According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

This chapter moves through three clear stages. First, the initial sections highlight some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory (including Badiou, Deleuze, and Marcuse); and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of (what the chapter terms) philosophical modernism. Second, the chapter tarries with a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the “apocalyptic view of the world,” and it brings these remarks into dialogue with the work of a number of other literary and philosophical figures, including Gertrude Stein, Günther Anders, and Theodor Adorno. Third, and finally, although Wittgenstein’s remarks on apocalypse appear in his private, postwar notebooks, they nevertheless provide us with a crucial link to his later philosophy, specifically Philosophical Investigations and this is what I turn to in the last sections of the chapter. In the Investigations, it is not simply the language of the book that we might describe as apocalyptic, but also, and more importantly, the fundamental conception of philosophy that we find therein. This returns us to the view of philosophical modernism previously outlined.

Across his career, as the previous work of this chapter’s author and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, M. Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeffrey Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, James Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, including the author’s wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology are looked at, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology.

This chapter argues that Irish modernism is founded on a broad notion of technology as form and an awareness of the embeddedness of technoscience in the imperial military power that supports British colonial rule. The first wave of Irish modernists, or what are referred to in the chapter as protomodernists, engaged critically with technological forms by the end of the nineteenth century, setting them alongside literary forms and evaluating them as modes of perception, engagement, and mediation. By the height of the European modernist period, Irish modernists would fully acknowledge that technoscientific development was part of a larger network of forms that could not be so easily disentangled from literary form. And all recognised those forms, this chapter argues, as ‘[organising] a situation of moral decision-making’, in the words of Peter-Paul Verbeek.

This chapter provides a brief account of the history of Serbian war poetry, written during the First World War and in the interwar period. By examining its relationship to different geopolitical constellations (Serbian, Balkan, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav) and literary contexts (the revival of war poetry during the Balkan wars, the poetry of pre- and post-war Modernism), it tries to show how Serbian war poetry was shaped by the dominant poetic idiom and by the collective and public representations of the First World War. Although selective, this account will essentially highlight the turning points in the history of Serbian poetry, where the possibilities and limits of expression were expanded or challenged in contact with a subject matter as unprecedented as the First World War.

What constitutes Czech First World War poetry? Rejection of the romantic cult; an emphasis on collective participation in life; a turning towards reality and civilisation; the search for a new aesthetic ideal and for new means of expression, especially for a poetic vocabulary and rhythm that would correspond to a dynamic conception of the world. In the Czech cultural context, the four years of the First World War were not identical. The first two years massively affected the development of Czech culture, many magazines were forced to stop publishing and many writers were sent to the front. In the last two years of the war, censorship declined, a series of new literary magazines emerged, and, in exile, negotiations for an independent Czech and Slovak state took place. This chapter deals with a significant attempt to present the new artistic generation Almanac for the Year 1914 and Manifesto of Czech Writers (1917), Dyk’s War Tetralogy and the poetry of exile and of the Czechoslovak Legion.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

This chapter explores the First World War poetry of Mary Borden, placing it against the backdrop of her critically acclaimed prose record, The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden published her poetic responses to her war experience as a post script to this text. Like the other fragments and short stories, these poems draw on her experience with the Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1, inviting the reader to see, hear, smell, and interpret the war along with the poilus whom she treated. Borden’s poems offer a record like no other, often adopting stylistic tropes of modernism to articulate the unspeakable. The chapter also examines some very different wartime poems that document her love affair with her future husband, Edward Spears. Powerful and erotically charged, these poems encapsulate a very different kind of war experience, enabling Borden to speak with a range of poetic voices.

The Romantic theory of war described in this chapter is the product of a group of highly educated Prussian officers trying to grasp the new conditions of politics and warfare that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. They had studied the philosophy of enlightenment, the history of warfare, and the mathematics of probability, they had read the works of the Classical and Romantic poets of their time, and they had fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In order to define the nature of war, one of the most eminent of these thinkers, Carl von Clausewitz, relied on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Describing the reality of war, he also relied on three new sciences that had played a role in Kant’s philosophy: the science of static and mechanics, the science of electro-magnetism, and the science of population statistics. The chapter argues that while Clausewitz was not a precursor of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, one of the most consequential moments of the digital revolution, he does, however, remain relevant to this day as one of the first theorists of irregular warfare.

Vita Sackville-West’s book-length blank verse poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) are unique in English poetry as the twentieth century’s sole exemplars of Virgilian formal georgic. This chapter discusses both poems in their historical context, reading them as distinguished receptions of classical as well as English literary models. The chapter focuses on Sackville-West’s recalibrations of Virgil, and assesses the implications of her work on conceptions of the georgic genre with regard to didacticism, linguistic experiment, aesthetic achievement and ideas about empire and national identity.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.

