The Nature of Modernism

Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew

Elizabeth Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351867115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

This books presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book's central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet to receive adequate critical attention. Whilst modernist studies continues to emphasize the plurality of the movement and the breadth of voices and concerns within it, the environmental consciousness of modernist literature and its response to changes to human/nature relations following the experience of war and modernity remain largely unexamined. Exploring British modernist poetry from an ecocritical perspective offers a fresh approach to the movement and its context, and produces original readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist voices. This book opens by discussing the relationship between modernism and ecocriticism and the benefits of creating a dialogue between the two. It then presents new readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew that reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. Building on the continuing growth of ecocriticism, this book demonstrates how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole, making it an essential resource for students of modernism, ecocriticism, and early-twentieth-century literature.

1 Critical and Theoretical Contexts

Examining modernist literature from an ecocritical perspective involves uniting two complex, substantial and continually evolving areas of literary studies. This chapter offers a summary of the context and development of both ecocriticism and modernist studies with the aim of illustrating the opportunities for meaningful dialogue between the two. The key terms that underlie this study are ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘ecocriticism’: although each is highly contested and subject to ongoing discussion and redefinition, discussing the meaning of each helps to clarify their use in this book and their relationship to each other.

Modernism

The difficulties of defining modernism are rooted in the problem of identifying shared interests within this varied and often contradictory movement. Monroe K. Spears describes modernism as ‘an impossible subject’ with ‘special difficulties’ which make attempts at definition liable to result in distortion.¹ However, it is important for ecocritics to engage in these debates to challenge the tendency of existing definitions to emphasise an interest in human concerns and human culture rather than the natural world, and to argue for a definition that recognises the extent of the movement’s environmental concerns. Understanding of the diversity of the modernist movement has increased since the practice, dating back to Frank Kermode in the late 1960s, of referring to a range of modernisms rather than a singular movement. This significant critical shift brought attention to previously marginalised interests and voices and allowed for more expansive and inclusive definitions which recognise the plurality of the movement. As a result, modernism is increasingly understood as a movement that crosses art forms, time zones and geographical boundaries. The vast scope of issues raised by awareness of global or transnational modernisms has informed specialisation in a multitude of research areas as diverse as genetic criticism, thing theory, middlebrow modernist literature and the study of the movement’s relationship to popular culture. There is also a growing resistance to historicising the movement, which has led to debate over whether the modernist era continues to the present and if, considering this, post-modernism should be understood as a point of crisis rather than departure.

The difficulty of identifying core modernist values or practices raises the question of whether modernism possesses sufficient cohesion to be recognised as a movement: ‘modernism is more a transitional phenomenon than a period or movement’.² Attempts to define this diverse movement or even identify shared characteristics often result in broad associations or generalisations. For example, modernism is known for being cosmopolitan, international, abstract, complex and informed by developments in other fields such as psychology and anthropology. It is associated with experimentation and the emergence of new art movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, Dadaism, Futurism and Vorticism: groups whose radical break from conventional artistic practices embodies the spirit of Ezra Pound’s rallying call to reject inherited or stale modes of artistic expression and ‘Make it New!’³ Literary modernism tends to be associated with a break from nineteenth-century literary conventions, such as realism in prose and the iambic pentameter in poetry, in favour of experimenting with avant-garde techniques to represent modern experience.

Whilst broad, such overviews of modernism can be useful in identifying enduring stereotypes and, for ecocritics, illuminating discrepancies between perception and reality in modernist responses to nature. As Lawrence Rainey observes, this continual endeavour to interpret and define a complex and often contradictory artistic movement has become ‘something of an academic obsession’.⁴ However, whilst the ongoing expansion of modernist studies has contributed to this complexity by foregrounding alternative or previously marginalised modernist voices, challenging previous assumptions about the movement has created a space for ecocritics to reassess the movement from a nature-centred perspective and show the potential for ecocriticism to provide meaningful contributions to the understanding of modernist responses to place.

