Editor’s Introduction: Modernist Modes of Resistance

How can writers use the tools of their cultural inheritance to shed light on the oppressive aspects of their nation’s ideology or on related practices of other societies or time periods?

The first four essays in this issue deal with artists seeking to resist or escape nationalist ideologies through modernist techniques. Ariela Freedman argues that Charlotte Salomon’s iconoclastic image-text combinations were inspired by the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Germany and that these composite expressions became her mode of resisting, both politically and therapeutically, the fascist regime that sought to oppress her. Keri Walsh’s essay deals with how Elizabeth Bowen exploited the spatial and temporal features of Futurism in her fiction, separating these from the movement’s fascist-leaning ideology and, in the process, drawing attention to victims of fascism. Aleksandar Stević refutes twenty years of scholarship that concentrated on James Joyce’s linguistic nationalism and ethnic essentialism, taking us back to an earlier appreciation of Joyce’s cosmopolitanism and aestheticism. Vaughn Anderson looks at the way John Cage was able to deploy an aesthetic of indeterminacy as a model for non-intervention in South American policy during the Cold War.

The next group of essays makes connections across communities or time periods. Zoë Roth discusses how the American author John Littell in his French novel, The Kindly Ones, uses image as well as text to create links between World World II, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and 9/11. J. Russell Perkin addresses John Lanchester’s 2012 Capital, which draws on earlier work by “condition of England novelists,” most notably Charles Dickens, to show connections and divergences from contemporary England. Raphaël Lambert’s essay on Barry Unsworth’s novel, Sacred Hunger, traces the creation and the dissolution of an eighteenth-century mixed-race utopian community, discussing the complex factors needed for a community to remain coherent and unified over time. The final essay in the issue, by Laura R. Fisher, reads James Baldwin’s Another Country as an experiment in language that illuminates social conditions and makes language the site of protest from the 1960s into the present.

Rounding out the issue are three book reviews on themes related to the essays. Steve Ellis’s British Writers and the Approach of World War II deals with the way canonical nineteenth-century and modernist authors, in their mix of skepticism and support for liberalism, can teach contemporary readers to think in nuanced ways about political issues. Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism deals with the anxiety experienced by major modernist writers about their commitment to liberalism at the beginning of World War II. Bridget T. Chalk’s Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience addresses the constraints and related circumventions that came into being as a result of “the narrow juridical narrative of individual identity” associated with the advent of the passport.