TY - JOUR
AU - O’Hanlon,, Karl
AB - Abstract This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post-1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7 British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon. 1. General For the field of modernist studies, 2018 was a transitional year. Approaches that have felt novel and urgent in the past five years continue to flourish, namely those derived from archival studies, periodical studies, and the digital humanities, but publications adopting them are less likely to be imbued with a sense of self-conscious newness and more likely to be integrated with a variety of more traditional methods and engaged with long-established debates. Even more palpably, as scholars become more comfortable with the temporal and spatial expansions of what counts as modernism, the perceived need for bold, defensive, or manifesto-like theoretical justifications of these expansions has relaxed. As the moniker ‘modernism’ continues to be applied to more and more art produced outside Europe and the Americas and for art produced before the 1890s or after the 1940s, attention to modernisms across the globe and across time continues to be framed as a comparative venture. In other words, canonical modernist authors and texts are being juxtaposed with figures and works of art to be brought under the shared umbrella of modernism. One change is that scholarship published in 2018 suggests that comparison is being supplemented by a second, newer method, one that is attempting to re-examine local and national contexts without abandoning the hard-fought transnational framework characteristic of the new modernist studies. To put it more succinctly, modernist scholars are increasingly absorbed by the question of how to think nationally in a transnational context. In addition, a marked increase in the sciences and social sciences in recent publications on modernism, as well as the mainstreaming of digital humanities tools and other quantitative approaches to analysis, suggests that the historicism of the new modernist studies is being supplemented by more empirical methods and to consider twentieth-century sciences and social sciences as themselves subjects for research. With more attention being given to the mechanisms by which bureaucratic and corporate institutions regulate themselves and their populations, the nascent interest in infrastructure studies is another trend to note. At first glance, these trends may seem to threaten to fragment the field into a clutch of niche concerns, but they may be boiled down into two basic strands: first, a renewed investment in non-textual modernisms and their relation to textual production; and second, an interest in the sciences, social sciences, and empirical methodologies particular to those disciplines. Considering the fine arts and the sciences, it seems, can provide modernist studies with new ways of thinking about the affordances and limitations of languages and about the specific advantages or disadvantages of humanist ways of thinking and communicating, especially when compared to other formalized systems of knowledge. Both threads are united by a curiosity about signs that do not signify, about processes that do not end, about structures of knowledge that do not create meaning, and about formal strategies that do not unify works of art. Yet many of the books reviewed here strike a note of optimism in the face of these refusals, finding in them a salutary preference for revelling in the open-ended aesthetic possibilities of the philosophical and technological, rather than crafting magisterial pronouncements and forcing spurious unities that would sour over the passage of time. These shifts towards the fine arts and the sciences are evident in the novel structure of The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon. The first major section of the companion comprises twenty-one essays, sorted into four categories: ‘The Modernist Everyday’, ‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, ‘The Sciences and Technologies of Modernism’, and the ‘Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’. The first category is eclectic, featuring essays on everydayness, geography, language scepticism, emotion, and myth. Michael Bell’s contribution, ‘Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature’ (pp. 99–116), is the standout chapter in this section, notable for its comprehensive scope. The second category features essays on music, the visual arts, film, popular culture, magazines, and (interestingly) manuscripts. This includes Dirk Van Hulle’s contribution ‘Minding Manuscripts: Modernism, Genetic Criticism and Intertextual Cognition’ (pp. 211–26), that wisely investigates periodical studies as a part of modernism itself and of modernist scholarship. The third category enfolds essays on relativity, sexuality, and gender; on psychoanalysis’s roots in neuroscience; on modernism’s many engagements with various psychological theories (psychoanalysis is also covered here); and on technology in general. Einstein, Freud, Heidegger, and other familiar theorists dominate this section, although Laura Salisbury’s ‘Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Other Psychologies’ (pp. 285–306) fascinatingly investigates psychology’s growth as a field, and psychoanalysis as a practice current during modernism, rather than as a set of concepts. The fourth section exhibits the strongest influence of transnational approaches, with Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis’s ‘Can There Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) offering a perfect first selection for this final section of the handbook’s first major part. After this part are three extremely powerful tools: an ‘A to Z of Key Terms’, an annotated bibliography of modernist criticism, and a timeline of modernism that should be made required reading for new scholars in the field. Prefacing all of these materials is Maude’s wide-ranging yet admirably succinct introduction, ‘Modernism, Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), which provides numerous close readings to support her claim that modernist stylistic experimentation served to reveal the contingencies of life, which (troublingly for the reader) brutally expose the lack of purposiveness and linear narrative structure that typify modernity. Maude’s selection of Joyce, Conrad, Beckett, Woolf, Eliot, and all the other usual suspects for these deftly worked close readings does little to illustrate her explanation that modernist studies is geographically and temporally capacious; the component chapters show a similar preference for canonical modernists. Throughout the handbook, there is a subtle tension between the handbook’s account of the decreasing significance of canonical authors and historical periodization for determining what is modernism, on the one hand, and the undoubted historicism and conservative choice of authors in many of the component chapters on the other. This tension is, perhaps, productive: it allows readers to survey both historical approaches and transnational approaches as potential ways into the field, observe the differences between them, and shuttle back and forth between the insights of both schools of thought, ultimately allowing readers to take advantage of both. Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction, undoubtedly one of the most ambitious new monographs of 2018, proposes a solution to circumvent this tension between historicist approaches and transnational expansions of modernism’s temporal span. Following Rita Felski’s call to question the hermeneutics of suspicion that typically accompanies historicist approaches, all in the name of an ideological critique whose conclusions are all too knowable in advance, as well as drawing on Paul Armstrong’s suspicion of historical context as the primary methodology of modernist scholarship, Bronstein defines modernism not in terms of the past, but in terms of the future readings and rewritings that are opened up by particular stylistic choices. Understanding historicism as a backward-looking, closed operation in which the past provides all answers for critics in the present, Bronstein instead examines the afterlives of modernist fiction as particular texts are taken by later writers as salient provocations or cues for responding powerfully to their own cultural and political situations. Formal experimentation emerges as a tool for creating ‘antihistoricist strategies’ that ‘enabled a wide array of later political uses’ (p. 19). This operation can be regarded as a variant of reception theory fashioned for modernists’ expanded boundaries; the responses of ‘unknowable readers of the future’ are queried by Bronstein as they ‘turn the past to suit new purposes’ (p. 2). It can also be seen as a subversive rereading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for reading modernism through its legacies is meant not to celebrate another ‘Dead White Man who wrote in an old-fashioned style’ (p. 4), but to identify a ‘recuperative modernism’ that avoids the ‘negative affect’ associated with modernism (p. 16). Out of Context looks hopefully towards the future by employing ‘revolutionary literary forms’ in order to ‘preserve older epistemologies for the future’ (p. 12). Bronstein reads Henry James through James Baldwin’s use of James, Joseph Conrad through Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and William Faulkner through Ken Kesey, showing the three modernists and the three mid-century writers to be engaged in ‘rescue work’ (p. 28) that forges ethically responsible ways to create order out of modern chaos (chapter 1), to cultivate politically efficacious models of individualism (chapter 2), to structure narratives and knowledge according to rhetorical effect rather than linear chronology (chapter 3), and to uncover failures to communicate without wholly ceding the narrator’s authority or abandoning the pursuit of universal truths (chapter 4). In each chapter, Bronstein incisively yet reflectively meanders among a broad array of texts and authors, with many digressions, returns, and qualifications ensuring that Out of a Context offers a richly peripatetic reading experience that, like the literature it analyses, needs no ‘satisfyingly excerptable conclusions’ but revels in its ‘open-ended’ investment in ‘processes’ over ‘endpoints’, allowing readers to ‘fill in the ends with a variety of political and philosophical commitments’ (p. 220). This open ending renders Out of Context an appropriately optimistic choice for the final title appearing in Oxford’s Modernist Literature and Culture series, edited by Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger. The venerable series’ penultimate offering is Tim Watson’s Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World, which also adopts a comparative structure to illuminate the modernist aspects of a selection of mid-century texts, whose political charge can be better understood through the comparison. In Watson’s case, the comparison reveals under-appreciated but palpable links between literature and anthropology, while the political thrust is to recover dissenting voices within mid-century anthropology during a period of decolonization. Watson’s archive includes literary fiction, genre fiction, Cold War scholarship, manuscripts, and notebooks. This mix reveals writers borrowing images and plots from ethnography (which he terms ‘the anthropological novel’) and anthropologists consciously adopting literary techniques (which he terms ‘literary anthropology’) decades before Clifford Geertz’s thick description inaugurated anthropology’s ‘literary turn’. Culture Writing is a thus a prominent example of the recent escalation of interest in modernism’s relationship to the social sciences. Inspired combinations of authors do not revolve around figures or concepts well known by modernist scholars (for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Mass Observation, primitivism), but include later writers and developments across the anglophone Atlantic (Barbara Pym, Ursula Le Guin, Laura Bohannan, Saul Bellow, Bessie Head, Mary Douglas), the francophone Atlantic (Édouard Glissant, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss), and beyond (Amitov Ghosh, Erna Brodber, Chinua Achebe). Culture Writing is thus an example of undiminished scholarly investments in charting modernism’s late manifestations, global permutations, and interdisciplinary forms. Particularly compelling readings include Watson’s re-evaluation of middlebrow writer Barbara Pym as a critic of the functionalist school of anthropology then dominant in Great Britain; his recovery of Saul Bellow’s training in the field; and his extended readings of Glissant as a self-consciously literary writer. Less comprehensive is Watson’s account of Ursula Le Guin’s extensive knowledge of anthropology, her use of fieldwork as a plot device, her adaptation of ethnography as a narrative genre, and her interactions with prominent figures in anthropology (beginning with her anthropologist father, Alfred Louis Kroeber) who emphasized the role of language in enculturation. Watson’s conclusion that literary anthropology and the anthropological novel from 1945 to 1965 enacted a turn back to Victorian novel conventions may seem startling, but in the context of recent re-evaluations of realism’s multiform presence within modernism, Culture Writing’s account of literature and anthropology’s mutual influence provides a compelling explanation for why and how realism persists within modernism. Watson pinpoints interdisciplinary exchanges as a mechanism through which modernism reaches across time and space and Bronstein posits reader responses as another mechanism, thereby attributing the transnational and transhistorical reach of modernist scholarship to the art itself. In comparison, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (published in 2017 but not received in time for consideration last year) straightforwardly acknowledges that her century-long set of texts was assembled through a scholarly process of ‘grafting’ (p. 2). This grafting serves ‘to deprovincialize a once exclusively European aesthetic category’, acknowledge the influence of modernist scholarship on our perceptions of modernism, and connect her texts to ‘the intellectual history of globalization’ (p. 2). What unites these texts is the figure of the chimera, which Vadde explores in two veins: first, as a challenging textual vision created by formal strategies that represent the unsayable and think the unthinkable, in a list that boasts the playfulness of Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’, Vadde specifies ‘autotranslations, alternating asymmetry, stories without plots, archival legends, and root canals’ (p. 7); secondly, as a political dream that, if realized, would result in positive international relations, global justice, and autonomy. The latter is made possible, or at least thinkable as an ‘unachieved ideal’ (p. 4), through the former. Like Bronstein, then, Vadde does not regard a narrator’s or character’s failure to communicate clearly or reach a stated goal as a failure of the text or as a wholly negative outcome, but as a deliberate and effective strategy adopted by writers to shape better futures. Vadde tempers this optimism with an explanation that though such optimism ‘can be judged naïve and unrealistic’, we should not undervalue the political chimera as a ‘powerful illusion, one with traction over the hearts and minds of people and connectedness to the institutions of state that give it a concrete political apparatus’ (p. 10). What is less persuasive, perhaps, is the sleight of hand that allows Vadde to avoid clarifying the relationship between her definition of internationalism and accounts of globalism and postcolonialism: ‘I am allowing the chimeras of form that populate this study to affect the book’s own methodological self-understanding’, she explains (p. 20). But perhaps investing too much in these long-dominant definitional excursions would have diverted Chimeras of Form from its primary task, that of investigating the formal strategies that conjure political chimeras as they appear in the texts themselves. Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith all ‘revisited the principles and practices of the literary form that we call modernist to imagine more interdependent models of nationhood and to reflect upon as well as diversify styles of political belonging and internationalist expression’, which include the textual acts of translation, collation, circulation, comparison, reinscription, and demythologization (p. 221). These textual acts show political promise because they make use of social ties of ‘obligation and fellowship” in order to contest ‘isolationist aspects of national cultures and even take narratives of communal cohesion beyond identitarian claims’ (p. 220). In a similar vein, Anna Teekell explores the textual interrogations of the nation from a transnational perspective in Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War. Distinct from the globe-trotting archives assembled by Bronstein, Watson, and Vaade, Teekell maintains a more intimate focus on one country (the Irish Free State) during a restricted period (the Second World War). However, by exploring the outward-facing performance of neutrality staged by a newly independent Ireland specifically for audiences abroad, Teekell does not abandon the lessons of transnational approaches but instead reveals that adopting the comparative method associated with them is not strictly necessary. Indeed, a clutch of texts written by citizens of one nation can be investigated from a transnational lens, although it must be noted that Teekell engages with Irish studies scholarship more than with transnational scholarship. Notably, the first chapter analyses political rhetoric, rooting Teekell’s history in non-fiction, before the remaining four chapters move on to the poetry and fiction at the heart of Irish studies. The political rhetoric of Eamon de Valera’s Irish government, particularly through constitutional amendments, debate records, and the discourses disseminated by the Censorship Board, ‘created a slippage between belligerence and neutrality that would trouble daily life in Ireland, where many felt they experienced war and neutrality simultaneously’ (p. 14). Consequently, the Irish government failed to create a genuine alternative to Axis and Allied propaganda, leaving room for late Irish modernists to criticize the government’s inconsistencies, acts of censorship, and unconvincing projections of a communal, cohesive cultural nationalism that had yet to develop. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on poetry: Teekell reveals that Patrick Kavanagh’s and Denis Devlin’s adaptations of the pilgrimage poem satirize the government’s mobilization of Catholic rites of prayer and attitudes towards peace to posit a coherent national position of neutrality, while Louis MacNeice’s war lyrics interrogate modernist writers’ complicity with devastating national policies. Chapters 4 and 5 cover fiction, delving deeply into the strained uses of language during the Second World War as fiction and government rhetoric experiment with new tropes to produce or counteract propaganda and to represent trauma adequately. