Affective Materialities

Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature

Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, Robin Hackett

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813056289
• eBook ISBN: 9780813057071
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Affective Materialities reexamines modernist theorizations of the body and opens up the artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation.

Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen.

Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Affective Materialities
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations
• 2. Flesh over Granite: Walt Whitman’s Embodied Presence in William Carlos Williams’s “History”
• 3. E. M. Forster among the Ruins
• 4. “‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’m wounded’”: Disrupting Wounded Masculinity through the Lyrical Spaces of War
• 5. Frustrated Energies in Modernism’s Female Arrangements
• 6. “Things were in people, people were in things”: Language, Ecology, and the Body in H.D.
• 7. Cold Crystal: The Ecology of Affect in Herbert Read’s The Green Child
• 8. “I wanna be your puppy”: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Queer Cute Body
• 9. The Brain and the Living World in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water
• 10. “Becoming Animal, Becoming Other”: Modernism, Millennial Jurisprudence, and the Limits of Materialist Subjectivity
• 11. Black Girls and Lady Police: Blank Affect and the Ecology of the Gym
• List of Contributors
• Index