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The Transcontinental Book Trade: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur Enterprise

Second Receipt for Books Purchased at Shakespeare and Company

By Nora Benedict,

In the second volume of her Testimonios, Victoria Ocampo recalls how her friend, Virginia Woolf, insisted that she must “guardar el dinero para la revista [Sur] y los libros” (save money for her journal [Sur] and books).[1] Drawing on her own publishing experience with the Hogarth Press, Woolf acknowledges both the literary importance of Ocampo’s journal as well as the inherent financial strain of maintaining it. The world of publishing involves great risk, but the rewards can be even greater, as Woolf notes: “¿Sabe usted que nosotros vivimos de la Hogarth Press?” (Did you know that we live off of the Hogarth Press?).

The Fabric of the City: Magazines, Dressmakers, and Madrid’s Gran Vía

Alfonso Sánchez García, Un grupo de modistillas con bandera republicana

By Maite Barragán,

In February 1928, the popular magazine Estampa published an unassuming centerfold photograph of a large group of people strolling through Madrid. The jovial crowd pictured is so large that they take over the sidewalk and spill into the avenue (fig. 1). At the center of the image, cheerful female dressmakers walk with synchronized steps. Nearby pedestrians take note of the group’s energetic display for the photographer and pause to look at them.

T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St. Louis

Whipple’s Fire Insurance Map of 1897 showing the 2600 blocks of Washington and Locust Street

By Frances Dickey, University of Missouri, Columbia

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in words that resonate unexpectedly with the work of another noted twentieth-century Christian, T. S.

Towards a Late Modernist Theater

Henry Moore, Mask concept sketches for Auden's Dance of Death

By Lauren Arrington,

Joan Didion begins her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem with W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” printed in full as an epigraph; the title and the long quotation underscore Didion’s perception of the rupture of the 1960s: a revolution—sexual and political—of which she was skeptical. As she explains in her preface, she “had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” Later in the same book, in the essay “On Morality” she argues that the “ethic of conscience” as a measure of a writer or anyone else’s morality was an “insidious” metric; neither the individual’s intention nor—as will be discussed in this essay—the form of the work conferred “any ipso facto virtue.” Scholars of modernism have not been so careful.

All Articles

The Transcontinental Book Trade: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur Enterprise

By Nora Benedict

The Fabric of the City: Magazines, Dressmakers, and Madrid’s Gran Vía

By Maite Barragán

T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St. Louis

By Frances Dickey, University of Missouri, Columbia

Towards a Late Modernist Theater

By Lauren Arrington

Hollywood, Exile, and New Types of Pictures: Günther Anders’s 1941 California Diary “Washing the Corpses of History”

By Christopher John Müller

When Günther Anders arrived in New York in 1936, following three years of exile in Paris, he tried to achieve “‘a typically American’ breakthrough” (Interviews, 37).[3] One of the first ventures this involved was writing a script for a Charlie Chaplin movie, a script, as Anders adds, that “probably went straight into the bin of some Hollywood agent” (37). For those familiar with Anders’s prolific postwar writings, especially the media theory advanced in the two uncannily prescient volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings), these Hollywood aspirations might come as a surprise.

Washing the Corpses of History: The Hollywood Costume Palace, a 1941 Exile Diary by Günther Anders

By Christopher John Müller

Vita brevis? No, nobody will make me believe that life is short. It’s long—not because of long boredom, but because of its genuinely long duration. At least moving backwards, life is endless. “My” childhood in Breslau stretches into the depths of paleontological prehistory. My mind can only persuade me for a few seconds that my erstwhile namesake and I are one and the same —he must have been a distant ancestor.

Virginia Woolf’s Armchair

By Aimée Gasston

Virginia Woolf’s memoirs resonate richly with seating, beginning with the rocking chair from which she heard her father drop books to the floor at Hyde Park Gate. Leslie Stephen had “written all his books lying sunk in that deep rocking chair,” Woolf would recall in the essay “A Sketch of the Past,” his feet clear of the ground, a writing board across his lap. Yet Woolf did not herself begin as an armchair storyteller.

Translation as Alienation: Sufi Hermeneutics and Literary Modernism in Bijan Elahi’s Translations

By Kayvan Tahmasebian, University of Birmingham

The history of Iranian modernism is inseparable from the history of literary translation. In most accounts of Iranian literary history, the translation of European literary works played a formative role in the redefinition of poetic discourse as well as in the introduction of new literary genres, such as the short story and the novel, to modern Persian literature. In his landmark study of Iranian literary modernism, Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani rejects the ascription of originality to Iranian modernism.

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