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman debunk official accounts of Ireland’s isolationism, showing how language itself becomes infected by the inconsistencies of neutrality rhetoric. Like Vaade, Teekell investigates the moments when language fails under the pressures of national identity and international conflict; like Vaade, she ends with a contemporary text, the play Improbable Frequency, which debuted in 2004, to reveal how the state of linguistic emergency that precipitated artistic production persists today and prompts revisitings of the political cruxes that inspired and frustrated late modernists. For a book about wartime trauma, Emergency Writing is an unexpected pleasure to read. Its untortured prose is beautifully suited to gathering Teekell’s diverse and impressively large archive of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and drama gently into an orderly, cohesive group without flattening the differences between the various solutions and critiques offered by late Irish modernists. Teekell’s framing of a transnational, transhistorical problem within a tight national, historical context, though very much unlike the first three books reviewed here, demonstrates that exciting work continues to be possible outside transnational scholarship’s comparative methodology. In Modernism and the Law, Robert Spoo scrutinizes Anglo-American institutional networks of laws, lawyers, jails, juries, judges, and the writers and publishers whose private and professional lives interpolated them into these networks. Part of Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms, Spoo’s work is the latest addition to the exciting series of reference volumes on major issues in modernism, edited by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers. Like Teekell, Spoo crafts a thoroughly entertaining account of subject matter that, at first glance, may seem unlikely to court eager readers: the bureaucracies and other formal institutions of individual nation-states. To negotiate a variety of legal issues—from libel, censorship, and obscenity to privacy, and piracy, and copyright—a variety of ‘legal and extralegal mechanisms … shaped, inhibited, and sometimes deformed literary production and dissemination’ to the degree that the law can be seen to have ‘regulated modern literature’ (p. 3). Chapter 1 provides a new account of Oscar Wilde’s obscenity trial by contextualizing it within legal battles of self-censorship and copyright infringement that were fought by other modernists, while chapter 2 focuses more strictly on obscenity and literature in the United States (here is where Spoo’s account of United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses may be found). The economically minded chapter 3 tackles issues related to artists’ remuneration, including copyright law and patronage. Chapter 4 is the volume’s most engrossing chapter, which covers ‘the reputational cluster: the modern expectation that the law will guarantee a person’s domestic privacy and intimate secrets, the freedom from false imputations, and her exclusive right to exploit her name and likeness’ (p. 103). Legal cases involving defamation, blackmail, privacy, and publicity serve as a stage where changes in the modern subject’s availability and visibility to the government and to mass publics become dramatically visible. Indeed, in all of Spoo’s chapters, the intersections between modernism and the law are fascinating because they tread inexorably across any presumed boundaries between the author as a private individual and the author as a public figure. Nowhere are these boundary-crossings more vividly illustrated than in chapter 5, which nimbly covers all of the various legal battles Ezra Pound waged during his life. A series of vignettes paint a compelling portrait of Pound as ‘a moralist crying in the wilderness of modernity’ with his ‘indictments of grasping financiers, corrupt politicians, and pandering publishers’ (p. 128), which appear in his poetry as well as in major events of his life, most notably during his fight for free speech during the Second World War and his resulting detention at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Spoo’s final favour to his readers is his ‘Annotated List of Statutes, Treaties, and Cases’, which is invaluable even though some critics may wish they could trade its comprehensive coverage of late nineteenth-century law for a more thorough documentation of post-1950 legal milestones. Caroline Hovanec’s Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism is another notable 2018 publication that assembles a nation-based group of texts and phenomena. Like Spoo, Hovanec touches on questions of ethics, subjecthood, and relationality, but whereas Spoo’s relations are interpersonal connections mediated by legal discourses, Hovanec’s are human–nonhuman connections mediated by scientific discourses and practices. In Victorian studies, investigations of science and nature dominate the field in the same way that transnational investigations have dominated modernism in the recent past, so Hovanec’s intervention may well spur interest in the nonhuman world in the same way that Harriet Ritvo, Gillian Beer, Bernard Lightman, and others did for Victorianists. It is likely too late for an ‘animal turn’ for modernism: the anticipated rise of animal studies within literature, influenced by theorists like Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, never quite happened; but this is all to the good, as Hovanec’s analysis is not overdetermined by the philosophical questions of justice, subjectivity, and ontology that animate these theorists. Instead, Hovanec roots Animal Subjects in modernist scholarship’s signature brand of historicism and incorporates popular culture, historical events, literature, and science writing in a way that resembles current work on animals in Victorian studies (indeed, Hovanec cites Beer as a direct influence). She discusses twentieth-century disciplinary developments in biology, physics, and ecology in ways that recall Watson’s treatment of anthropology as a field undergoing great change at the mid-century mark. Darwin, Freud, and William James provide the scientific theories and texts against which modernists react, including the Huxley family (which includes the writer Aldous, but also his brother Julian, a biologist like their evolutionary scientist father, Thomas Huxley), H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Hovanec traces problematic uses of animals in modernist texts, including anthropomorphism, primitivism, and allegorical symbolism, all of which reduce animals to the qualities that connect them to human concerns, whereas liberatory or productive modes of incorporating animals in modernisms are marked by ‘curiosity, observant seeing, and respect for animals’, which amount to a ‘folk zoology’ that produces desirable aesthetic effects without instrumentalizing animals (p. 30). Though the Huxley family’s scientific endeavours are well known, the generous two chapters Hovanec affords them render Animal Subjects easily some of the best and most comprehensive coverage of the two brothers’ scientific interests designed for modernist scholars. Chapter 4 surveys the Bloomsbury Group’s theories and representations of animals as an expression of their interest in comparative psychology; Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, and J.B.S Haldane are equally drawn by empiricist models of the world, derived from the philosophy of John Locke and the psychology of Conwy Lloyd Morgan, John B. Watson, and Niko Tinbergen. These scientists bring Hovanec’s work far from the stalwart presences of Darwin, Freud, and James, hinting at new work to be done to extend modernist scholars’ consideration of empiricism, sensory experiences, and scientific phenomena. One might venture to pronounce Hovanec’s investigation of comparative psychology and Watson’s anthropology as not only evidence of heightened interest in the intersections of science and literature, but also as indicative of a new disciplinarity in the field (as opposed to interdisciplinarity). Or an incipient ‘academic turn’ might be diagnosed here, given that these works take seriously the growth of and discourses endemic to particular scholarly disciplines. We are now positioned to analyse how shifts in the way that various disciplines formally organize knowledge sparked the ire or fascination of modernist artists. Two examples of this trend focus on mathematics: Baylee Brits’s Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction and Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Brits, whose interest is in pure (as opposed to applied) mathematics, opens by explaining that modernists found numbers fascinating for two reasons. First, numbers comprise ‘a formal language’ rather than a semiotic one; instead of symbolically representing a pre-existing object or phenomenon, a number ‘is the thing itself’ (p. 1). As a result, ‘literature and mathematics are at once inextricably intimate and implacably oppositional’ because ‘the form of writing peculiar to mathematics—pure presentation—is excluded from what we understand to be relevant to literature’ (p. 6). Consequently, the alien abstraction of numbers both repels and attracts writers drawn to humanist values. Second, numbers provided a way for understanding infinitude that contrasted with humanist approaches to it, due to the work of German mathematician Georg Cantor, known for his work on set theory and transfinite numbers. By proposing the empirical existence of multiple infinitudes and by assigning infinitude a marker (the aleph of the Hebrew alphabet), Cantor made it possible for mathematicians to manipulate this difficult concept in the same way as they could any other number. Both of these unusual characteristics attracted career-long interest in numbers on the part of Borges (especially in ‘Thing Itself’, ‘The Library of Babel’, and ‘The Lottery of Babylon’), Beckett (seen in the novels Molloy and Watt and in the short prose texts All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine), and J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country and The Childhood of Jesus). In these texts, Brits finds a ‘literary transfinitude’, defined as a kind of ‘allegorical doubling’ by which readers who perceive two systems of meaning operating on one strand of text: the extra-textual (the ‘phenomenology of reading’) and the intra-textual (the ‘formal processes of the text’ (p. 45)). Essentially, readers always interact with texts in two ways, one properly linguistic (representational) and the other mathematical (presentational), but Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee are particularly aware of this doubling and consciously manipulate it to highlight the indeterminacies of language and ‘to explore literary propulsion: the capacity of prose to move forward’ (p. 191). Brits’s account of these three authors’ frustrated depictions of the impossibility of overcoming the paralysis caused by modern traumas partakes of the same interest in the future shown by Bronstein and Vadde, weaving a subtle thread of hope and amelioration (if not progress) through a field of enquiry more often associated with cynicism and critique. Nina Engelhardt’s account of modernism and mathematics, entitled simply Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, may share a common field of interest with Brits’s, but her methodology more closely resembles that of Hovanec, because it explicitly draws on science studies and surveys a wide range of developments in a particular non-humanist discipline and then identifies literary authors who observed these developments and commented on them in their texts. Readers who wish for more of an overview mathematics as a field in the twentieth century, or who would like to encounter a vigorous argument calling for more scholarship on modernism and science, should therefore consult Engelhardt’s volume first. Herman Broch’s Sleepwalkers trilogy, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day brush up against the concepts of C.P. Snow, Norbert Wiener, L.E.J. Brouwer, David Hilbert, and Kürt Godel, who are then juxtaposed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Hans Vaihinger, and other modernist philosophers. (Note here the easy absorption of Pynchon into modernism: another symptom of the normalization of modernism’s expanded temporal boundaries.) These intersections are truly provocative, as well as unforced. The book feels, quite simply, easy in its global and transhistorical scope: ‘easy’ in the sense of secure and untroubled, rather than simple or unearned. Clearly, Engelhardt could have written an entire monograph on Pynchon and modernist mathematics alone, but a fuller portrait of mathematics as an alternative way of forging meaning during modernization emerges. For example, Broch incorporates concepts from analytical philosophy and from mathematical theories of relativity and intuitionism to contextualize the tortured psyche of a bookkeeper brought to existential crisis when he faces the ultimate lack of meaning and coherence lurking underneath the formal order of his numerical tables. Meanwhile, Musil’s Man without Qualities, which explores the unfulfilled promises of mathematics to serve as a guiding, salutary rationalism powerful enough to supersede mysticism and spirituality, leads Engelhardt to conclude that, in modernist fiction, ‘maths becomes a model not only of exactitude but also of vagueness, and in this paradoxical double function it serves to inspire the critical trust needed to adapt epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics to a time of rapid change. Maths thus takes on a mediating or bridging function between seeming opposites, not least between the domains of science and literary fiction’ (p. 121). The payoff for scholars is a new pragmatism that enables a ‘critical trust, based on a methodology of constant questioning’, one that persists in spite of the stubborn refusal by numbers to signify in the same way as language or to create the satisfying sense of meaning generated by narrative structure (p. 121). This is why, even though Engelhardt’s analyses of Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow do emphasize the failure of mathematics to offer fulfilling models of causality or reliable cues for ethical living (an example of modernist disillusion with the rational institutions and assumptions dependent on Enlightenment philosophies), Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics provides another example of a nascent, optimistic, process-focused (not conclusions-focused) scholarly attitude first observed in Bronstein’s Out of Context. Non-linguistic signs also form the object of Jesse Schotter’s Hieroglyphic Modernisms: Writing and New Media in the Twentieth Century. Like Engelhardt’s monograph, Schotter’s work appears in Edinburgh University Press’s Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series, curated by series editors Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley, whose editorial labours have been stepping capably into the vacuum left by the end of Dettmar and Wollaeger’s own series on modernist culture for Oxford University Press. Rather than thinking about non-linguistic signs in a disciplinary context, Schotter shifts our attention from science and physics to the fine arts and visual culture. Emphasizing the appearances of such signs in new media, Schotter uses them to investigate the proliferation of visual languages in modernism. Egyptian hieroglyphs in particular, thrust into cultural prominence by the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, inspired a wealth of textual and new media productions that partook in the ‘long history of misinterpretation in the West’, where they were seen ‘as potentially mystical or sacred visual sign’ that ‘supposedly directly depicted the object [they] signified’ and therefore, just like photography and cinema, ‘promised to render the images of the natural world directly into recorded form’ (p. 5). In truth, Schotter explains, hieroglyphs constitute a phonetic system, not an embodied, immediate one, merely another alphabet that combined visual and oral elements. Consequently, like the new media used to disseminate images of hieroglyphs, hieroglyphs cannot be immediately, intuitively, and universally understood. However, the misunderstanding that hieroglyphs bypassed semiotic processes (a claim that, we have seen, mathematics also presented to modernists) produced a curious and aesthetically valuable response. Modernists attempted to incorporate hieroglyphs directly into their works or were indirectly inspired to ‘leave out narrative all together’ because hieroglyphs suggest that ‘language will communicate not at all or totally, without the need for narrative processes of “description” or “commentary”’ (p. 6). As chapter 1 shows, misunderstandings are at the heart of the hieroglyphic excursions of Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hollis Frampton. Chapter 2 focuses on Virginia Woolf, who, excitingly, appears as a theorist of film and new media and uses hieroglyphic imagery as a bridge capable of traversing the gaps between language and characterization. Chapter 3 reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as hybrid texts that exploit productive tensions between language and image to produce experimental forms. Thankfully, chapters 4 and 5 address the problem of cultural appropriation: chapter 4 corrects a potential oversight in Schotter’s method by investigating hieroglyphs as they were used by Egyptian artists and impacted modern Egyptian politics, while chapter 5 considers how Anglo-European modernism engaged with hieroglyphs in a less insular, more inclusive way by revealing Joyce’s anti-fascist applications for hieroglyphs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A final chapter on contemporary American new media samples from postmodernism (Pynchon), cyberpunk (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson), and Afro-Futurism (Ishmael Reed) to reveal that the artistic use of hieroglyphs as a medium for exploring visual languages and non-symbolic representation in new media is still in operation today. Another new book rooted in new media is Alix Beeston’s In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. This is powered by a truly interdisciplinary gathering of proofs and examples taken from photography, literature, history, and theory from the modernist moment and our own. Beeston develops a ‘method of citational reading’ suited to the ‘composite modality of literary modernism’ (p. 27). Also packed with well-chosen illustrations and lit by vivid verbs and unusual adjectives and adverbials, the may be the most thrilling offering of 2018. While incidentally providing a fantastic primer for the scholarly analysis of photographs and debunking stale truisms about modernism and cinema, Beeston argues that photography interacts with literature dialectically through relations of ‘interdependence and reciprocity’ (p. 12). This argument eschews simple connections (for example that Virginia Woolf kept meticulous photo albums and admired her photographer pioneer aunt) in favour of teasing out the cognitive logic of photography as a serial or composite, rather than mimetic or realistic, form. In and Out of Sight mobilizes Gertrude Stein’s early Three Lives, Jean Toomer’s multigeneric Cane, John Dos Passos’s collage Manhattan Transfer, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon as case studies whose collage-like structures are analogous to composite photography, particularly those that present the ‘woman-in-series’. This textual and visual figure, which is both a still and moving form, multiplies and withholds ‘female bodies along the linear track of the written word’, bodies whose ‘conspicuous appearances and disappearance’ are ‘constituted in, and constituent of, [modernist] narration’ (p. 5). Beeston regards these deaths, dissolves, and disconnections as central to modernism, whose stylistic signature of ‘the gap or interval’ signifies ‘at once as a mark of trauma, the wounding of typologized representation, and as a vehicle for evading or defending against such trauma: a zone of withdrawal, incompliancy, or active recalcitrance’ (p. 7). These gaps therefore hold tremendous political potential to denaturalize essentialist models of identity and thus ‘serve as sanctuaries from, or passageways out of, the social and political order whose injurious dictates they also materialize’ (p. 8). Intersectional feminist readings made possible through these gaps include Stein’s surrealism, whose medicalized, racialized bodies ‘demonstrate that those who seem most irreparably impaired by their typologized representation bear a radical potential for enduring and curtailing its violence’ (p. 34). Toomer’s Cane is an ‘act of resistance to the production of racialized images as the props of white supremacy’, particularly scenes of lynching (p. 67). Beeston centralizes Manhattan Transfer’s aspiring actress Ellen Thatcher to highlight her role in ‘reclaiming the resistant and recalcitrant gaze of the nonwhite, non-middle-class woman’ and thereby critiquing hegemonic white feminism (p. 110). The gradual, glossy, deadening transformation of Thatcher’s body as she is trained to perform as a machine reappears in The Last Tycoon, which exposes ‘the reiterative logic of studio-era Hollywood’ and ‘the iconographic syntax of stardom’ which freeze actresses into glamour shots and reproduce them through body doubling (p. 149). This cannot, however prevent the woman-in-series from making ‘herself heard the very moment that she seems to be silenced’ (p. 187). Angela Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel also links new sensory technologies to the development of the modernist novel. Whereas Beeston eschews drawing direct causal links from photographic causes to modernist effects, Frattarola boldly claims that particular acoustic technologies inspired particular modernist interventions. Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse open up a quiet space to oppose the displacement of the silent movie by the talkie, while Woolf’s experiences with phonographs led to experiments with onomatopoeia meant to reduce the levels of mediation that removed readers from direct perception. Beckett’s fascination with the tape recorder and the looping and splicing of magnetic tape led to his unique forms of repetition that conveyed the ultimate paucity of language but also created new ways for artists to connect more directly to their audiences. Joyce and Jean Rhys, however, have more wholly positive experiences with these auditory technologies: Joyce’s monologues exhibit an ‘auditory cosmopolitanism’ that inserted other voices into the privatized, silent world of listening made possible by headphones, and Rhys’s snippets of radio programmes over the wireless peppered her protagonist’s first-person narratives, thereby providing momentary respites from her narrator’s own melancholic headspace. This is an intriguing array of devices, although Frattarola’s primary concern is the aesthetic patterns peculiar to these various machines and their reproducibility in narrative form, rather than (as scholarship in modernist sound studies tends to analyse) the circumstances of their invention, production, marketing, and distribution, the conditions under which radio programmes and other recorded spans of audio information were created, or the operational and proprietary details related to individual user experiences over the device’s lifespan. Frattarola’s mission is to upend the ocularcentrism of modernist scholarship by examining how modernists ‘represent the act of listening, describe the soundscape, and formally make their narratives auditory’ and by revealing how modernism’s characteristic innovations ‘are in part a result of a growing awareness of and shift toward sound perception made possible through new auditory technologies’ (p. 4). Whereas ocular information is linked to ‘a Cartesian visual-based perspective’ of which modernists were suspicious, and whereas modernists are often accused of ‘solipsistically turning inward’, aural information and the technologies that delivered it in novel ways to audiences, by contrast, questioned Cartesian values of distance and objectivity and created ‘new forms of intimacy’ that modernist writers used ‘to connect characters through listening and sound’ (p. 5). In the end, the greatest contribution made by auditory technologies to the modernist novel is their promptings towards ‘new ways to listen’, new ways to listen to the inner world and the outside world that ‘draw attention to language as sound: not a transparent medium of communication but textured rhythmic patterns that we continually chant and listen to together’ (p. 163). Like Bronstein, Engelhardt, and Teekell, Frattarola provides a new account of the precise cultural mechanisms that forced modernists to face the limitations of language, and explores how they forged new avenues for recuperative aesthetic production nonetheless. For Frattarola, direct experiences of particular auditory technologies caused individual modernists to perceive new problems to be solved by textual experiments with sound. Heather Fielding, by contrast, in Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, takes a more conceptual approach by revisiting the ontology of the novel. How definitions of the novel changed in the twentieth century is the quite substantial question that drives Fielding’s exploration of modern technological change. As the twentieth century dawned, ‘rethinking the novel’s relationship to reading was an urgent task’, Fielding explains, because ‘both novel and machine were increasingly reduced to an instrument for meeting an end that had been determined in an advance’ (p. 5). The novelist’s task seemed to be reproducing known quantities, satisfying readerships who knew precisely what they wanted to read and engaging in the same kind of mass production of the same enabled by technology. At the same time, however, thinking of the novel itself as a machine with two useful features was empowering for many modernists: an autotelic self-containment allowed the novel to ‘unfold and “move” without requiring input from or the participation of a reader’ and an ability to ‘produce knowledge’ as machines produced commodities or power (p. 6). Instrumentalized, the novel form was impoverished, but as an instrument wielded by these authors, it was revitalized and capable of intervening in ‘a series of ongoing debates about the cultural and philosophical meaning of technology’ (p. 23). For The Ambassadors, Henry James seized on projection as a metaphor for the novel’s autonomous existence apart from the reader, while for Wyndham Lewis, the industrial machine prompted similar literary experiments to circumvent the vagaries of linear reading practices beyond the control of the author. For Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford found the telephone a useful figure for understanding how narrative techniques of impressionism serve to connect and separate the disparate units that comprise a novel, whereas Rebecca West, in a 1928 essay on James Joyce, turns away from attempting to take control of the novel back from the reader and theorizes the novel as ‘an experimental tool for gathering information’ (p. 119). As these chapter summaries reveal, for Fielding, ‘technology’ is a kaleidoscopic term revolving loosely around the figure of the machine; and definitions of the novel can be discerned by reading novelists’ own accounts of their work, particularly non-fiction reflections on writing that feature creative adaptations of technical imagery as metaphors for narration. As a result, Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain does not fit easily alongside the other titles examined here. Even its opening salvos on Marshall McLuhan and hypertext feel almost as if teleported in from a different dimension. This is precisely the value of Fielding’s intervention: it is almost tailor-made for answering Bronstein’s call for clear alternatives to the context-based historicist approaches to modernism, even as Fielding is interested in making arguments about changes in literature over time. Also fundamentally absorbed in tracing the influence of machines on modernism, Michael Osman’s Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America takes nearly the opposite approach. An example of infrastructure studies, Modernism’s Visible Hand contributes to the investigation of the history and culture of the built environment, especially as it relates to the physical instantiation of machinery providing the means of industrial production, sanitation, and ventilation; waystations for storage and distribution; and access to utilities like gas, water, electricity, and (more recently) Internet connectivity, along with the bureaucracies and knowledge-gathering systems that supported them. Where Fielding understands the symbolic freight of machinery, Osman elaborates the details of machines’ concrete existence: the ‘legal, technical, and economic instruments’ that make up the ‘visible hand of management’ of modernity (p. xi); and he considers their effects on the architectural styles that emerge within the cultures that produce them. Like Teekell and Spoo, Osman generates excitement out of a topic that might elicit gravity. ‘This is not a history of enthusiastic people doing interesting things’ (p. xx), Osman apologizes, yet his set of illustrations is as beguiling as Beeston’s, with pipes, ducts, braces, conduits, and wires stretching like orderly jungles of modern vines across blueprints, diagrams, photographs, and advertisements. Material and bureaucratic mechanisms of regulation and control become, in the hands of modern architects, aesthetic inspirations appreciated for their own formal merits, rather than for the utility that originally inspired the design. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Osman diagnoses a ‘belated architectural reaction’ (p. xvi) that regarded ventilation systems as clues for liberating women from housework drudgery. This is set out in chapter 1, which features feminist reformers Catherine Beecher, Christine Frederick, and Mary Pattison. Chapter 2 explores cold storage facilities as elements of a visual language, ultimately rooted in mass commodity production and financial speculation, for creating monumental buildings. It features the architects Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, and William Gibbons Preston. Chapter 3 discusses two academic buildings for the sciences, the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Illinois Vivarium, which were designed to perform in brick and mortar emergent theories of ecology. Chapter 4 turns to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the scientific managers trained by him, whose complex diagrams were meant to increase industrial efficiency but which also created a new visual language that were taken up by modernist architecture. By investigating the ‘appropriation of managerial tools, diagrams, and office furniture’ and by formulating new building designs to ‘interpret the products and functions of industry that might have otherwise escaped visual attention’ (p. xxiv), Osman demonstrates how modernist scholars may adapt infrastructure studies as a fresh method of relating the historical data that has been used to drive mainstream historicist analyses of modernism. Bureaucracy and industry are not simply concepts for Osman, but embodied, physical entities whose material forms could inspire progressive aesthetic experimentation even though their ideological connections were far from savoury to many modernists. Indeed, as Osman concludes, ‘modern techniques for governance are an essential, if unacknowledged, part in modernist history’ (p. 189). With publications like Modernism’s Visible Hand, Modernism and the Law, and Modernist Soundscapes, these connections can continue to be combined with newer variations on transnational approaches to produce work that is informed by the wealth of theoretical discussions of the transnational and transhistorical over the past two decades without remaining solely fixed on those conversations. 2. Fiction Pre-1945 (a) Fiction 1900–1930 Critical work in 2018 on fiction published between 1900 and 1930 cleaved to a range of familiar and refreshing themes and approaches, augmenting studies on literary and material cultures, the medical humanities, ecocriticism, animal studies, necropolitics, reception history and networks, periodical studies, the Anthropocene, and the transnational turn. A number of studies work to resist conventional literary-critical historical boundaries, traversing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while several monographs and edited collections sought to align the anxieties of the inauguration of the ‘machine age’ with current debates surrounding new media and their effect on personal, social, and political health. Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon’s Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to a number of ideas and debates in the field, covering the modernist everyday, literature and the arts, textual and archival approaches, and geopolitics, reflecting the recent transnational turn in modernist studies. A useful resources section includes an annotated bibliography. This volume makes a vital addition to Bloomsbury’s publications in early twentieth century literature and Companion series. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature contains a wealth of discussion on H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield’s style is carefully considered in Ulrika Maude’s ‘Introduction: Modernism, Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), alongside Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. ‘Mansfield’s short stories’, Maude writes, ‘indicate that female modernists often find value in the undoing of a self-hood that for male writers tends to function as an ambivalent locus of power and autonomy’ (p. 10). With careful, deft close readings contained within a compelling and comprehensive selection of essays, this volume will prove an indispensable resource for students and researchers. The timely questions posed by Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis in ‘Can There Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) will no doubt find diverse and innovative responses in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, expected in 2020. Barbara Straumann’s monograph Female Performers in British and American Fiction adds to a growing field of work on performance and interpretation in her analysis of literary stagings. While her focus, in general, lies with Victorian and late twentieth-century novels, Strausmann’s final chapter takes on continuities between late nineteenth and early twentieth-century texts. Focusing on George du Maurier’s Trilby and Isak Denison’s ‘The Dreamers’, ‘Fin de Siècle Ventriloquism and Modernist Self-Authorship’ (pp. 236–66) suggests a lineage of continuities that may be traced through the trope of the female performer. This final chapter speaks to emerging scholarship in the field of modernism, dance, and performance, and may provide a fruitful line of further enquiry. Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism, and the Avant Gardes, edited by Harri Veivo, Jean-Pierre Montier, Françoise Nicol, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, and Sascha Bru, offers a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion of the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe. Beyond Given Knowledge moves beyond standard canonical configurations, with essays on marginalized figures in European literary history, covering Czech, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish literature, and transnational intersections between European and Latin American avant-gardes. The collection’s admirable focus on figures studied less often includes Joel Hawkes’s ‘Primitive Modern Practices of Place: Mary Butts and Christopher Wood in Paris and Cornwall’ (pp. 315–30). Hawkes delves into ‘conflicts of space’ in Butts’s writing, noting the affinities between Butts’s fragmentary prose and Wood’s landscape paintings, and their ‘troubled’ presentation of the rural (p. 326). Heather Fielding’s Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain offers a timely perspective on ‘ongoing debates about the cultural and philosophical meaning of technology’ (p. 23) within modernist literary circles, opening with an intriguing parallel between modernism and our current struggles with a perceived surfeit of information. Modernist writers, Fielding argues, ‘thought specific technologies modeled ways of engineering the novel to protect itself from the bad habits of modern middlebrow readers, who manhandle novels to produce desired emotions’ (p. 87). For Ford Madox Ford, Fielding writes, ‘the surfeit of information made it all but impossible for the modern subject to understand the world around her’ (p. 59). Fielding rethinks literature’s relationship with technology, offering an astute reading of narrative form, tracing the ways in which modernist writers reshaped novel theory through these considerations, shifting criticism away from reader’s experiences in favour of the work as an autonomous object. Fielding analyses the work of modernist writers who ‘reconceptualized’ technologies, developing the novel ‘to resist the instrumentalizing tendencies of readers’ (p. 24). In ‘What Carries the Novel: Ford Madox Ford, Impressionistic Connectivity, and the Telephone’, Fielding holds in hand Ford’s concern ‘about the state of modern reading’ (p. 59). ‘Overwhelmed subjects’, she writes, ‘had lost the ability to connect disparate fragments of information and competing points of view’ (p. 25). Ford, Fielding argues, ‘theorizes the impressionistic novel as the last bastion of connective thought: it fragments but then connects the pieces by emphasizing forward narrative momentum’ (p. 25). Crucially, Fielding suggests, ‘Ford shifts away’ from ‘visual metaphors, emphasizing instead the media channel implicit in his formulation that the novel must be “carried” forward … the telephone’ (p. 25). In Ford’s hands, Fielding concludes, the telephone functions as a ‘conduit’ that enables the assemblage of narrative fragments, ‘modeling for its readers a way to stitch the fragments into a meaningful, synthesized whole’ (p. 86). In his contribution to Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm’s Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror, Vincent Sherry considers the figure of sacrificial offering in representations of the First World War. ‘The Failing Sacrifice of the First World War’ (pp. 92–112) uncovers how Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, and David Jones record the ways in which the ‘old model’ of ‘the proportionate economy of individual sacrifice is eventually disrupted by indiscriminate slaughter’ (p. 92). Compelling, contextually argued and drawing on fine close readings, Sherry’s chapter notes a sectarian divide between Aldington and Jones, contrasting Jones’s ‘pre-Reformation way of thinking about sacrifice’ (p. 106) with the ‘economy of sacrifice in a form of expressive disorder’ in Aldington’s Death of a Hero (p. 105). Noting Ford’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, Sherry concludes that Ford’s cultural if not religious ‘Protestant Englishness’ results in a ‘combination [that] makes his work the register of a sort of ecumenical dissolution, where current and older economies of sacrifice are recorded as undone’ (p. 111). In ‘Personal Landscape: Ford Madox Ford, War, and the Mind’ (Rudaityte, ed., History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture, pp. 54–64), Andrea Rummel discusses Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction as a work of life writing. Focusing on its ‘interweaving’ of autobiographical and fictional writings, Rummel views Ford’s work as ‘A Tale of Reconstitution’. Rummel argues that Ford’s landscapes work as ‘visual memory-scapes’ that ‘transform momentous experience into visionary tableaux symbolic of emotional and psychological longings’ (p. 63). In ‘Narrative Order in the First-Person Novel’ (PoT 39:i[2018] 131–58), William Nelles and Linda Williams analyse Genette’s model through attention to The Good Soldier, alongside David Copperfield, The Sound and the Fury, and a number of other texts. Complicating Dorrit Cohn’s narratological work, wherein ‘a radically dechronologized order is typical of memory narratives and monologues’, Nelles and Williams ‘question her claim that autobiographical narratives and monologues follow a chronological order’ through a series of datasets (pp. 131). It was a busy year for work on Wyndham Lewis. Heather Fielding devotes a chapter to him in Novel Theory which situates him within ‘the context of the philosophy of technology’ (p. 26). For Lewis, she writes, ‘the modern subject, captured by the rhythm of the machine, was reduced to the status of a “machine minder”’ (p. 26). The novel is for Lewis similarly ‘unable to escape the temporality of the reader’s experience of reading’ (p. 26). Fielding considers Lewis’s critical reception as ‘the most technophilic of high modernists’, associated with readings of Lewis as linked to protofascist side of modernism (p. 87). She argues for a reading that accommodates Lewis’s idiosyncrasies, showing the writer ‘trying to define novel and machine against their most stable contemporary characteristics’ (p. 116). Through an intricate examination of narrative form, Fielding argues that Lewis ‘wants to imagine the novel as a machine at the moment it stops being read … as a contained, geometric work’ (p. 115). In ‘Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses’ (in Beloborodova, Van Hulle, and Verhulst, eds., Beckett and Modernism, pp. 81–94), José Francisco Fernández explores the influence of Lewis and Joyce on the development of Beckett’s writing. Fernández argues that, despite Beckett’s ‘dislike’ of Lewis, the latter’s influence was crucial to the young Beckett’s working through Joyce’s influence. ‘He took advantage of the material in Apes that suited his needs, along with his own criticism of Ulysses, thus leaning on Lewis in order to surpass his own master and to move forward’, writes Fernández (pp. 93–4). Modernism/Modernity published a Lewis