Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students. I was asking them to delve into yet another textual universe of trauma, alienation, and unease. The only somewhat playful relief on offer that semester was Un Chien Andalou (1929)—hardly a set piece for eudaimonia. I assured my students that modernism was not all doom and gloom: modernists had fun, they could throw a good party. At the conclusion of the course, I routinely show archival footage of people dancing the Charleston to demonstrate just how much fun modernism can be. But in all seriousness, this experience prompted me to start thinking about the question of modernism and happiness, and why it has remained such a conspicuously absent topic in modernist studies both past and present. As Sara Ahmed observed in her 2010 study, The Promise of Happiness, we are in the midst of a “happiness turn.” Happiness, wellness and wellbeing are large, lucrative culture industries. This is exemplified by the large number of books, podcasts, seminars, and websites dedicated to informing us what happiness is and how we can attain it. If we follow Darrin McMahon’s comprehensive intellectual history of the idea, we are possibly in the biggest happiness craze since the eighteenth century. In recent years several governments, such as New Zealand’s, have focused more attention on issues of individual and social well being. In 2018, Tracey Crouch was appointed the unenviable task of serving as the UK’s first Minister for Loneliness, a role which clearly aligns with issues of community and wellbeing. By contrast, some commentators fear that happiness and wellbeing have become instruments of neoliberalism as much as capitalist enterprise. As John Updike quipped, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” In academia, Happiness Studies is an established interdisciplinary field, and an increasing amount of scholarly and empirical research on the topic is being published in disciplines across the Social Sciences and Humanities.

In 1990, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick declared the closet “the defining structure for gay oppression in this century,” she followed that claim with a reference to the legal discourses of privacy, specifically those concentrated around the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the existence of anti-sodomy laws. As she describes them, the conversations following this case zoomed in on “the image of the bedroom invaded by policemen,” implicitly affirming that queerness belongs behind closed doors, while policemen belong in the street.

An art form that relates to a particular social class does not exist, and if it did, it would be entirely irrelevant to life. We ask those who want to create proletarian art: “What is proletarian art?” Is it an art created by the proletarians themselves? Or an art only in the service of the proletariat? Or an art intended to arouse proletarian (revolutionary) instincts? There exists no art created by proletarians because a proletarian who creates art no longer remains a proletarian but becomes an artist.

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press As I read Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, my mind wandered to a 1929 essay by Theodor Adorno. The essay considers the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and the early compositions of Franz Schubert. Adorno describes the transition between the two composers as follows: He who crosses the threshold between the years of Beethoven’s death and Schubert’s will shiver, like someone emerging into the painfully diaphanous...

Austral summer on the Antarctic Peninsula. Eight of us climb out of our zodiac onto the shore of Petermann Island. This place dazzles and overwhelms the senses. The luminous blue icebergs, granite streaked pink with penguin guano, the weakly green cryoplankton spread across the snow. Antarctica is not the white continent of popular imagination. And it isn’t quiet either. The plangent groans of glaciers crawl across the landscape, reverberating through our bodies. Gentoo penguins squawk atop their stone nests, staring helplessly skyward at the skuas eying their young. We are unwelcome, unneeded guests.

“Affect, feelings, and emotive responses cannot be shaped into a methodology,” writes Fionnuala Dillane in her thoughtful exploration of this essential dimension of periodical meaning. [1] Acknowledging the frustrations of those “who prefer graphs, reproducible, predictable, transferable methods, and definite structures,” Dillane argues persuasively that we need instead to embrace “the operations of affect, its openness, its aleatoric potential, and its emotion-based effects, in particular when considering the open-ended, multi-textured, serial form that is the periodical” (“Forms of Affect,” 10). My purpose in this examination of The Western Home Monthly ( WHM) is to take up this challenge, exploring in the process a complementary analytical concept, what I have come to term the “texture” of the magazine. Further elaborating this term and exploring its analytical potential is a key aim of this contribution, but for the time being let me offer an outline definition.

“We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot?” – Thomas Pynchon, quoted in Zadie Smith, “Love, Actually” [1] In her essay, “Love, Actually,” Zadie Smith relates her debt as a writer to E. M. Forster. Though the quote above is taken from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a novel generally considered to be...

What distinguishes modernism’s legacies from the afterlives of other literary or cultural movements? To begin to answer this question, let’s glance back to 1941, when several writers of transatlantic renown composed what we might call obituaries for the modernist arts. Djuna Barnes’s “Lament for the Left Bank,” for example, an elegiac piece published in the American periodical Town and Country, memorialized a Paris made brilliant by overlapping arcs of collaborative innovation: Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes; George Antheil and Ezra Pound; Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Coco Chanel. The essay ends with the line, “The dreadful thing is not that all these things were done, but that they are over.” [1] The things that were done and the things that are over: Barnes identifies the tensions that would come to mark modernism’s legacy in the twenty-first century, the dialectical occurrences of cultural continuity and discontinuity, of originality and repetition. For Barnes, Left Bank artists in the 1920s and 1930s did “things”—a single, compact word for modernism’s kaleidoscopic transformations—that were over by 1941, a conviction varied and echoed in other coeval “art-historical post-mortems,” to borrow from Richard Meyers, by Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Anaïs Nin, and Cyril Connolly. [2]

Modernism’s singular allure for contemporary novelists and critics alike raises a number of questions, problems, and interpretative opportunities. What do these shared attachments reveal about the legacies of modernism today? What feelings does modernism inspire, and what values do those feelings imply? Why do contemporary novels invoke modernist writing with such urgency, and what conceptions of modernism emerge from these engagements? Should we take seriously the idea that contemporary fiction...

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf famously writes, “Chloe liked Olivia,” a line that anticipates, and even directs, feminist literary scholarship through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [1] Woolf’s modernist feminism, in A Room and a range of other literary essays, calls for a female literary lineage as well as histories of the anonymous women whose stories have never been told. How then, after almost a century, has Woolf’s vision fulfilled itself? In what ways has her work reached global and contemporary audiences, and how have these audiences used modernist feminism to talk about their current political and cultural circumstances? How do we begin to construct a female literary canon that is based on the affective responses of one writer to another? The overwhelming international popularity of Elena Ferrante’s metamodern Neapolitan quartet, which includes My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Lost Child (2014), illustrates the affective impact of Woolf’s feminist ideas. [2] Ferrante does in fiction what Woolf calls for in theory as she amplifies the implications of female friendship, matrilineal lineage, women’s anger, and anonymity. Through an appropriation of modernist feminist tendancies, both in content and form, Ferrante explores the psychological and subterranean currents of female consciousness and gives voice to Shakespeare’s sister, the female writer who comes into existence through the work of anonymous women. Ferrante, herself one of those anonymous women, continues the female lineage Woolf argues for. The inner worlds of the women in Ferrante’s realist prose remind us of Woolf’s call to remember the interior lives of women; yet Ferrante’s novels are very much products of post-fascist Italy and 1970s Italian feminism.