The second chapter explores how middle-class Americans responded to the modernist battle cry “make it new!” not only by embracing new technologies, fashions, and aesthetic forms but also, and more simply, by representing poor white people as antiquated—a practice intended to throw into relief middle-class modernness. I argue that William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) interrogates ideas about poor white southerners’ backwardness set forth by eugenics and other modern movements. Faulkner deployed the structural forms and stylistic techniques that define modernism in response to the challenge of fictionally representing the ideas and experiences of rural poor white characters in new ways. Signal modernist devices like stream-of-consciousness narration allow poor white speakers to articulate sophisticated thoughts that their somewhat narrow lexicons would otherwise make it hard to voice.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.

In this final chapter, I analyze Furūgh Farrukhzād’s innovative development of Nīmā’s earlier prosodic experiments and link Farrukhzād’s late modernist poetic project with Western modernist poetry. My purpose in avoiding lengthy comparisons with Western poetry up to this point in the book is to provincialize European poetic modernism and consider instead the significant links in poetic forms, themes, and politics that were more important for the elaboration of modernism in the Arab and Iranian contexts. However, I also readily admit that Western poetic influence plays a significant role in the Arab and Iranian modernists’ approaches to poetry. I thus take the opportunity in this last chapter to address Farrukhzād’s work not only in the context of local poetic connections, but also in light of the bonds she forged with Western modernist poetry. In so doing, I argue that Farrukhzād’s poetic persona is best understood as a flâneuse, the female Iranian counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian poetic persona. I furthermore undertake a lengthy analysis of the close associations between Farrukhzād’s late poetry and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” from 1925.

This chapter underscores what I will call “Mexican Miracle Modernism”; that is, the emergence of literary forms and styles tied to the rapid population growth, economic modernization, and urban development that characterized the period. The key figure to be studied is Salvador Novo, whose work is often recovered in terms of his alternative sexuality and his role as chronicler. Building on those lines of inquiry, I will claim that he is in fact the precursor of a form of urban modernism that will become central in both fictional and nonfictional narratives from the 1960s onward. The chapter will also discuss the rise of the detective novel (Rodolfo Usigli, María Elvira Bermúdez, Antonio Helú, and Luis Spota will be key) and the importance of the Mexican gothic (Rafael Bernal and Francisco Tario).

The chapter begins with a section on the Egyptian Marxist Louis Awad’s radical modernist poetic project Plutoland from 1947. The chapter engages Awad’s critical intervention to lay out the transnational roots of Arabic poetry from the premodern period to the twentieth century before moving on to address the intricacies of the Arabic prosodic rules he wanted the modernists to break. In the second section, I give technical details about how I represent poetic meters throughout the rest of the book and explain the science of Arabic prosody. Next, the chapter covers critical approaches to modernist poetry in both Arabic and Persian, paying particular attention to the critics’ positions on the possibility of composing politically committed poetry. I then transition into a long section on the history of literary commitment, its philosophical foundations, and the role it played in Arabic and Persian poetic criticism. In a brief conclusion, I suggest a way out of the debates that took shape around literary commitment and offer further details on my balancing of formalist and contextual analytical approaches to the poetry I read in the later chapters.

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the articulation of new approaches to literature in Iran and the Arab world as Arabic and Persian literary modernisms developed out of the Arab nahḍah “renaissance” and the neoclassical Persian bāzgasht movement of “literary return. Modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian, which emerges in many ways on its own and draws on this other, local history, thus stands outside and against a singular understanding of modernism as a European phenomenon and calls us to consider what it might look like if we situate the center of our modernist map in the Middle East. The introduction deploys a range of recent literary theory on modernism, transnationalism, and modernity in the Arab world and Iran to argue for a re-orientation of our perspective and to treat Middle Eastern modernism on its own terms. By relocating our modernist center to an “Eastern” geography, the chapter argues for a new way of looking at modernist poetic developments within the region and across the border between the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Considering modernism from this relativist perspective shows how Arabic and Persian poetries form a significant modernist geography within the broader movement of modernism.

The most provocative legacy of surrealism in Latin America in the period following World War II can arguably be found in the work of women artists and writers. The postwar feminine surrealisms examined in this chapter responded to the encroachment of capitalism in daily life and the gradual, if incomplete, loosening of normative categories of sex and gender. Taking up historical surrealism’s focus on eros as an incomplete promise, they expanded into alternative configurations of sex, desire, and family life, while simultaneously emphasizing persistent, if updated, forms of gendered violence. This chapter analyzes experimental writers and visual artists from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s – Grete Stern, Maria Martins, Marosa Di Giorgio, and Alejandra Pizarnik. It concludes by noting the legacies of their erotic surrealisms for contemporary art and literature.