cluster, ‘New Perspectives on Wyndham Lewis’, uncovering his periodical networks, the political formation of masculinities in his works, and his enmeshment in aesthetic debates over personality and impersonality. Nathan O’Donnell’s ‘“The Most Broadminded ‘Leftwinger’ in Europe”: Wyndham Lewis and The New Age’ (Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 749–69) explores Lewis’s connections with the networks surrounding The New Age. Outlining ‘the shared theoretical territory’ between Lewis and the magazine, O’Donnell shows correspondences between ‘certain radical prewar and wartime British socialisms, and the development of fascist ideologies in the 1920s’ (p. 749), ‘recognizing the complex interweaving of radical political theories in the prewar period, and after’ (p. 766). Turning to gender politics, Erin G. Calston’s ‘“Acting the Man”: Wyndham Lewis and the Future of Masculinity’ (Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 771–89) reassesses Lewis’s ‘configurations of gender’, long deemed ‘unsalvageable for any kind of progressive or even very interesting politics of gender and sexuality’ (p. 771). Calston, unusually, proposes that ‘we might see Lewis’s entire project as an excavational endeavour, digging into the foundations of structures of (gendered and other) domination in order to expose them’ (p. 773). She sees Lewis as ‘a modernist whose work merits careful reassessment for what it can tell us about the complex rearrangements of gender taking place in the early twentieth century’ (p. 789). Heather Arvidson’s ‘Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis’ (Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 791–814) steps into enmeshed debates surrounding personality and impersonality. Arvidson sketches out Eliot’s formulation of ‘impersonality’ and its entrenchment through the New Critical institutional consensus, uncovering the fascinating ‘less when known’ fact that ‘“impersonality” lived an equally vibrant discursive life outside of art in transatlantic print culture’ (p. 791). Arvidson moves on to propose a theory of ‘personified detachment’, the effect of which ‘is to carve out space for the author, even in cases where a first-person showman fills the role’ (p. 809). One hundred years on from the first publication of Tarr in novel form, the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies investigates its resonance for current readers. ‘Reading Lewis’s “Preface” in 2018’, the editors write, ‘it’s hard not to think that our current moment of testing and trying forces would benefit from Lewis’s constructive scorn’ (p. 7). Jeffrey Meyers contemplates ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Cruel Satire’, ‘an invective that can salve our anger as well as express it’ (JWLS 9[2018] 90–6). Meyers probes the ‘sharp focus’ (p. 98) of Lewis’s satire. Udith Dematagoda examines ‘National Allegory as Negative Dialectic in Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr’ (JWLS 9[2018] 68–89). This draws on Fredric Jameson’s observation that ‘Lewis was an internationalist, the most European and least insular of all great contemporary writers’ alongside his ‘brash and incongruous subtitle’, ‘The Modernist as Fascist’, Dematagoda considers the staging of the idea of ‘national allegory’ in Tarr. This analysis, Dematagoda writes, allows the confrontation of Lewis’s ‘dialectic in which nationalism is the thesis; cosmopolitanism its antithesis—and anti-Semitism its synthesis’ (p. 100). Turning to narrative form, Allan Pero offers a finely grained phenomenological reading in ‘“Paris Hints of Sacrifice”: Necropolitan Aesthetics in Tarr’ (JWLS 9[2018] 1–23), arguing that death informs the narrative form of Tarr and its composition. David Mulry similarly discusses ‘“This … feeling of indifference”: Tarr’s Importance in Lewis’s Narrative Design’ (JWLS 9[2018] 24–43), analysing Lewis’s ‘striking choices in his narrative design, and bold innovations in character and form’ (p. 136). Finally, Flora de Giovanni’s ‘A Psychological Dynamism of the Boa-Constrictor Type: Tarr and Dostoevsky’ (JWLS 9[2018] 24–43) situates Tarr alongside his forebears, rereading moments in Tarr that suggest a Dostoevskian inheritance. Giovanni argues that Lewis ‘reveals himself capable of identifying in Dostoevsky’s works a paradigmatic alternative to the monologic novel of the European tradition’ (p. 76). A mark of the issue as a whole the way that it draws parallels between current political climates and those of the early twentieth century. ‘More than ever’, Meyers writes, ‘we need contemporary satirists who, like Lewis, understood how our decaying democracy infects our culture’ (p. 108). Joong-Eun Ahn’s ‘T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis: 1923–1925’ (TSESK 28:iii[2018] 127–53) analyses correspondence between the two writers, including letters relating to Lewis’s publications in The Criterion, and details the intricacies of the publishing process alongside their complex friendship. Ahn places Lewis and Eliot’s interactions within the broader social context of 1920s London, highlighting their encounters with Sydney and Violet Schiff, the Sitwells, and Lytton Strachey. Nicole Cosentino and Wendy Ryden take an innovative health studies approach in ‘Unspeakable Horror: Outing Syphilis in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness’ (in Nixon and Servitje, eds., Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present pp. 137–62). Alongside a number of 2018 studies, Nixon and Servitje’s collection resists and complicates disciplinary time-frame boundaries through attention to a particular trope or idea, here ‘looking at literary treatments of the disease as they shifted from the Victorian to the Modernist’ (p. 9). For Cosentino and Ryden, Conrad yokes medical fears and sexual morality within the broader context of a global violence that inflects ‘self-congratulatory European benevolence and charity’ (p. 9). Cosentino and Ryden argue that Conrad’s vision of death includes ‘a literal one … intertwined with the obvious colonial violence being perpetrated in and on the Congo’ (p. 138). The horror of Marlow’s journey might simultaneously refer to ‘the existential hollowness of modernity’ as well as syphilis, understood by the late Victorian population as ‘a degenerative menace to Western civilization’ (p. 138). Russell West-Pavlov’s edited collection The Global South and Literature explores the history, meanings, and cultural and literary applications of the term the ‘Global South’. In his own chapter in the ‘Applications’ section of this collection, ‘Extractive Industries in the Global South: Development, Necropolitics, Globalization and Planetary Ethics’, West-Pavlov turns his attention to The Heart of Darkness (pp. 145–60). West-Pavlov contrasts Marx’s ‘glimpses of colonial forms of “primitive accumulation”’ with Conrad’s ‘more pointed equivalent of the same process’ (p. 145). West-Pavlov wields this complex of literary figures and geopolitical and global economic strategies, ‘setting the contemporary extractive industries, refracted via two fictional texts from Indigenous Australia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the context of the triple notions of development, bio- and necropolitics’ (p. 146). Sara Saei Dibavar and Hossein Pirnajmuddin return to familiar territory in their readings of Heart of Darkness in ‘Deixis and Delayed Decoding in Joseph Conrad’s Falk’ (Neoh 45:ii[2018] 789–806). This suggests that Falk portrays the cannibalism of a white man to suggest that ‘cannibalism can find its moral justification within the society that abhors such actions’ (p. 789). This effect, the authors argue, is achieved through ‘simultaneous narrative distance and involvement’, created through Conrad’s technique of delayed decoding. Dibavar and Pirnajmuddin propose that this produces an ‘uncanny effect’ which is ‘in line with epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility’ (p. 804). Studies in the Novel published two contrasting analyses of ‘atmosphere’ in Conrad’s novels. Drawing on Žižek, Adam Meehan’s ‘Spectres of Ideology in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (SNNTS 50:iii[2018] 359–77) suggests a unique form of ‘spectral narrativity’ in Conrad’s novel (p. 360). Meehan argues that Conrad’s ‘spectral engagements produce a self-contained form of ideology critique that operates simultaneously within and outside the world of the novel’ (p. 360), in which Nostromo straddles the ‘fault line[s] of social antagonism’ (p. 375). In the same issue, Anna Jones Abramson’s ‘Joseph Conrad’s Atmospheric Modernism: Enveloping Fog, Narrative Frames, and Affective Attunement’ (SNNTS 50:iii[2018] 336–58) proposes ‘atmosphere’ as a new paradigm for theorizing literary modernism and reading practices. Abramson suggests that the frame narrative is both crucial to atmosphere and creates a ‘fog’ for the reader which mirrors Marlow’s crisis of knowledge (p. 354). Claire Wilkinson rereads the so-called ‘empty centre’ of Nostromo in ‘The Empty Centre of Conrad’s Nostromo: A New Economic Approach’ (CQ 47:iii[2018] 201–21). Wilkinson’s article begins with the familiar premise that the ‘necessary difficulty’ of Conrad’s style has a ‘stylistic, as well as a moral function’ (p. 201). Unusually, however, Wilkinson suggests that economic trade is at the heart of the mysterious centre of Nostromo. The novel ‘presents a necessary void in the spiritual and substantial manifestation of the commodity at its own centre’ (p. 221). Drawing on similar themes, Jim Holstun’s ‘“Mr Kayerts. He is Dead.”: Literary Realism in Conrad’s “Outpost of Progress”’ (ELH 85:i[2018] 191–220) dwells on ‘modernist selective tradition’ and Conrad’s ‘complex and unresolved’ reception history (p. 192). Holstun proposes that Conrad’s story ‘connects imperial causes to horrific but intelligible colonial effects’ (p. 191), a counter to Heart of Darkness, he argues. Shifting to a different set of contingencies, Thomas H. Ford’s ‘Ecohistoricism: Aristotle, Dryden, Conrad’ (JRCC 24:iii[2018] 278–93) delves into literature that ‘self-reflexively attributes to literature the potential to suspend these determining military events’ (p. 279), tracing a lineage from Aristotle through Dryden to Conrad. Noting Conrad’s allusions to Dryden, Ford suggests that ‘literary reverberations also communicate another potentiality to our categories of historical understanding, even returning to the past event its contingency’ (p. 291). In ‘The Fateful Impact: Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness’, Jeffrey Meyers explores Conrad’s debts to Melville (Style 52:iii[2018] 212–21) in both the pattern of the plot to Heart of Darkness and the central figure as survivor. Meyers includes careful close readings, noting subtle correspondences between the use of language in both novels (p. 214). Elsewhere, Eduardo Valls Oyarzun’s ‘From Carlyle’s Hero to Conrad’s Depraved: Hermeneutics of Morbidity in Heart of Darkness’ (PragueJESt 7[2018] 65–78) considers how Conrad’s characterizations might borrow from Carlyle’s concepts of ‘great men’. Andrew Hewitt places Conrad in a different milieu in ‘Conrad, Woolf, and the Title of Moments of Vision’ (THSJ 14:i[2018] 63–7), tracing Woolf’s use of the phrase back to Lord Jim and reconsidering Woolf’s lines of influence. ‘Woolf still thinks of ‘moments of vision’ as pertaining to Conrad’, writes Hewitt, ‘but by 1928, she has re-assigned the phrase from Conrad to Hardy by including it in his obituary’ (p. 65). Pouneh Saeedi’s ‘Winnie Verloc: A Case of “Female Malady” in The Secret Agent’ (CRCL 45:ii[2018] 315–27) engages with an ekphrastic influence on Conrad’s novel: the correlation between an ink sketch found in Conrad’s belongings and his character Winnie Verloc (p. 315). Saeedi intervenes in scholarship on the novel, noting the relegation of this character, despite The Secret Agent’s original title, ‘The Story of Winnie Verloc’ (p. 316). This article ‘unveils’ the mysterious character of Verloc, reading her as ‘an embodiment of what Elaine Showalter has called the “female malady”’ (p. 316). In another assessment of Conrad’s women, Joyce Wexler augments critical narratives of ‘Conrad’s Erotic Women’ (CollL 45:iii[2018] 424–48). Drawing on careful close readings of The Rescue, Wexler argues that Conrad’s ‘plot, imagery and dialogue’ are used to express erotic feelings that, in turn, give his female characters ‘imagination and agency’ (p. 443). In ‘Modernist Low Vision: Visual Impairment and Weak Narrative in Conrad and Joyce’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 60–78), Robert Volpiecelli sheds light on Conrad and Joyce’s ‘shared interest in the aesthetic qualities of bad eyesight’. Drawing on advances in disability theory, Volpiecelli proposes that ‘low vision’ offers a means of contesting narrative’s seemingly intrinsic desire for normative development and the constitution of bodily wholeness (p. 60). Disability, Volpiecelli suggests, ‘turns to defamiliarize the very foundations of modernism itself’. ‘These low-vision novels’, he argues, ‘encourage us to see how modernist aesthetics may begin with upheavals in the body that are then followed closely by a revolution in how we see our own capabilities’ (p. 67). Reflecting a wider recent ecocritical and economic turn, Caitlin Vandertop reads Heart of Darkness as a world-ecological text, in ‘“The Earth Seemed Unearthly”: Capital, World-Ecology, and Enchanted Nature in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (MFS 64:iv[2018] 680–700). This examines ‘themes of sociological violence, waste, and exhaustion as theorized by the world-ecology paradigm’ (p. 680). ‘Conrad’s nature appears as a vast socioecological assemblage’, writes Vandertop, ‘organized into commodity frontiers for resources as diverse as silver, petroleum, coal, sugar, coffee, silk, bananas, tobacco, and ivory’ (p. 682). Effortlessly tying together several common themes in recent work on Conrad, Vandertop argues that ‘it is no longer enough to talk about nature without identifying the role of colonial economic activity’; this ‘continue[s] to be imbricated in contemporary climate issues from land dispossession to toxic dumping’. To this end, she explains, ‘Conrad’s fiction invites a historical examination of the entwined activities of nature and capital’, and ‘it continues to be an invaluable resource for ecocritical scholars today’ (p. 694). In ‘Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-history of Climate Denial’ (VS 60:iv[2018] 543–64), Allen Macduffie reassesses the roots of ‘soft denial’, the tendency to accept the scientific consensus while continuing to live as normal. Macduffie’s fascinating article discusses ‘Darwinian plots’ in Heart of Darkness alongside Tennyson’s poetry and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In these texts, Macduffie argues, ‘everyday life is exposed as an artifice designed to keep natural reality materially and imaginatively at bay’ (p. 544). ‘To read Heart of Darkness’ as a climate change novel, writes Macduffie, ‘is to notice the ways in which Conrad both critically exposes and implicitly reinforces the logic of domination that is at the root of the crisis’ (p. 545). This entails reading ‘reparatively and suspiciously at once, to see it as a text that reveals the hypocrisy and irrationality at the root of Western anthropocentric rationalism, while also maintaining its exclusionary and dehumanizing biases’ (p. 545). Macduffie follows this line of argument in his analysis of Wells’s The Time Machine, working through ‘the cognitive dissonance involved in trying to, in H.G. Wells’s phrase, “live as though it were not so”’ (p. 545). In ‘“An Animal among the Animals”: Wells and the Thought of the Future’ (pp. 96–129), a chapter of his monograph, Animal Fables After Darwin, Chris Danta explores how Wells uses the ‘animal’ to ‘figure the narrator’s emotional response to the untethering of the present from the historical past’ (p. 99). Danta argues that the rise of the biological sciences in the later nineteenth century provided writers such as Wells with new ways of approaching the fable, leveraged to interrogate the notion of human exceptionalism. Built through astute close readings, Danta’s essay explores The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Time Machine in this light, questioning how Wells plays with ‘the vertical order of things’ and the ‘orientational metaphor “human is up; animal is down”’ (p. 113). Gustavo Generani’s article, ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells: A Pre-Freudian Reply to Darwinian Imperialism’ (English 67:cclvii[2018] 235–61), takes a similar tack, but argues that Wells creates a specifically political work, a ‘double sided representation of civilization, capitalism and imperialism’, developing ‘a chaotic universe without aim or purpose, full of monstrous uncertainties’ (p. 235). It is worth noting here that C.W. Marshall’s ‘H.G. Wells and Horace’ (N&Q 65[2018] 405–8) details Prendick’s library in The Island of Doctor Moreau and his ‘small crib of Horace’ (p. 406). Marshall argues that this detail ‘reinforces the association between Moreau and Charles Darwin’ (p. 408). Another brief article, Terry W. Thompson’s “The Door in the Wall”: H.G. Wells’s Paean to the Victorian Age’ (ANQ 31:iv[2018] 248–52) unpicks allusions in Wells’s Door in the Wall and Other Stories In his fascinating monograph Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution, David Ayers examines responses in literature and journalism to the Russian Revolution following 1917 and the founding of the League of Nations. Ayers offers novel insights into the relationship between early twentieth-century literature and the geopolitical shifts which governed the period. This inaugurated, he argues, a new age of transnational politics. In ‘British Visitors to Russia’ (pp. 93–129) Ayers reads H.G. Wells’s writings in Russia in the Shadows alongside accounts from Bertrand Russell, Arthur Ransome, John Cournos, and Robert Wilton’s deeply anti-Semitic dispatches. Refreshingly, Ayers situates Wells within a broader consideration of the climate of ideas that shaped modernism following the First World War. Edited by Gregory Benford, Gary Westfahl, Howard V. Hendrix, and Joseph D. Miller, Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy presents essays from the J. Lloyd Eaton conferences, inaugurated in 1979. While these essays are broad in scope, focusing on formal qualities, tropes and the cultural production of science fiction, a number contain insightful discussions of H.G. Wells. Patrick Parrinder’s opening essay, ‘Science Fiction as Truncated Epic’ (pp. 5–18), carefully unpicks the relationship between prophecy and ‘truncated’ narrative forms in The Time Machine. Gregory Benford’s ‘Effing the Ineffable’ (pp. 58–69) makes glancing reference to ‘sensations of encounter’ in Wells’s works (p. 62) and offers a more general discussion of ‘Modernist Aliens’ (pp. 63–4). Robert Crossley’s ‘In the Palace of Green Porcelain: Artifacts from the Museums of Science Fiction’ (pp. 86–97) provides an interesting account of the ‘historical rise of science fiction’ alongside ‘the opening of museums as public buildings’ (p. 86). Crossley investigates the portrayal of museums and museum culture in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man alongside The Time Machine: ‘Shelley and Wells seem to almost work in tandem’, Crossley writes, ‘she pioneering an intellectual strategy and he discovering its more streamlined narrative form; she articulating the archetype and he imagining the fictional prototype’ (p. 90). Like Crossley, Paul Alkon seeks to map Wells’s anatomy of influence; his ‘Cannibalism in Science Fiction’ argues that The Time Machine augments a ‘semiotics of cannibalism’ drawn from Swift’s A Modest Proposal (pp. 126–37). Tom Shippey’s ‘Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition’ (pp. 178–94) discusses Wells’s position in the cultural and economic place of the science fiction marketplace, while Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay’s ‘Shapes from the Edge of Time’ discusses Richard M. Powers’s cover art for The Time Machine (pp. 203–14). Louisa MacKay Demerjian’s ‘“And Imperfect Beings Cannot Make Perfect Decisions”: Future Humans in The Time Machine and Oryx and Crake’ (in Demerjian, MacKay, and Stein, eds., Future Humans in Fiction and Film, pp. 16–31) discusses the use of biblical tropes in Wells and Atwood, and attempts to contextualize conceptions of ‘the future human’ in both writers, offering a gloss of each work. Meanwhile, Alessandra Albano’s ‘The Science of Degeneration in Stoker’s Dracula and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau’ (JDS 20[2018] 54–81) explores connections between both works, focusing on their formal and aesthetic models of degeneration and their scientific models. Jessica R. Valdez’s ‘“Our Impending Doom”: Seriality’s End in Late-Victorian Proto-Dystopian Novels’ (JModPerS 9:i[2018] 1–29) delves into the fascinating role of seriality in relation to Wells’s The Time Machine, in part of a broader special issue on serial forms, demonstrating the increasing tendency within periodical studies to marry material and formal aesthetics. Augmenting current debates in the field, Valdez argues that the temporal form introduced by seriality mingles with the futuristic orientation of utopian subjects. Writers ‘dismantled rigid ideas about temporality and serial form’ through these enmeshed experiments (p. 24). Aaron Rosenberg’s ‘Romancing the Anthropocene: H.G. Wells and the Genre of the Future’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 79–100) ‘considers how the representation of deep times affects, and is affected by, literary genres’, arguing that Wells ‘repurposes the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansive temporal scales that exceed the representational capacity of the realist novel’ (p. 79). Rosenberg concludes further ‘that organizing them under the heading “Anthropocene” serves to reframe those events into narratives whose structures, tropes, and rhetorical devices enter the purview of literary analysis’ (p. 99). In ‘Utopia in the Future Histories of Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells’ (Foundation 47:i[2018] 6–19), Iren Boyarkina situates Wells within the broader field of utopian studies, working through a comparison of Stapledon and Wells to approach a definition of literary utopia. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Rachel Piwarski, meanwhile, approach ‘The Gothic Uncanny as Colonial Allegory in The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (Gothic 20:i–ii[2018] 358–72), offering analysis of the uncanny and animalism in Doctor Moreau and the colonial context of fin-de-siècle Europe. Boosung Kim takes a similar line in ‘The Uncanny, Normalcy, and the EnLIGHTenment: Reversing the Hegemony of Vision in H.G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”’ (BAF1900 25:i[2018] 125–44), reading Wells against Freud. Finally, The Journal of the H.G. Wells Society published a number of interesting articles on Wells, with Lisa M. Lane on Wells and pedagogy in ‘Cram and Criticism: H.G. Wells and Victorian Education’ (Wellsian 41[2018] 28–42), and Una Brogan’s ‘Liberation on Two Wheels: Social Change and the Bicycle in H.G. Wells’s Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly’ (Wellsian 41[2018] 5–27) adds to research on Wells and bicycles. Monica Cure’s monograph, Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century stakes out new territory in material and cultural studies, recovering the fraught history of the postcard as a powerful piece of communication technology. Cure uncovers the postcard’s representation in fiction, which Cure links to the current obsessions and anxieties that surround new social media. In a chapter, ‘Return to Sender: The Postcard Terror’ (pp. 117–96) Cure surveys the object in E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which ‘confusion in the intention behind sending a postcard leads to the death of a child’ (p. 36). For Forster, Cure writes, the postcard, and its limited form, is presented as a ‘force beyond the control of the user’ (p. 36). ‘In the world that Forster creates’, she argues, ‘letters stand for reliable, conventional social relations, while postcards threaten this order’ (p. 128). Cure suggests a possible queer reading in Forster’s use of the trope: the postcard, she writes, is used to ‘signal the irrepressible and unpredictable nature of desire in the presence of stifling conventionality’ (p. 127). Kevin J. Hayes’s edited volume Herman Melville in Context contains a useful discussion of the ways in which ‘the Melville revival of the 1920s’ (p. 307) shaped British fiction. This includes helpful, if brief, discussion of E.M. Forster scattered through two chapters. David M. Ball’s ‘Modernism’ (pp. 307–16) places Forster within a transnational network of Melville’s interlocutors. Ball dwells on Forster’s analysis of Moby-Dick in Aspects of the Novel [1927], which reads Melville through Brontë, Dostoevsky, and Lawrence (p. 312). In ‘Opera’ (pp. 147–56), Hayes writes on Forster’s collaboration with Benjamin Britten on Billy Budd. Delving deeper into this rich vein of scholarship, Tsung-Han Tsai’s ‘Music as Queering in E.M. Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’ (M&L 99:i[2018] 1–15) suggests that music plays a key role within Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in representing Dickinson’s homosexuality. It argues that musical pieces, such as Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata, layer biography with a queer subtext. Tabish Khair’s ‘Muslim Migrants and the Global South’ (in West-Pavlov, ed., pp. 161–72) contrasts Raja Rao, Rudyard Kipling, and Forster, while in the same volume Simon During’s ‘Political Theology, Literature and the Global South’ (pp. 209–22) explores the prevalence of political-theological dimensions in canonical novels about the Global South. During places Passage to India alongside Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, and J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. This essay argues that these novels ‘assert both political theology’s limits and its continuing force’ (p. 212), with religious and special differences used to structure these novels, to different ends (p. 216). Claudia Rosenhan rereads Maurice [1971] and The Longest Journey [1907] in ‘“We Can Only Interpret by our Experiences”: Nature/Culture in Forster’s “Cambridge” Novels’ (GL 22:iii[2018] 275–87). Carefully investigating their reception, Rosenhan argues that the attention to nature in these works has hitherto been overlooked. Reading these novels through a phenomenological lens, Rosenhan argues that nature emerges in them as an ‘affiliation of identity, landscape and ethics’ (pp. 285–6). One of a number of articles to map networks and relationships against reception and canon formation, Stuart Christie’s ‘E.M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, and the American Turn, 1942–1953’ (WenRLC 11:ii[2018] 1–26) uncovers the ways in which Lionel Trilling succeeded in moulding Forster’s reception in the United States. Continuing with the question of how individual critics might wield great influence in terms of a writer’s reception, Charles Campbell’s ‘Edward Said and Modernist Misreadings of A Passage to India’ (Interactions 27:i[2018] 23–37) works through what he perceives to be Said’s misunderstandings of Forster. Campbell argues that ‘he himself follows a tradition of critical analysis of Forster’s A Passage to India which distorts the novel in the service of certain preconceptions, refusals and misreading’, which he groups in six categories (p. 203). In these ‘misreadings’, Campbell writes, ‘he joins a school of readers of A Passage to India which I will call the modernist anti-mystical critics’ (p. 204). Elsewhere, Terry W. Thompson offers a gloss of Forster’s ‘one science fiction story’ in ‘Political Geographies in E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”’ (ANQ 21:i[2018] 32–6), while Masayuki Iwasaki approaches Forster and cinema in ‘“What, Then, Must Be Done?”: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and the Heritage Film Institute’ (SELit 59[2018] 21–38). Contributions to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, edited by Gerri Kimber, Todd Martin, and Christine Froula, explore the intriguing friendship between the two writers from fresh angles, covering their shared terrains and key interlocuters. This volume is the annual publication of the Katherine Mansfield Society published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. Christine Froula’s introduction, ‘Thinking Sideways through One’s Sisters’ (pp. 1–8), considers how Mansfield’s and Woolf’s ‘asymmetrical lifespans shape their bodies of work’, introducing their ‘relationship of mutual admiration and fascination … wariness, rivalry’ (p. 1). Maud Ellmann’s ‘Powers of Disgust: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’ (pp. 11–28) notes both writers’ association with lyricism, but argues through attentive readings that disgust runs as a powerful undercurrent through, respectively, In a German Pension, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’, and The Years. Maria DiBattista’s ‘Together and Apart’ (pp. 29–41) offers a biography of the pair’s friendship, drawing on diary entries, letters, and reviews, alongside comparative readings which reveal affinities between the writers’ works through careful close readings. Turning to reception history, Sydney Janet Kaplan’s ‘Seated Between “Geniuses”: Conrad Aiken’s Imaginative and Critical Responses to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’ (pp. 42–54) pieces together Aiken’s encounters with both writers. Kaplan argues that Aiken’s reviews shaped the reception history of both writers (particularly through his glowing review of Mansfield’s Journal) and that his own fiction was marked by his encounters with both women, as in his thinly veiled portrait of Mansfield and John Middleton Murry in ‘Your Obituary, Well Written’. Froula’s second contribution, ‘Katherine’s Secrets’ (pp. 55–74), sketches out similarities between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s aesthetic projects, attacking the ‘new post-war aesthetics’ (p. 55). Noting the competitive, even fractious, nature of their friendship, Froula highlights Mansfield’s unsigned review of Night and Day, her allegiance with John Middleton Murry against Bloomsbury, and the posthumous publication of Doves’ Nest and Journal, which ‘flows’, Froula writes, into her ‘nascent thinking towards The Waves’ (p. 69). Karina Jakubowicz’s ‘A Conversation Set to Flowers: Beyond the Origins of Kew Gardens’ (pp. 75–86) takes up a long-running debate in Mansfield studies: whether Mansfield was ‘responsible for the creation of Woolf’s Kew Gardens’ (p. 75), through a letter sent to Ottoline Morrell in 1917. The article situates Mansfield within her Bloomsbury milieu and investigates directions of influence between Woolf, Mansfield, and Morrell regarding ‘the literary possibilities of gardens’ (p. 78). Jakubowicz ultimately concludes that it is ‘impossible’ to argue that Kew Gardens was inspired by one event, and instead suggests that it is the product of a shared ‘great interest’ in the subject (p. 85). Like Mansfield and Morrell, Jakubowicz writes, ‘Woolf presents the garden as a dynamic, surprising landscape that departs from conventionality’. Each writer, she argues, ‘saw the potential of this traditional setting for the expression of bold, even radical ideas’ (p. 85). It is worth noting, too, that Richard Vytniorgu’s ‘Ottoline Morrell: Personalist Thinker’ considers this same set (MLR 113:i[2018] 57–79). In ‘“Roses Blooming Under Glass; Lips Cut with a Knife”: Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield’ (pp. 87–101), Halyna Chumak argues that, for Woolf, the face is a site ‘that spurs “contradictory” interpretations of “character”’ (p. 87), while Mansfield’s fiction ‘displays an overt fascination with the modern female visage’ (p. 87). Chumak discusses Mansfield’s and Woolf’s relationship to physiognomy, noting how the Victorian body became ‘a semiotic system’. Both writers, Chumak argues, ‘experiment with facial inscrutability as a mode of female resistance’, with images ‘refracted through another character’s perspective’ (p. 100). While Woolf ‘uses the modern woman to demonstrate that character reading requires invention’, Chumak writes, Mansfield ‘produces images of womanhood that compel extradiegetic readers to recalibrate their own hermeneutic approaches’ (p. 99). From roses and gardens to worms: in ‘The Fly and the Displaced Self: Affective Potential in the Epiphanic Moments of Mansfield, Woolf and Lawrence’ (pp. 102–16), Cheryl Hindrichs adopts an intriguing animal studies approach, noting Mansfield’s curious fly analogies. These both relate to her own writing and are used to interrogate gendered subjectivity and class dichotomies in her work. This article compares Mansfield’s, Woolf’s, and Lawrence’s bathetic use of this trope, where the metaphor of the fly is used to puncture affective climaxes, passing over epiphany or catharsis for ‘existential impasse’ (p. 116). Brian Richardson’s ‘Dangerous Reading in Mansfield’s Stories and Woolf’s “The Fisherman and his Wife”’ (pp. 117–28) explores characters in the act of reading. Richardson argues that reading is presented as often ‘dubious’ or ‘dangerous’ in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’, and ‘The Little Governess’ and ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ scene in To the Lighthouse. Attention to Mansfield’s view of reading as a mode of resistance, Richard claims, can shed light on Woolf’s ironic use of allusion. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf also contains: a review essay by Claire Drewery on recent scholarship; a critical miscellany by J. Lawrence Mitchell, which documents Mansfield’s relationship with her brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp; and creative critical responses to Mansfield. The latter section contains: a transcript of an excellent lecture given by Ali Smith at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014 (pp. 131–54); Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’ (pp. 155–72); and poetry from Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith (pp. 173–6). In ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Lyricism and Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics’ (Mo/Mo 25:iv[2018] 729–47), Elsa Högberg reads Mansfield in dialogue with Rancière’s idea of the ‘redistribution’ of the sensible. This compelling article proposes that the lyrical dimension of Mansfield’s work is fundamentally unsafe, a pioneer of an alternative lyrical tradition. ‘Through their defamiliarizing vocal and visual qualities’ Mansfield’s stories, Högberg argues, ‘redraw the affective and sensory boundaries that continue to sustain inequitable class and gender hierarchies’ (p. 742). Giles Whiteley details Mansfield’s interest in the fin de siècle in ‘Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Symons, Gabriele D’Annunzio and The Virgins of the Rocks’ (N&Q 65[2018] 402–5), correcting a misattributed quotation in the recently published Diaries, while neatly explicating Mansfield’s decadent lineage. Reflecting a broader trend in the work of 2018, Derek Ryan’s ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’ (MFS 64:i[2018] 27–51) argues that Mansfield’s ‘attentiveness to how animals feature in literary creation’ in the works of others is ‘central to her development of her own modernist practice’ (p. 31). Mansfield’s ‘careful observations of animals and creative encounters with them’, Ryan writes, ‘suggest that literature, rooted in linguistic structures that have traditionally been seen to divide humans from other species, may actually bring us into closer contact with animality’ (p. 46). Returning to the popular theme of Mansfield’s gardens, Tracy Miao’s article ‘Converging the Artificial and the Natural: Katherine Mansfield’s Actual and Imagined Botanical Gardens’ (JNZL 36:i[2018] 118–22) explores ‘how these two opposing forces’ of naturalness and containment ‘contend, negotiate and settle’ in Mansfield’s writing (p. 118). Miao argues that Mansfield ‘rejects natural borders and lines’ (p. 119), which, by way of Mansfield’s reading of Baudelaire, Miao links to both her interest in ‘garden designing’ and prose. Finally, ‘Empathy and Literary Style: A Theoretical and Methodological Exploration’ (OrbisLit 73:vi[2018] 471–86) by Anne Mangen, Anne Charlotte Begnum, Anezka Kuzmicova, Skans Kersti Nilsson, Mette Steenberg, and Hildegunn Støle, presents data on readers’ responses to Mansfield, building on publications in 2017 In ‘The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British Rural Fiction’ (in Bluemel and McCluskey, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain, pp. 135–48) Stella Deen explores the role of the English spinster un the rural and urban spaces of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman, E.H. Young’s Miss Mole, and Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. Deen argues that these novels show a development from a ‘libertarian to a communal’ notion of civilization (p. 12). There is much to commend in this collection from Edinburgh University Press, which offers a genuinely refreshing view of rural literature of the period, split into three sections considering rural networks, landscapes, and communities. ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Letters to Genevieve Taggard’ (PMLA 133:i[2018] 205–20), introduced by Laurel Harris, saw the first publication of Warner’s letters to the critically neglected US poet, Genevieve Taggard. The letters describe wartime life in an English village, with details of Warner’s work with the Women’s Voluntary Service, interactions with American servicemen, and Warner’s political views, alongside details of everyday life. As Harris writes, these letters ‘reveal a transatlantic connection between two leftist women writers that intertwines the political, literary, and personal’ (p. 206). Similarly, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany contained some brief discussion of Warner in its special issue, Essays in Honour of Jane Marcus. This includes by Robin Hackett’s ‘Jane Marcus, an Ongoing Legacy’ (VWM 93[2018] 36–7) and J. Ashley Foster, Cori L. Gabbard, and Conor Tomás Reed’s ‘Jane Marcus Feminist University: The Documentary Record’ (VWM 93[2018] 29–50). Unfortunately, Philosophy and Literary Modernism, which contains work on E.M. Forster, and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group did not arrive in time for this review. (b) Fiction 1930–1945 Marina MacKay’s book, Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic, looks at the critical output of this canonical theorist of the novel as a response to his experiences as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. This important and original study takes into account unpublished archival correspondence to build a case for looking at Watt as a mid-century thinker. MacKay’s chapters take up Watt’s approach to institutionalism, as well as to the writers about whom he wrote: Defoe, Richardson, Conrad. MacKay’s book considers Watt’s preoccupations in light of mid-century questions about the nature of language and empiricism alongside contemporaries such as George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Rebecca West, and Primo Levi, Leo Amery, and Arthur Koestler. Also bringing to light a less well-known archive, the latest instalment in a much longer project, the publication of volume 26 of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922–1934 and edited by Donat Gallagher was published by Oxford University Press last year. The volume brings together previously unpublished material written in the years immediately following his graduation and his travels in South America. Judith Woolf’s ‘Wrecked as Homeward She Did Come: “Transposed Autobiography” in Elizabeth Bowen’s Late Novel, The Little Girls’ (LW 15:ii[2018] 227–41) re-reads Bowen’s penultimate novel, The Little Girls [1963] as an example of transposed autobiography, centring on Bowen’s own traumatic experience as a result of the loss of her mother at a young age. In this novel, the article argues, Bowen departs from her usual mode of narration and instead represents characters from an exterior perspective so that the reader discovers the continued reach of past experience on characters’ present lives decades later. Woolf also situates the novel in relation to other events in Bowen’s life, including the Cuban missile crisis, as well as to the loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court. Edward King’s article, ‘“What Muck & Filth Is Normally Flowing through the Air”: The Cultural Politics of Atmosphere in the Work of George Orwell’ (JML 41:ii[2018] 60–76), centres on the evolution of Orwell’s thinking about radio. King draws on John Durham Peters’s theory of elemental media in The Marvellous Clouds [2015] to argue that Orwell’s ideas about the place of radio in everyday life should be thought about in relation to