One approach to defining modernism has been through its temporal boundaries. Carol H. Cantrell locates modernism ‘between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War II’ with an epicentre of 1922.⁵ Such parameters provide a useful timeframe in which to consider modernism, but any concept of a definitive ‘modernist period’ risks excluding earlier texts which exhibit modernist traits, or failing to recognise its continuing influence on contemporary literature. Even if a broad consensus can be achieved, for example the period between 1890 and 1935, the timeframe can be further deconstructed to reveal the existence of several distinct stages of modernism. Tim Armstrong demonstrates this by identifying ‘a politically-engaged, radical avant-garde modernism before 1918’, followed by ‘the more conservative “high” modernism of the 1920s’, which is distinct from ‘“late” or second-wave modernism’ in the 1930s.⁶

Geographically, the scope of modernism has extended beyond the axis of Paris, London and New York to include Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Prague, St. Petersburg and beyond.⁷ Two studies which have been central in recognising the transnational character of modernism and its cultural and national variants are Modernisms: A Literary Guide by Peter Nicholls and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel. Nicholls acknowledges the achievement of feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists in revealing the diversity and ironies of modernist writing which confirm ‘modernism is not one thing but many and that its divergent forms are profoundly determined by specificities of time and place’.⁸ Developing this further, Nicholls traces the familiar account of modernism from its roots in nineteenth-century Paris through to its manifestations in Futurism, Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism, and then goes beyond Anglo-American dominance to explore previously under-examined areas such as African-American modernism. In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Doyle and Winkiel promote ‘a locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity’, and in doing so discover a correlation between modernist experiments in marginalised texts and more mainstream versions.⁹ By extending understanding of modernism ‘well beyond familiar accounts of race, politics and primitivism’, they reveal it to be a global phenomenon which is better understood not as a fixed term, but as ‘a contested and historical referent that suffers pressure from the affiliations, indifference, or antagonism of diverse twentieth-century writers and artists’.¹⁰ As Andrew Ross observes, such work on transnational modernisms have contributed significantly to awareness of ‘numerous and disparate understandings of modernisms in the plural’ and challenged old geographical, temporal and material limits to allow scholars to ‘work with new materials, new regions, and new questions’.¹¹

However, although the global character and variations of modernism have been recognised, less attention has been paid to the more immediate relationship between writers and their physical environment. This book aims to address this omission and contribute to the ongoing recognition of the diversity of interests within modernism by producing an ecocritical analysis of modernist poetry which highlights the importance of the non-human world to literary modernism. This emphasis on how writers respond to environmental change is particularly pertinent to the modernist era. Despite emerging during a period of significant advances in science and technology, modernism is often seen to represent ‘not just change but crisis’.¹² As this study argues, much of this sense of crisis relates to a perceived disconnection from nature as the industrial revolution and the parallel rise of capitalism ushered in the final phase of Britain’s transformation from an agricultural to an urban society. Richard Sheppard recognises this, rooting this crisis in a ‘sense of dislocation between the material, the human and the metaphysical’.¹³ Tim Armstrong situates modernism within the ‘second industrial revolution’, a period characterised by rapid urban growth, increased bureaucracy, expanding capitalist markets and the rise of new technology and developments in areas such as banking, transportation and communication.¹⁴

These changes contributed to a sense of discontinuity from the past which strongly informs the character of modernist literature. Freedom from restrictive literary conventions created exhilarating potential for artistic expression, but this was coupled with a sense of dislocation and disillusionment at the loss of these same stabilising structures. Bradbury and Macfarlane recognise the tensions inherent in the removal of previous boundaries, observing that ‘experimentalism does not simply suggest the presence of sophistication, difficulty and novelty in art; it also suggests bleakness, darkness, alienation, disintegration’.¹⁵ This sense of unease is embodied in the archetypal modern figure: intelligent and sensitive but also alienated, self-conscious and neurotic almost to the point of full blown breakdown. Monroe K. Spears describes the emergence of the modern ‘mass man’:

… anonymous and rootless, cut off from his past and from the nexus of human relations in which he formerly existed, anxious and insecure, enslaved by the mass media but left by the disappearance of God with a dreadful freedom of spiritual choice.¹⁶

In this climate of cultural and personal exhaustion, ‘the great modern monster’ of ennui was not simply a literary affectation, but its characteristic boredom, weariness and general dissatisfaction with life were also symptoms of neurasthenia: a commonly diagnosed depressive condition which affected many writers of the period, including Edward Thomas and Charlotte Mew.¹⁷ However, this pervasive dissatisfaction also inspired a search for meaning and continuity which often involved a re-evaluation of the role of nature in modern society, as well as to art and the individual.

Modernism is commonly associated with a preoccupation with ‘the new’ and identified by the linguistic and formal experiments which stem from this interest. However, each poet in this book also reflects the continuing importance of roots and traditions, even to th...