the twenty-first century (or for that matter, about the twentieth), I want to argue that the versions of cosmopolitanism James presents in his essay ‘Occasional Paris’, his short stories from the nineties, such as ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Greville Fane’, as well as in other late writings, such as The American Scene, represent a complex response to the possibilities and limitations of cosmopolitanism at the turn of the twentieth century. James was concerned with the expansiveness of American commercialism, the jingoism of its political posturing and with the threat of warfare, and sought to mitigate its effects by espousing a practical cosmopolitanism opposed to imperial and commercial swagger and often deeply connected to ideals of femininity. On the other hand, his work constantly exposes the lack of connection to culture and the problematic rootlessness among many cosmopolitans in Europe, and highlights the danger it posed to both women and men.

“THE HISTORY OF THE VOICE”: COSMOPOLITAN'S AMERICA

Launched in the publishing euphoria that gripped the nation in the 1880s and 1890s, as new printing machinery and new trademark law revolutionized the industry, Cosmopolitan exemplified an America newly enamored of worldly perspectives. Emblazoned on its cover for 1886, beneath its world-embracing slogan, was a picture of the newly completed Statue of Liberty, beckoning its readers into its pages as though into the bosom of the nation. On the cover of the magazine the statue stood not only for America's still open door, but for the magazine's vision of itself as various in its perspective and far-reaching in its content. Its advertisements for 1887, the coming year, promised: “The Finest American Stories; Powerful Stories from the Russian; Brilliant Stories from the French; Beautiful Stories from the German; Striking Stories from the Dutch and Italian.”

Walter Benjamin tells us in his celebrated essay, “The Storyteller,” that, in the period after the First World War, “a process that had been going on for a long time” began to become apparent. “It is as if something inalienable to us … were taken from us,” he writes, “the ability to exchange experiences.” This ability to exchange experiences is the storyteller's art. It is, for Benjamin, an art that is based not only on the possibility of imagining a community of listeners but also on the relevance of experiences of the past. In the First World War, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds.” None of the past experiences of that generation prepared them to stand in that changed countryside; none helped them translate it into a story they could tell.

“SPLINTER” AND “MOSAIC”: TOWARDS THE POLITICS OF CONNECTION

In October 1931, in the midst of national political and economic crisis, Oswald Mosley and Harold Nicolson called for political change in a new journal entitled simply: Action: “The nation demands action; the politicians seek a ‘formula’ … we ask for policy they give us a manoeuvre.”

STEINIAN TOPOGRAPHIES: THE MAKING OF AMERICA

Gertrude Stein's enormous early novel The Making of Americans grew out of the restlessness of loneliness, indecision, and displacement. When she began it in 1903, she had recently left Baltimore, medical school, and her unhappy love affair with May Bookstaver and, after a period in London, was living in New York City. By that summer she had moved to her famous apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, and was writing what she called her “American” novel in the atelier, after her brother Leo had gone to bed. The first four months of 1904 saw her back in New York where she wrote much of the early draft of the novel, which was not to be completed until 1908. By June she was back in Paris and would not return to the United States for close to thirty years.