his theory of media. This article proposes that Orwell’s view of the radio be integrated into the environment, and that, if it is seen in this way, we can better understand his more optimistic hope for the possibilities of radio. In ‘“I Find My Mind Meeting Yours”: Rebecca West’s Telepathic Modernism’ (SNNTS 50:iv[2018] 543–62), Jennifer Spitzer proposes a new reading of Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy [1929], placing the novel in conversation with modernist ideas about spiritualism. Spitzer roots the novel’s interest in telepathy in nineteenth-century theories of consciousness and in the context of the development of communication technologies. According to Spitzer, West’s novel bridges spiritualism and the modernist interest in telepathy. West’s representation of Harriet Hume’s telepathic ability is ethically motivated, however, and is connected to West’s larger ‘utopian vision of consciousness’ (p. 544) which is linked to her socialist feminism. In ‘Regicide on Repeat: The Pensive Spectator of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ (Criticism 60:i[2018] 43–73), Jonah Corne offers a new reading of West’s multi-generic travel memoir by emphasizing its many references to West’s viewing of film reels. While recovering from illness in the first chapter of the book, West hears about the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia in 1934. Later, she watches news reels of the assassination, which brings up echoes of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Corne’s analysis of West’s references to observation, viewing, and perceiving in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is connected to Bellour’s theory about the differences between how photography and film affect viewers. The article breaks new ground in theorizing what Corne terms West’s ‘spectatorial process’ (p. 48). Laurel Harris’s ‘From “The Worst Horror of All” to “I Love You”: Gender and Voice in the Cinematic Soundscapes of Brighton Rock’ (LFQ 46:i[2018] 1) discusses the 1947 cinematic adaptation of Greene’s 1938 novel. Focusing on the character of Pinkie and drawing on Kaja Silverman’s theory of the status of the voice in modernist cinema, Harris’s article argues that voice in this film fulfils this character’s desire for discursive control despite his ambivalence about heterosexual romance. (c) James Joyce In At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University, one of the highlights of 2018, Sebastian D.G. Knowles differentiates his approach from other work on error and mistakes by stating ‘The beauty of Joyce is that through reading him we learn to make mistakes, and through them we learn to forgive ourselves’ (p. 4). An opening chapter warmly asserts ‘the necessity of an institutional appreciation of error’ (p. 21), and is followed by entertaining chapters on different Joycean texts and readings that Knowles occasionally describes as ‘the hunt’ (p. 23), ranging from finding each song in ‘Sirens’ to a link between Finnegans Wake’s Issy and, of all things, baseball. Knowles’s approach is generous and playful; he describes his book as one ‘that celebrates openness and engagement, and is everywhere concerned with Joyce’s comic principles of empathy and delight’ (p. 23). ‘The major point of At Fault’, he states, ‘is that Joyce is to be enjoyed, that all Joycean readings are properly flights from the center, that comedy lies at the heart of all that Joyce does, and that if a text is truly atelic then a true reading of that work must take it out of its own bounds’ (p. 25). Emphasizing this, Knowles ends At Fault with twelve forewords written in his role as series editor of the Florida James Joyce series, arguing finally that ‘there is no limit to Joycean study’ (p. 219). Proof of this abounded in 2018, with important new work on topics including ecocriticism, music, translation, and non-fiction. As in literary studies more broadly, ecocritical approaches to Joyce continue in popularity. Yi-Peng Lai’s EcoUlysses: Nature, Nation, Consumption is a prime example of such work. Effectively arranged into chapters themed respectively around gardens, waste, trees, and the pastoral, Lai’s study thus examines nature first as it relates to land and consumption, and then in terms of the nation and the ecosystem. Through her reading of ecopolitics in Joyce, Lai develops her own approach to ecocriticism that combines ‘natural history, cultural politics, historiography, colonial discourse, genetic studies, and even architectural history’ (p. 21). Bloom’s ‘Flowerville’, the pollution of Sandymount Strand, and, notably, the catalogues of tree wedding and marketplace in ‘Cyclops’ are treated with care and in detail. EcoUlysses succeeds in exhibiting ‘the possibility’, Lai suggests, ‘of reading the environment alongside history, politics, social languages, and genetic criticism’, productively situating ‘the interpretation of eco-politics in a Joycean context that is historically and socio-politically relevant’ (p. 172). Ultimately, Lai argues that ‘the imagination of nature in Ulysses is in fact inseparable from that of the emergent nation of fin-de-siècle Ireland’ (p. 172). While predominantly concerned with Joyce’s texts, Vincent J. Cheng’s far-reaching study Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joyce also examines literary texts by Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walker Percy, and Milan Kundera. This rigorous but sensitive discussion of how forgetting and amnesia function in the formation of national identities and histories focuses on Ireland and the American South. In his fifth chapter, Cheng further considers the relationship between these histories. ‘Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes’ covers broad ground, moving, for example, from a reading of Irishness in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and its 1939 film adaptation to a focus on references to the Ku Klux Klan in the Wake, in order to argue for the ‘blending/doubling of a performative, imagined Irish/Southern identity’ (p. 108). Responding not only to current concerns in literary and historical scholarship but to very recent upsetting events in the American South, Cheng’s study explores urgent issues of race, narrative, and the relationships between literature and history. Careful, as he explains in his Afterword, to avoid ‘any overarching or reductive argument’ (p. 149), Cheng maintains the importance of preserving nuance, difficulties, and detail as a challenge to the ‘wilful creation of very dangerous fictions’ seen in our post-Trump world (p. 150). Michelle Witen’s James Joyce and Absolute Music takes an intensely detailed, archivally informed approach to analysing Joyce’s engagement with music. Witen’s thorough knowledge and understanding of the history, terminology, and connotations of absolute music is apparent throughout, in explorations which revolve around (yet extend beyond) the question of the fuga per canonem in ‘Sirens’. The book opens with a substantial chapter her central focus ‘absolute music’, ‘or pure, non-referential instrumental music (music that does not refer to anything outside of itself), wherein the structure and the content are inseparable’ (pp. 2–3). After this discussion of the roots of the term, what it denotes, and how the concept reached modernist writers, chapter 2 covers Joyce’s early engagement with music in Chamber Music, Exiles, Dubliners, and Portrait. Chapters 3 and 4 form a ‘diptych’ on ‘Sirens’ (p. 9) and reach forward to the fifth chapter on ‘Circe’. Witen turns finally to the Wake in chapter 6, thus providing insight across Joyce’s major works. Linking ‘the rationale informing the fugal format of “Sirens”’ and Joyce’s later claim of having written Finnegans Wake as “pure music”’, Witen proposes a convincing ‘trajectory’: ‘in the emphasis on instrumentation in the early works; in his use of the fugue in “Sirens”; in his recycling of the fugal elements of “Sirens” in “Circe”; and in his emphasis on the fusion of sound and sense, the visible and the audible in Finnegans Wake’ (p. 3). Witen’s chapters on ‘Sirens’ consider Joyce’s fuga per canonem in terms of first structure, then effect, significantly reassessing and deepening understandings of the episode. The longer of the two chapters, ‘A Case of Structure’, begins with a history of the fugue, showing the issues inherent in critical tendencies to refer to late twentieth-century interpretations of fugal structure. Detailing the popularity of the fugue in the music of Bach and Handel, Witen then outlines how interest waned before becoming reinvigorated by the ‘ascension of absolute music in the nineteenth century’ (pp. 117–18). This chapter then directly addresses previous critical readings of the fugue in ‘Sirens’, forming a genetically informed argument for Joyce’s ‘fugal intentions’ (p. 126). Witen relies on two items from the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce papers acquired in 2002: an early draft of ‘Sirens’ in a notebook (MS 36,639/7 A) and a handwritten copybook of the episode which includes a list of eight parts under the heading ‘Fuga per Canonem’ (MS 36,639/9). Calling the latter ‘a genetic turning point’ (p. 126), Witen systematically works through the terms of the list to show the implication of a double fugue structure in ‘Sirens’, before turning to the earlier draft of the episode to determine intentionality (p. 157). This rich work is then followed by a shorter chapter considering the effects of such innovations, which is vital to Witen’s wider argument that Joyce shows ‘an understanding of absolute music that reveals the inseparability of its content from its form, its structure from its effect’ (p. 114). Joyce and Absolute Music will be essential to those working on ‘Sirens’ or Joyce and music, and also of real importance to future work on the relationships of influence, representation, and experimentation between modern literature and music more generally. Elsewhere, four further pieces of work on Joyce and music rely similarly on musical expertise. In Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism, edited by Katherine O’Callaghan, O’Callaghan’s essay ‘“That’s the Music of the Future”: Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old Irish Tonality”’ (pp. 32–47) suggests ‘that Joyce saw a kinship between traditional Irish music and the radical developments he encountered in the European musical world’ (p. 32). O’Callaghan examines what she calls a ‘juxtaposition of modernity and returning past’ by looking at ‘The Dead’, ‘Sirens’, and ‘Circe’ (p. 32). In the same volume, Jamie McGregor’s chapter ‘The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce’ (pp. 48–61) looks at what McGregor describes as ‘a surprising omission’ in previous criticism on Wagner’s influence on the literature of Woolf and Joyce: the ‘cyclical structure’ of both The Waves and the Wake in relation to Wagner’s Ring Cycle (p. 48). ‘For all three artists’, he furthermore concludes, ‘final transcendence is achieved through a heroic Liebestod’ (p. 59). Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s edited volume Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White contains two essays which respond to Harry White’s own interest in Joycean musical links. In ‘Moore, Wagner, Joyce: Evelyn Innes and the Irish Wagnerian Novel’, Gerry Smyth discusses George Moore’s influence on Joyce (pp. 335–49), while John O’Flynn’s ‘Alex North, James Joyce, and John Huston’s The Dead (1987)’ focuses on the score Alex North composed for Huston’s The Dead (pp. 351–71). Philip Sicker’s study Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture argues that Ulysses is Joyce’s ‘ultimate act of capturing and preserving the eye’s encounter with reality, a transaction conducted via the gazes of Stephen and Bloom and through a multitude of refractory narrative lenses’ (p. 2). Linking his focus thus to Joyce’s biography, Sicker’s readings of perception and spectacle in Ulysses cover a wide variety of topics, from silent films and photography to the flâneur, Futurism, and the philosophy of Locke and Berkeley. Three 2018 journal articles also focus on Joyce and the visual. Unlike Sicker’s study, however, each of these is informed by disability studies. In ‘The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (JLCDS 12:i[2018] 53–69), Paul Marchbanks queries readings of Bloom’s sympathy and pity for others and argues that Joyce’s critique of bigotry towards those with disabilities extends beyond the society depicted in Ulysses. Robert Volpicelli’s ‘Modernist Low Vision: Visual Impairment and Weak Narrative in Conrad and Joyce’ (Novel 51:i[2018] 60–78) considers Stephen Dedalus’s weak vision in Portrait as it links to an emphasis on sensation and movement away from a narrative of progression. Matthew Rubery’s ‘Ulysses, Blindness, and Accessible Modernism’ (NLH 49:i[2018] 47–70) discusses the concept of modernist difficulty in terms of accessible alternative formats, particularly sound recordings of various kinds. This article provides an in-depth account of the American Foundation for the Blind’s efforts to record Ulysses and offers a reading of what was retained and gained in that recording. From the visual back to the aural, Daniel Ryan Morse’s article, ‘Sounding Dismodernism in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (JLCDS 12:iv[2018] 459–75) focuses on Joyce’s methods of reading and writing (particularly dictation in the writing of Ulysses). It addresses and challenges a perceived binary between the audiences and cultural connotations of audiobooks and printed texts. Moving away from disability studies, Angela Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel explores ‘how modernists represent the act of listening, describe the soundscape, and formally make their narratives auditory’ (p. 4). Frattarola’s fourth chapter, ‘Turning Up the Volume of Inner Speech: Headphones and James Joyce’s Interior Monologue’ (pp. 94–113), looks broadly at the technology of headphones as a historical context for Joyce’s works. This chapter examines in particular the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, its characters’ ‘fictional soundscapes’ (p. 95) and ‘bodily sounds’ (p. 107), the episode’s ‘auditory cosmopolitanism’ (p. 97), and the ways in which ‘just as headphones brought sounds from remote places into one’s headspace, Joyce’s representation of stream of consciousness reflects an interior space that is filled with voices, noise, texts, advertisements, and music that do not necessarily originate within the self’ (p. 98). While Grace Eckley’s close readings of the Wake and of what Joyce himself read bestow journalist and public figure W.T. Stead with great importance in her monograph, The Encryption of Finnegans Wake Resolved: W.T. Stead, Sean Seeger’s study Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott: History Repeating Itself with a Difference builds a judicious comparative reading of Joyce and Walcott through four chapters addressing Ulysses, Omeros, Finnegans Wake, and Tiepolo’s Hound. In the first full, dedicated study of Joyce and Walcott, Seeger reads these authors’ explorations of nonlinear temporality both within the texts and at a metatextual level. Elsewhere, Patrick O’Neill’s Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations provides an in-depth consideration of Joyce’s involvement in the experimental French and Italian translations of Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the standalone text of 1928 which would eventually form the eighth chapter of the Wake. Joyce’s involvement is well known, but this is the first detailed comparison of the English, French, and Italian texts, variations ‘equally informed by Joyce’s personal authority’ (p. 3). O’Neill also fruitfully brings in the less usual (in terms of status) work of Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron in French, Ettore Settanni in Italian, and C.K. Ogden in Basic English. As O’Neill qualifies, ‘Grand narratives and overarching interpretive schemes are … unapologetically avoided in what follows’; the result is ten chapters of around fifty ‘comparative microanalyses’, reading short sections of ALP in three languages (p. 39). The ‘triple iterations’ of ALP, O’Neill argues, are ‘at once three separate and authorially validated individual texts and in combination one single Annalivian macrotext’ (p. 38). In practice, then, these discrete yet conjoined ALPs are read together in rich detail, each chapter breaking down a few lines and ending with a section of ‘comments and contexts’. While these discussions are microscopic, they not only give just enough information for a reader less familiar with the Wake, they also consistently communicate the enjoyment there is to be had in the Wake and (even) in Wakean criticism. This book could be indispensable to anyone working on the Wake, or chapter 8 more specifically (in any language). It is also a valuable case study for those researching literary translation beyond Joyce. Though the roster of well-known and well-respected contributors helps, it is rather its significance as an endeavour that should grant Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser’s edited volume Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: ‘Outside His Jurisfiction’ lasting importance in the field of Joyce studies. As a collective study of how we categorize Joyce’s writings (if the editors will excuse the unqualified use of that ‘inflated gerund’ (p. 7)), Joyce’s Non-Fiction asks complex questions regarding the reception of authorship and addresses issues of intent, biography, and canon. A strong, eloquent introduction provides context and poses questions. With one eye trained on the accessibility issues concomitant with discussion of Joyce’s non-fiction and another on the effects of separately publishing an author’s collected fiction and non-fiction, Ebury and Fraser make useful comparisons with the anthologizing and assembling of Collected Works of writers such as Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Virginia Woolf. Outlining ‘the broad position of the volume’, the editors argue that ‘while designations of fiction and non-fiction have some indisputable connections to specific formal and textual features of these works, they are at least as much a production of meta-textual issues that, though they are connected to these texts, are not at all intrinsic to them’ (p. 6). Their introduction takes Joyce’s journalism, a topic treated by several of the contributors, as a case study, and further includes a useful history of interest in or publishing of Joyce’s non-fiction, contextualizing this within broader movements in literary criticism, from early attention to the archive but not politics, to the later boom of historical and political scholarship in the field. The editors stake the position of this collection of essays, however, as one which ‘remains open to politicised and, where appropriate, depoliticised readings of Joyce’s non-fiction writings’ (p. 15). Collectively, the essays of Joyce’s Non-Fiction posit that ‘the traditional rubric of fiction and non-fiction has determined the way Joyce’s (and other’s) texts have been read as much as readings of those texts have determined those designations’ (p. 18). Michael Groden’s essay, ‘“Please, Mr. Postman”: Joyce’s Expanding Epistolary Novel’, discusses Joyce’s 3,800 letters, and Groden’s current project (with William Brockman, Kevin Dettmar, and Robert Spoo) to publish new Joycean letters. Groden considers this particular body of writing as both an ‘epistolary novel’ and as autobiography: as fiction and non-fiction (p. 31). In ‘“He Chronicled with Patience”: Early Joycean Progressions between Non-Fiction and Fiction’, Hans Walter Gabler reads Stephen Hero as non-fiction; while in ‘Tracing the Curve of an Emotion: Joyce’s Early “Portrait” Essay’ Terence Killeen then effectively places the essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ alongside manifestos, in order to address it not as an avant-text of Portrait but as ‘a more radical, more modernist work than what we have of Stephen Hero’ (p. 78). Kevin Barry, Kevin Chekov Feeney, Gavin Mendel-Gleason, and Bojan Božić’s ‘Is It Joyce We Are Reading? Non-Fiction, Authorship, and Digital Humanities’, focuses particularly on the essay ‘Politics and Cattle Disease’—the authorship of which has been disputed—in order to ‘answer some questions of attribution using new methods of computer-based natural language analysis’ (p. 94). Three essays on journalism follow. Emer Nolan, in ‘James Joyce as Cultural Critic’, argues that ‘Joyce’s early criticism suggests