Much of the literary and cultural theory developed throughout the twentieth century relied on modernist texts and artefacts as both example and paradigm. This Dictionary collects, categorises and ...intersects literary, aesthetic, political and cultural terms that in one way or another came into being through the debates, conflicts, co-operations, experiments – individual and collective – that characterised modernism. In concise entries from international experts, it presents the terms, categories, concepts, tropes, movements, forged through the modernist upheavals (at once aesthetic and political), highlighting their genealogy, their modernist ‘newness’, and their historical longevity.
Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high ...modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism she finds the ideal conditions for glamour-blankness, polish, impenetrability, and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape glamour's meanings: the most significant perfume of the twentieth century, Chanel No. 5; the idea of the Jazz Age and its ubiquitous cigarette; the celebrity photograph; the staging of primitivism; and the invention of a shimmering plastic called cellophane. Alongside these artifacts, she takes up the development, refinement, and analysis of glamour in Anglo-American poetry, film, fiction, and drama of the period. Glamour in Six Dimensions thus asks its reader to see the proximity between the vernacular and elite cultures of modernism, and particularly how glamour was animated by artists working at the crossroads of the mundane and the extraordinary: Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and others.
Book review of Gualberto Valverde, Rebeca (2021). Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth. Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València.
The new articles in this volume by Lingxiang Ke, John Pedro Schwartz, and Kathryn Van Wert-together with Jeanette McVicker's important contribution to Woof Studies Annual 28 (2022)-form a cluster of ...studies marking the centenary of 1922, modernism's annus mirabilis and publication year of Virginia Woolf's Jacob s Room. In addition to these articles and a number of reviews of new books in the field, WSA 29 also continues the Index Project started in volume 28, this time indexing articles published in WSA 11-15 (2005-2009). WSA 29 also features a forum of essays in response to Mark Hussey's Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021)-a text that fundamentally reorients Bell for readers not only of Woolf but also of Bloomsbury and twentieth-century art criticism and history more broadly.
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