Modernism and the Materiality of Texts

Description

Modernism and the Materiality of Texts argues that elements of modernist texts that are meaningless in themselves are motivated by their authors' psychic crises. Physical features of texts that interest modernist writers, such as sound patterns and anagrams, cannot be dissociated from abstraction or made a refuge from social crisis; instead, they reflect colonial and racial anxieties of the period. Rudyard Kipling's fear that he is indistinguishable from empire subjects, J. M. Barrie's object-relations theater of infantile separation, and Virginia Woolf's dismembered anagram self are performed by the physical text and produce a new understanding of textuality. In readings that also include diverse works by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, P. G. Wodehouse and Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, George Herriman, and Sigmund Freud, this study produces a new reading of modernism's psychological text and of literary constructions of materiality in the period. Cover Half title Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures Preamble Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1 = Nonsense and Motivation Body of Thought Thought of Body No Room with a View 2 = VSW: Anagram Body Miss S. Wolf Verdict – Winner Wreathed upon the Sky We Never Speak Them Whole Self-Sown from Wind-Dropped Seed 3 = The Erasure of Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein Forgetting Alice Toklas to the Letter The Condition of Language Harnessing on or Another 4 = Barrie's Object Relations Peter Does Some Things to You The Name of Peter Pan Pooh-Pooh: “Slightly Soiled, that’s my name” The Shadow of the Object 5 = Late English Empire Nonsense As Plainly as Print (Kipling Ink) For A' That A Thing beyond Myself Kim’s Foreign Madness 6 = George Herriman's Black Sentence A State of Psychosis The Banana Femly The Elixir of Invisibility I’m Writing a “Sickrit” to Myself 7 = Afterword: Indifference in Freud Notes References Index