that if he had become a literary critic, he might have been a kind of postcolonial thinker or theorist of world literature’ (p. 121), while John McCourt addresses Joyce’s Italian journalism in ‘Into the West: Joyce on Aran’. James Fraser reads the specific context of production of Joyce’s Trieste journalism in ‘Writing Journalism, Writing Betrayal: The Formation of a Journalistic Voice’, after a discussion of how Joyce distinguishes between literary writing and journalism in his own fiction. Arguing that Joyce’s own distinction falters, Fraser furthermore proposes ‘that Joyce intentionally sought a hyperbolic, almost counterfactual style that was rooted in the narratives of betrayal he had been exploring in his fiction’ (p. 145). Two essays close this volume, linked by their use of literary theory. Ebury’s ‘Becoming-Animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction’ and J.T. Welsch’s ‘“… For Frankness’ Sake”: Confessional Structures in Giacomo Joyce’ implement Deleuzian and Foucauldian approaches respectively. Ebury offers ‘a detailed reading of a single aspect of the epiphanies, the role of a Deleuzian concept of becoming-animal within their drama, with particular reference to tensions between the autobiographical and the counterbiographical’, and relates her avoidance (in keeping with the efforts of literary animal studies) of reading the animals in these texts as ‘straightforward symbols or emblems’ to her efforts to resist transforming the epiphanies into finished texts (p. 176). Ebury works towards a delineation of ‘Joyce’s thinking about genre and the distinction between fiction and non-fiction’ (p. 180) by focusing particularly (though by no means exclusively) on three epiphanies ‘based on real dreams and nightmares’ (p. 182), before turning finally to Joyce’s later works in a broader discussion of how ‘becoming-animal’ relates to Joyce’s ‘creative anxiety’ (p. 191). An approach usually reserved for Joyce’s completed fiction, Ebury’s ‘creative reading’ relies on her affirmation that it is ‘the unfinished, evolving, and liminal status of the epiphanies, rather than their more stable position in an archive of Joyce’s writings, that gives them most power’ (p. 180). Welsch’s own creative reading, closing this essential volume, suggests that both Catholic confession and confessional literature (particularly, and provocatively, confessionalist poetry) offer a potential framework for addressing the non-fictional elements of Giacomo Joyce. ‘The extent’, Welsch observes, ‘to which we can ascribe not just autobiographical truth but any empirical correspondence to a text is bound up in the generic conventions that allow prose but not poetry to be identified as either fiction or non-fiction, although the distinction has nothing ostensibly to do with form’ (p. 208). Four further edited collections dedicated to Joyce appeared in 2018. Cognitive Joyce was one of the last projects of the late André Topia, and the editors Sylvain Belluc and Valérie Bénéjam dedicate the volume to his memory. As they state, ‘in plain English’ in their introduction, ‘what we know and how we know it is the focus of Joyce’s literary know-how’ (p. 1). After Belluc and Bénéjam detail the ways in which Joyce’s work has figured in the development of literary cognitive studies, chapters progress through historicist and contemporary approaches to cognitive science and discuss minds within Joyce’s texts as well as how minds encounter Joyce’s texts. First, Fran O’Rourke addresses cognition in classical philosophy in ‘Knowledge and Identity in Joyce’, while Jean-Baptiste Fournier looks instead at phenomenology in ‘Intentionality and Epiphany: Husserl, Joyce, and the Problem of Access’. Following these philosophical chapters, Dirk Van Hulle discusses Joyce’s composition in ‘Authors’ Libraries and the Extended Mind: The Case of Joyce’s Books’, Belluc examines the functions of etymology in ‘Characters’ Lapses and Language’s Past: Etymology as Cognitive Tool in Joyce’s Fiction’, and Thomas Jackson Rice explores the visual imaginings of half-sleep in ‘Joyce and Hypnagogia’. The remaining chapters look at specific works. Dubliners is the focus of Caroline Morillot’s ‘Spatialized Thought: Waiting as Cognitive State in Dubliners’ and Benoît Tadié’s ‘The Invention of Dublin as “Naissance de la Clinique”: Cognition and Pathology in Dubliners’, before Topia’s ‘Cognition as Drama: Stephen Dedalus’s Mental Workshop in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and Pierre-Louis Patoine’s ‘Joycean Text/Empathic Reader: A Modest Contribution to Literary Neuroaesthetics’ take very different approaches to the Portrait. While Topia’s article reaches back to O’Rourke’s discussion of Aristotle, Patoine draws rather on recent and contemporary work in the cognitive sciences in order to argue for the importance of the responses of the reading body. Lizzy Welby, in ‘Configuring Cognitive Architecture: Mind Reading and Meta-Representations’, and Teresa Prudente, in ‘Hallucination and the Text: “Circe” between Narrative, Epistemology, and Neurosciences’, consider Ulysses, in chapters grounded in evolutionary biology and neuroscience respectively. Annalisa Volpone closes the volume with her chapter ‘“[The] Buzz in His Braintree, the Tic of His Conscience”: Consciousness, Language and the Brain in Finnegans Wake’, which contextualizes stuttering in the Wake with ‘medico-cultural discourse’ contemporary to Joyce (p. 231). James Joyce’s Silences, edited by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti, tasks an impressive (if predictable) cast of contributors to interrogate multivalent notions of silence and silences in Joyce’s works. Building on the significant work of Hugh Kenner regarding the gaps and unsaids in Joycean narratives, fifteen essays of varying lengths explore ‘rhetorical, linguistic, translatorial, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of “silence”’ (p. 3). Following Wawrzycka and Zanotti’s short introduction, four essays focus on silence and language: Fritz Senn’s ‘Active Silences’, Laura Pelaschiar’s ‘Joyce’s Art of Silence in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Ira Torresi’s ‘What Happens When “The Silence Speaks the Scene” (FW 13.3)?’, and Laurent Milesi’s ‘In the Beginning Was the Nil: The “eloquence of silences” in Finnegans Wake’. Senn and Pelaschiar each discuss articulations of the unsaid or unsounded, while Bollettieri and Torresi consider silence as it relates to Joyce’s treatment of death, exploring silence as concealment, a distraction, and even a weapon. Milesi ends this section by looking at language and gender construction. In the following section, John McCourt’s ‘“Fragments of Shapes, Hewn. In White Silence: Appealing”: Silence and the Emergence of a Style from Giacomo Joyce to Ulysses’, Teresa Caneda’s ‘Joyce and the Aesthetics of Silence: Absence and Loss in “The Dead”’, Sam Slote’s ‘“Affirmations and Negations Invalidated as Uttered” in Ulysses and How It Is’, and Morris Beja’s ‘“Shut Up He Explained”: Joyce and “Scornful Silence”’ all focus on stylistics and aesthetics. A third section comprises William Brockman’s ‘The Silent Author of James Joyce’s Dictated Letters’, Sara Sullam’s ‘“Secrets, Silent … Sit” in the Archives of Our Publishers: Untold Episodes from Joyce’s Italian Odyssey’, and Tim Conley’s ‘The Silence of the Looms: “Penelope” as Translation’. Held together by looser links than the essays in the sections that precede and follow, these three chapters examine Joyce via the archive, publishing, and (tangentially) Homer respectively. Conley’s chapter views Ulysses as ‘a kind of translation of Homer’, which, though not a particularly unusual figuration in classical reception studies more broadly, provides a link forward to the final section of essays on translation. Zanotti’s ‘Silent Translation in Joyce’, Wawrzycka’s ‘“Mute Chime and Mute Peal”: Translating Chamber Music’, and Erika Mihálycsa’s ‘“Music Hath Jaws”: Translating Music and Silence in Ulysses’ explore Joyce’s uses of translated texts, poetic silences in translation, and translating sensations. This volume ends with a coda on modernism and silence by Franca Ruggieri, ‘Forms of Silence in Literary Writing: James Joyce and Modernism’, which contextualizes Joyce’s silences with the work of several other modernist writers, from Kafka to Conrad. As the editors of the twenty-sixth volume of Brill’s series European Joyce Studies point out, the many links between Joyce and the industries of advertisement, printing, and publishing are widely known, but ‘serious interest’ in such topics has developed only in the last twenty years or so (p. 1). In Publishing in Joyce’s Ulysses: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing, William S. Brockman, Tekla Mecsnóber, and Sabrina Alonso narrow their scope to Ulysses. As a result, this volume will be of particular use to those working on the ‘Aeolus’ episode, which is discussed by several contributors. In ‘George Newnes’s Most Entertaining Publication’, Judith Harrington focuses on Joyce’s awareness of three entrepreneurial newspaper publishers: George Newnes, Arthur Pearson, and Alfred Harmsworth. Elisabetta d’Erme looks at the two Victorian weeklies that feature in Ulysses in her essay ‘Bloom, the Dandy, the Nymph and the Old Hag: Tit-Bits and Photo Bits, Reflections of the Victorian Press in James Joyce’s Ulysses’. Rounding off this cluster of essays on newspapers, ‘Types of News Events’ by Fritz Senn examines specific news stories in Ulysses, while Jolanta Wawrzycka analyses notions of code and coding in ‘Newspapers, Print, Language: Steganography in Joyce’. David Spurr discusses code too in ‘Classified Advertising in Joyce’. His chapter moves from the coded erotics of classified advertisements referenced or imagined in Ulysses, to Bloom’s use of the newspaper in ‘Sirens’ to hide his illicit letter writing, and to the further fun had in Finnegans Wake. In ‘“But Who Was Gerty?”: Intertextuality and the Advertising Language of “Nausicaa”’, Matthew Hayward proposes that ‘Nausicaa’ is pitched at advertising language rather than those who consume it. Continuing this focus on advertising, Sabrina Alonso takes a genetic approach in ‘Advertising in Ulysses’. The final group of essays in this volume address printing: Harald Beck reconstructs the offices of the Freeman’s Journal in ‘“Aeolus”—A Sightseeing Tour’, and Tamara Radak explores tensions between the cyclical and the linear in ‘“Aeolus”, Interrupted: Heady Headlines and Joycean Negotiations of Closure’. This is a particularly strong essay, as is Sangam MacDuff’s ‘The Self-Reflexive Text of “Aeolus”’. Taken together, Radak’s and MacDuff’s contributions offer significant developments of how self-reflexivity functions in ‘Aeolus’. In ‘“Clio’s Clippings”: From Newspaper to Press Cutting’ Brockman examines how Joyce removes clippings from their context in Dubliners and Ulysses, as well as how Joyce used clippings to communicate with Harriet Weaver, Ezra Pound, and others. Finally, Mecsnóber provides a welcome shift in perspective, viewing Ulysses as a printed object in ‘The Ineluctable Modernity of the Visible: The Typographic Odyssey of Ulysses in Interwar Print Culture’. Different typefaces used in different early editions, she argues, enact important shifts in how—and with what connotations—the book was promoted. Volume 28 of European Joyce Studies, James Joyce and Genetic Criticism: Genesic Fields, is the third of this series to focus on genetic criticism. A few newer voices join the expected set of contributors: the editor, Genevieve Sartor’s ‘What Genetics Can Do: Linking II.2 and IV of Finnegans Wake’ argues that chapter II.2 and Book IV are ‘compositionally connected’ via Lucia Joyce and Issy (p. 69), and that furthermore ‘Genetic work is the only way these sections could be understood as fundamentally connected’ (p. 80); Shinjini Chattopadhyay’s ‘Giacomonic Oxen: Avant-Texte or Intertext?’ proposes the term ‘anterior intratext’ for Giacomo Joyce’s relationship to Ulysses (p. 93); and Sangam MacDuff’s ‘Joyce’s Revelation: “The Apocalypse of Saint John” at Cornell’ examines one of the earliest manuscripts attributed to Joyce in order to infer Joyce’s interest in Revelation, which MacDuff then tracks in the genesis of certain passages in Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. The rest of the volume comprises further recent efforts in genetic criticism by more familiar names. Tim Conley’s ‘Revision Revisited’ offers ‘some cautionary notes’ on how to analyse and discuss revision (p. 14); Robbert-Jan Henkes’s ‘The at Wickerworks and the Case of Mute Authorisation’ studies the determination of errors and intent from an editorial perspective; and Dirk Van Hulle focuses on the ‘Guiltless’ copybook and the phrase ‘genesic field’ in the Wake chapter I.5 in his article ‘Editing the Wake’s Genesis: Digital Genetic Criticism’. In the detailed article ‘Correcting Joyce: Trial and Error in the Composition of Ulysses’, Sam Slote takes a different approach from Henkes to the incorporation of errors; Luca Crispi continues his work on the genesis of Ulysses in ‘The Genesis of “Penelope” in Manuscript’; and Fritz Senn, though not a genetic critic himself, looks at the work of genetic scholars in ‘Opsigenetic Touches in Ulysses: Ithacan Correlatives’. Sartor’s introduction lucidly argues for the ongoing relevance of genetic criticism’s innovations, highlighting the combined foci of these essays on revision, cross-reference, and re-reflection. Work on Joyce formed part of several broader studies in 2018. Joycean definitions of epiphany are briefly brought into a discussion of ‘moments of being’ (p. 71) in the fourth chapter, ‘Epiphanies, Ontologies and Epistemologies’, of Wilma Fraser’s Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning: An Autoethnographic Inquiry, a study of the marginalization of wisdom in education practice and policy (pp. 67–88). Two chapters of Gerard L. Bruns’s Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature focus on Joyce: ‘On the Words of the Wake (and What To Do with Them)’ (pp. 117–32) and ‘What’s in a Mirror? James Joyce’s Phenomenology of Misperception’ (pp. 133–50). Fragments and fragmentation, first of the individual word in Finnegans Wake and then of mirrors, encounters, and interruptions in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, are considered here by Bruns alongside chapters on Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett, J.H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, Charles Bernstein, and Gertrude Stein. Stephen G. Butler’s Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882–1964 looks at the reception of a group of male Irish writers who have become cultural commodities in the USA. His chapter on Joyce, ‘Through a Bowl of Bitter Tears, Darkly: James Joyce and the Amerirish, 1917–1962’, highlights how Joyce’s Irishness and Catholic upbringing were emphasized in early reviews of his works in American journals (pp. 121–46). In Modern Political Aesthetics from Romantic to Modernist Literature: Choreographies of Social Performance, Tudor Balinisteanu reads Wordsworth, Conrad, Yeats, and Joyce with Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, using concepts of dance, practical politics, and the nonhuman. The seventh chapter, ‘Joyce’s Choreographies of Gesture’ (pp. 140–57), forms part of Balinsteanu’s effort to ‘explore the relations between aesthetic creation and capitalist forces of materialist production’, and ‘the political value of performative aspects of literary texts’ (p. 17). Richard Kopley also dedicates a chapter to Joyce in The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present. Alongside discussion of authors including Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and Zadie Smith (among several others), the chapter ‘Table as Text in James Joyce’s “The Dead”’ (pp. 69–74) contributes to Kopley’s interpretation of the design and effect of the framed centre in works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. A small flurry of work on Joyce and Beckett was published in 2018. In Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism Alan Warren Friedman revisits and reclaims the importance of Joyce and surrealism as contexts for Beckett’s work. These two near-contemporaneous influences, as Friedman claims, have been often discounted as having little positive or enduring effect on Beckett. After a chapter outlining the origins and evolution of surrealism, Friedman dedicates a chapter to Beckett and Joyce: through a detailed comparative reading of their works and an overview of existing scholarship on their literary relationship, Friedman argues that ‘Beckett’s Joycean connections, while they did not determine or control his uniquely eccentric path, remained extensive, life-long, and profound’ (p. 57). In the following chapters and amid a wealth of links and relationships, Friedman identifies and discusses a potential surrealist root for a prevailing concept in Beckett’s works: ‘of carrying on despite the absence of resources for doing so’ (p. 115). Chapters on ‘Beckett and Visual Art’, ‘Dreams, Birth, and Beyond’, and ‘Voice, Narrative, and Identity’ are followed by detailed appendices offering a chronology of Beckett and surrealism and an account of Beckett’s influence on visual artists. Elsewhere, Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst’s edited volume Beckett and Modernism includes three essays on Beckett and Joyce. Sam Slote compares equivocating affirmations in ‘Penelope’ and Beckett’s How It Is in ‘Beckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity’ (pp. 69–80), a stylishly complex essay; José Francisco Fernández’s ‘Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses’ (pp. 81–94) places Wyndham Lewis between Joyce and Beckett; and Andy Wimbush analyses a rejection of Joyce in ‘Omniscience and Omnipotence: Molloy and the End of “Joyceology”’ (pp. 95–109). Essays on Joyce appear in several further collections. Barbara M. Hoffmann’s essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Madman’ (in Keating, ed., Patrick McCabe’s Ireland: ‘The Butcher Boy’, ‘Breakfast on Pluto’, and ‘Winterwood’, pp. 45–64) compares Stephen Dedalus and Francie Brady, protagonist of McCabe’s The Butcher Boy [1992]. Hoffmann proposes that ‘competing hegemonic forces in Ireland’ form an artist of Stephen and a killer of Francie (p. 46). An interview with McCabe by Keating, ‘“Sinking the Pail into the Self-Conscious,” Bubble Gum Ballads and Other Conversational Circles: Patrick McCabe, London 2015’ (pp. 164–81) includes brief discussion of Joyce’s influence on his work. Geert Lernout’s essay ‘Nabokov on Joyce and Ulysses’ (in Dhooge and Pieters, eds., Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher, pp. 101–20) discusses the lectures Nabokov delivered on Joyce in the 1950s. Irrationally idealizing the ‘more innocent time’ in which Nabokov and his students worked, before the first publications of Joyce’s letters and Ellmann’s biography (p. 105), Lernout’s tangible envy contributes to his depressing view of literary criticism: ‘When today someone claims to have found something new in Ulysses, it usually means that they have failed to consult all of the necessary secondary literature’ (p. 108). Another chapter by Lernout, on ‘James Joyce and the Study of the Bible’ (in Anderson and Kearney, eds., Ireland and the Reception of the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives, pp. 365–84), discusses ‘freethought’ and draws from Lernout’s extensive previous work on Joyce and the Bible. Teresa Casal’s chapter, ‘A Century Apart: Intimacy, Love and Desire from James Joyce to Emma Donaghue’ (in Villeneuva Romero, Amador-Moreno, and Sánchez García, eds., Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context, pp. 235–63), offers a comparative reading of ‘The Dead’ alongside O’Donaghue’s short story ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her collection Touchy Subjects [2011]. Louis Armand’s ‘The Obscene Object of Post/Humanism’ (in Matviyenko and Roof, eds., Lacan and the Posthuman, pp. 15–26) focuses on Lacan’s 1954 series on cybernetics and 1976 series on Joyce’s work. In Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition, edited by Sheila Murnaghan and Ralph M. Rosen, Joyce figures as one of the ‘assorted intermediaries’ between the Beats and the Classics (p. 9). In his article ‘“Thalatta! Thalatta!”: Xenophon, Joyce, and Kerouac’ (pp. 38–54), Christopher Gair discusses the exclamation of ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ (‘The Sea! The Sea!’) taken from Xenophon’s Anabasis and quoted both in Kerouac’s Doctor Sax and, of course, by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, tracing a ‘circuitous road to Xenophon’ via Joyce (p. 41). Arguing that this faint link back ‘is significant as a kind of classical unconscious’ (p. 42), Gair details several textual links from across Kerouac’s oeuvre to suggest Joyce as ‘a mediating presence’ in Kerouac’s development of the sea as an essential trope (p. 45). Sylvain Belluc’s essay ‘“Language Never Errs”: A Saussurean Study of Some Mistakes in James Joyce’s Works’ (in Porée and Alfandary, eds., Literature and Error: A Literary Take on Mistakes and Errors, pp. 195–211) ties mistakes in Joyce to work in language studies contemporary to the writing of Ulysses. Belluc furthermore argues that Joyce’s ‘celebration of mistakes’ goes beyond such research and writing to demonstrate that ‘language, in a very real sense, is indeed never wrong’ (p. 209). In his chapter ‘Evental Time and the Untime in Finnegans Wake’ (in Flynn and O’Brien, eds., Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, pp. 53–73), Shahriyar Mansouri ‘explores the emergence, loss and at once re-creation of time as a self-referential and authoritative agent’, referring to Alain Badiou’s concept of ‘Evental Time’ (p. 54). And three strong essays in Irish Urban Fictions rethink Joyce’s Dublin, as do the volume’s editors Maria Beville and Deirdre Flynn in their introduction (pp. 1–20). Each of the three parts of Irish Urban Fictions opens with an essay on Joyce, establishing the focus of each section, from ‘the city as experience, to the city as imaginary, and finally to city as amorphous and plural’, and thus treating Joyce’s Dublin as ‘that most iconic version of Irish urban identity’ (p. 7). Eva Roa White’s chapter, ‘Whose Dublin Is It Anyway? Joyce, Doyle, and the City’ (pp. 23–44), looks at Dubliners alongside Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees and Bullfighting, considering the limitations of Joyce’s legacy in Dublin and the work of contemporary writers to show the city’s ‘present multicultural identity and offer an alternative to viewing Ireland solely through the Joycean lens’ (p. 24). Quyen Nguyen’s ‘“Neither This Nor That”: The Decentred Textual City in Ulysses’ (pp. 109–27) reads the ‘neglected underlying cityscape’ of Ulysses, considering its multiple Dublins as opposed to the ‘real’ Dublin and focusing on Bloom as ‘a practical Dublin user’ in ‘Lestrygonians’ (p. 109). Finally, in his chapter ‘The Haunted Dublin of Ulysses: Two Modes of Time in the Second City of the Empire’ (pp. 185–201), Nikhil Gupta argues that ‘Wandering Rocks’ ‘opens up a larger picture of a community in motion; the separate members of that group may not recognise the larger collective experience in which they participate, but the narrative technique of the episode performs that imaginative work for them’ (p. 188). Two collections of essays by pre-eminent Joyce critics were published in 2018, each including several pieces on Joyce. Of four Joycean essays in Hans Walter Gabler’s Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays, two are new: ‘James Joyce Intrepreneur’ (pp. 65–79) and ‘Structures of Memory and Orientation: Steering a Course through Wandering Rocks’ (pp. 81–110). The first considers Joyce’s articulations of his Irishness in European cultures and politics, while the second argues that, in its construction, ‘Wandering Rocks’ is mapped on Jason and the Argonauts’ journey through the symplegades. David Pierce’s collection The Joyce Country: Literary Scholarship and Irish Culture, meanwhile, is a curious hybrid: the first half consists of six essays on Joyce and other Irish writers, while the second comprises over twenty reviews of Joycean criticism. This collection of Pierce’s work does not exactly cohere as having an identifiable or unifying approach, but nor does it need to: it is a useful record of responses to Joyce, an eminently usable and thus valuable work on reception from the 1980s onward. The reviews of Joyce criticism are grouped into six sections, on European cities, Yeats and Ireland, modernism, Ulysses, edited collections, and studies of correspondence and autobiography. Three issues of the James Joyce Quarterly were published in 2018. In ‘Conan Doyle, James Joyce, and the Completion of Ulysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 203–34), Thomas Jackson Rice tracks Joyce’s work on ‘Penelope’ in autumn 1921 as it relates to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s history The Great Boer War and Joyce’s development of Lieutenant Stanley Gardner. Brandon Walsh’s article, ‘The Joycean Record: Listening Patterns and Sound Coteries’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 235–50) discusses record-collecting and group consumption of audio together with the text and recordings of Ulysses, to identify the titular ‘sound coteries’ of listening and recording. In her article ‘Music, Intermediality, and Shock in Ulysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 251–68), Judith Paltin considers intermedial compositional practice in Ulysses not in terms of structure or attempts to map musical structure in the novel, but rather in terms of affect. In ‘Irish-Israelism: Reconsidering the Politics of Race and Belonging in “Cyclops”’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 269–85), Bryan Yazell proposes to challenge connections between the Citizen’s Irish nationalism and the discourse of Jewish nationalism in the early twentieth century. John Pedro Schwartz examines the Dublin Museum and Bloom’s museum-going in his article, ‘The Politics and Poetics of the Museum in Ulysses’ (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 287–306), addressing Victorian notions of education and modernist divisions between mass culture and high art, while Crispian Neill’s article on olfaction and the affective, ‘The Afflatus of Flatus: James Joyce and the Writing of Odor’, closes an issue of robust work on Ulysses (JJQ 53:iii–iv[2018] 307–26). Patrick Morris’s short article, ‘The Curse of a Title: bloominauschwitz (or, What’s Leopold Bloom Got To Do With It?)’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 7–12) draws the attention of Joyceans to the provocatively titled drama by Richard Fredman performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe during 2018 by the theatre company of which Morris is artistic co-director. In ‘Hunter Gatherers: On the Trail of the Dubliners “Ulysses” and Its Mysterious Hero’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 13–31), Marc A. Mamigonian sifts through the information we have on Joyce’s intention to write a short story titled ‘Ulysses’ featuring a character named ‘Mr Hunter’, in an attempt to establish what is and is not reliable fact. In yet more work on Beckett and Joyce, Ray Leonard positions Charles Stewart Parnell as Godot in his article ‘A Committee Room. A Table. Evening: Using Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Read Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 33–44), and, in ‘“Noticeably Longsighted from Green Youth”: Ocular Proof of James Joyce’s True Refractive Error’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 45–65), Jan van Velze adds to work on Joyce and the visual in a rereading the pandybat episode of Portrait in the light of new information regarding Joyce’s vision: that he was not myopic, but hyperopic. Katie Logan examines an under-explored intertext in ‘The Thousand and One Nights of Ulysses: Joyce’s Empathetic Intertextuality’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 67–85), proposing a relationship in Ulysses between the colonial history of Britain and Ireland and the imperial history of Persian and Arabic cultures. In ‘Mourning Becomes Dedalus: Ethics, Prosopopoeia, and Impossible Mourning in Ulysses’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 87–103), Christopher DeVault discusses Stephen’s mourning of his mother with Derrida’s The Work of Mourning. In ‘The “Cornish Tokens” of Finnegans Wake: A Journey through the Celtic Archipelago’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 105–18), Stephanie Boland reminds Joyceans of Cornwall’s position as a Celtic nation. Focusing on the Tristan and Iseult myth in the Wake, the importance of the Cornish region in that myth, and genetic evidence of the myth as inspiration for Joyce, Boland reveals multiple references to Cornwall (particularly in chapter II.4) and proposes that Joyce’s use of such references complicates the presentation of Celtic identity in the Wake. John Scholar engages with Heidegger and Barthes in his reading of ‘Ithaca’ as materialist, in his article ‘Joyce, Heidegger, and the Material World of Ulysses: “Ithaca” as Inventory’ (JJQ 54:i–ii[2018] 119–47). In her article ‘Forgotten Remembrances: The 6 January “Women’s Christmas” (Nollaig na mBan) and the 6 January 1839 “Night of the Big Wind” (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire) in “The Dead”’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 241–74), Mary Burke considers the feast of ‘The Dead’ in terms of two associations for its date: ‘Women’s Christmas’, a day on which women were excused from daily chores to eat together, and ‘Night of the Big Wind’, the meteorological event of 1839 seen by some as heralding the Great Famine. Michelle Rada’s close readings of the ‘narrative pull’ of ‘feminized sartorial detail’ in her article ‘Flirting with Function: Femininity and the Sartorial Detail from Freud to Joyce’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 275–302) effectively and stylishly analyses how, ‘With the detail of a sparkling splinter or frayed stitch, particular formal arrays and disarrays emerge, redirecting the text’s field of vision to its very own contradictory processes and dysfunctional meaning-making technologies’ (pp. 275–6). Where Rada looks to Theodor Adorno, Emily Apter, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Loos, Naomi Schor, and Georg Simmel, Frankie Thomas turns to Lacan in ‘Unspeakable “Circe”: Sexual Perversion and the Lacanian Detour in Ulysses’, discussing the critical (lack of) reception of the Bella/Bello scene (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 303–13). Sandra Tropp finds heresy in Joyce’s early essay, ‘The Study of Languages’, and Stephen’s essay for Mr Tate in Portrait, detailed in her article ‘Mathematics and Heresy in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 315–34), while in ‘Ulysses’s Martha Clifford: The Foreigner Hypothesis’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 335–52), Andrew G. Christensen bases his theory ‘that Martha is a foreigner in Dublin whose native language is not English’ on the ‘errors’ in her letter (p. 335). Paul Magee argues against common claims that Joyce’s last text must be read aloud: in ‘How Do We Read Finnegans Wake in Silence?’ (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 353–72) he ‘turns to the science of silent reading to show that the Wake’s variously alliterative, metrical, and homophonic properties are of the sorts that have been shown to elicit subvocalization in silent reading’ (p. 353). This issue of the JJQ ends with Olga Fernández Vicente’s interview with Xabier Olarra, the translator of Ulysses into the Basque language (JJQ 54:iii–iv[2018] 373–82). The 2017 issue of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (unavailable for review last year) opens with Frank McGuinness’s article, ‘Parnell and James Joyce’s Dubliners: Strategies of Failure’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 1–8), which focuses particularly on ‘A Painful Case’, rather than ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, in terms of a male ‘timidity’ that ‘has cursed the Irish heterosexual since the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell through his liaison with Mrs Katherine O’Shea’ (p. 2). Frank Callanan also examines Joyce and Parnell in his article, ‘The Origins of Joyce’s Parnellite Nationalism’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 86–102), which looks at the Christmas dinner scene in Portrait. Translator Akram Pedramnia discusses the difficulties of translating Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in her article, ‘“Pleasure or Pain, Is It?”: Translating Ulysses into Persian’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 9–21). These include the difficulties of censorship within Iran. In ‘“Who Is My Neighbour?”: Leopold Bloom and the Parable of the Good Samaritan’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 22–43), Richard Rankin Russell writes of Ulysses as a text that can generate care from its readers. Anne Marie D’Arcy’s ‘“haggiography in duotrigesumy”: Saints, Sages, and the Thirty-First International Eucharistic Congress, 21–6 June 1932’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 44–64) places the iconography of the Wake in the context of the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, 1932, and its final public mass in the Phoenix Park. In her article ‘James Joyce, Minimalist’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 65–85), Maria-Daniella Dick recasts Joyce as a minimalist writer. Analysing Joyce’s later texts and Ulyssean criticism by Declan Kiberd and Leo Bersani, Dick challenges readings of Joyce and Beckett as maximalist and minimalist respectively, seeking to instead place ‘their projects on a continuum rather than situating them as epochal exemplar’ (p. 82). In his entertaining article, ‘“And that’s another reason that I left Old Skibbereen”, or The Eye of the Eagles, the Thrill of the Fight’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 103–12), Sam Slote delves deep into the myth of the local newspaper the Skibbereen Eagle and its claim to have its eye on the tsar of Russia, referenced in ‘Aeolus’. Helen Saunders also follows up a detail here from ‘Nausicaa’: the Dublin poet and schoolteacher William Wilkins. Her short article, ‘William Wilkins and Ulysses: A Family Story’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 113–18), emphasizes the importance of archival research in work on Joyce. A note by Luca Crispi on ‘Paul, Lucie, and Alexis Léon’ (DJJJ 10[2017] 119–28) follows and concludes the essays of the 2018 issue. The 2018 issue of the Joyce Studies Annual opens with Hans Walter Gabler’s musings on the 1984 Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, looking back at the processes and difficult response to his work, and forward to the forthcoming digital edition. Though his article, ‘Seeing James Joyce’s Ulysses into the Digital Age: Forty Years of Steering an Edition through Turbulences of Scholarship and Reception’ (JoyceSA [2017] 3–36), is not where one might find an unbiased account of the ‘Joyce wars’, it does of course detail important slices of editorial history. Further retrospection colours Robert J. Seidman’s article, ‘A Lifelong Odyssey, Ulysses and Me: The Gifford and Seidman Annotation’ (JoyceSA [2017] 37–50), which follows. Julieann Veronica Ulin provides a detailed and affecting reading of stamp collection in ‘Philatelic Ulysses’ (JoyceSA [2017] 51–85); the novel is also discussed in Jeffrey Simons’s ‘Leopold Bloom on Death’ (JoyceSA [2017] 86–107) and Casey Lawrence’s ‘“The Link between Nations and Generations”: Cissy Caffrey as Racialized and Sexualized Other in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (JoyceSA [2017] 108–21). Lawrence’s careful discussion of Cissy as a figure who resists categorization and straddles boundaries reveals ‘the disruptive potential she gains by being the racial and sexual Other’ (p. 108). Three articles on Finnegans Wake take a comparative approach. After Gabriel Renggli’s consideration of ethical usefulness in ‘Building Metonymic Meaning with Joyce, Deleuze, and Guattari’ (JoyceSA [2017] 122–46), Michelle McSwiggan Kelly reads the Wake in Paterson. Her article, ‘“One Man Like a City”’: Masculinity and History in Finnegans Wake and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson’ (JoyceSA [2017] 147–60), finds different approaches to history in each text. Katie Mishler’s examination of Sheridan Le Fanu as precursor to Joyce in ‘“A phantom city, phaked of philim pholk”: Spectral Topographies and Re-awakenings in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard’ (JoyceSA [2017] 161–94) unpicks the presence of The House by the Churchyard in the Wake, reading, with Derrida, ‘a haunted narrative’ (p. 162). Revealing multiple connections between the Wake’s geography and Le Fanu’s Churchyard, Mishler refutes critical readings which have downplayed the importance of Le Fanu’s novel in Joyce’s text. Through a complex argument in ‘Spies in Joyce’s “The Sisters”: Allegorical Histories, the Irish Rebellion, and The Count of Monte Cristo’ (JoyceSA [2017] 195–233), Bonnie Roos identifies a ‘critique of Ireland’s misleading historiography’ in ‘The Sisters’, and furthermore suggests that ‘Joyce scaffolds Dubliners with the critical imperative for his readers to learn their history’ (p. 196). The issue closes with a short note also on Dubliners, Richard R. Gerber’s ‘The Horses of “Araby”’ (JoyceSA [2017] 245–9). It furthermore includes Peter O’Brien’s illustrations of Finnegans Wake and his own short commentary ‘Drawing on Finnegans Wake: “the one the pictor of the other”’ (JoyceSA [2017] 237–42). The 2018 issue of Genetic Joyce Studies opens with Dirk Van Hulle’s editorial (GJS 18[2018] 1–3), looking forward to the twenty-sixth International James Joyce Symposium held in Antwerp in June 2018. The symposium theme of ‘The Art of James Joyce’ encouraged a focus on genetic approaches to Joyce, and on the work of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp—which publishes Genetic Joyce Studies. This issue comprises six articles. Ronan Crowley’s ‘Earmarking “Oxen of the Sun”: On the Dates of the Copybook Drafts’ (GJS 18[2018] 20pp.) argues for a shorter timeframe than previously understood for Joyce’s drafting of ‘Oxen’. His article is followed by two from Viviana Mirela Braslasu and Robbert-Jan Henkes: ‘Irish Literary and Musical Studies in Notebooks VI.B.2 and VI.B.11’ (GJS 18[2018] 47 pp.) and ‘Order/Disorder in Finnegans Wake Notebooks VI.B.2 Nativities and VI.B.11 Assistance’ (GJS 18[2018] 15 pp.). Braslasu contributes two further articles, with Ian MacArthur, on Notebook VI.B.45: ‘Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington in VI.B.45’ (GJS 18[2018] 7 pp.) and ‘The Vikings in Notebook VI.B.45’ (GJS 18[2018] 11 pp.). MacArthur and Geert Lernout’s article on ‘Joyce’s use of “Digger Dialects”’ (GJS 18[2018] 18 pp.) in the late stages of composition of Finnegans Wake’ closes the 2018 issue, with an analysis of Joyce’s use of Australian soldier slang words. Beyond these Joyce-specific journals, several further articles discussed Joyce’s texts. In her article, ‘“The Hand That Rules … ”: Palmistry and Reading the Hand in the “Circe” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 295–306), Julia Yates discusses the pseudo-scientific practice of cheiromancy, or palmistry, as it relates to gendered power in ‘Circe’. Matthew Schultz’s article, ‘Molly Bloom’s Nostalgic Reverie: A Phenomenology of Modernist Longing’ (ISR 26:iv[2018] 427–87), on Homer’s Penelope, modernist nostalgia and (post)colonialism, was one of three to appear in the Irish Studies Review, along with Tony Murray’s ‘Joyce, Dubliners and Diaspora’ (ISR 26:i[2018] 98–110). Murray's contribution focuses on ‘Eveline’ and ‘A Little Cloud’ and characters who choose to stay in Ireland rather than leave. Ellen McWilliams’s article, ‘Maeve Brennan and James Joyce’ (ISR 26:i[2018] 111–23), discusses Brennan’s essays in the New Yorker and her negotiation of the influence of Joyce. In ‘James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual Liberators of Language’ (GR 93:i[2018] 39–47), Maria Kager analyses the work of Joyce and Mauthner in terms of the multilingual environments in which both authors were raised. Two articles on Joyce appeared in Essays in Criticism: John Gordon’s ‘Leopold Bloom Behaving Badly’ (EiC 68:iv[2018] 428–40) and Hunter Dukes’s ‘Heaney, Joyce: Namings and Nation’ (EiC 68:ii[2018] 234–58). A further pair of articles was published by the Journal of Modern Literature, providing illuminating comparative readings of Joyce and, respectively, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jorge Luis Borges: Tess McNulty’s ‘Joyce Adapting Shelley: The Social Function of Lyric Form’ (JML 41:ii[2018] 23–41), and Gabriel Renggli’s ‘Specters of Totality: Reading and Uncertainty in Joyce’s Ulysses and Borges’s Fictions’ (JML 41:ii[2018] 42–59). Elsewhere, Teresa Prudente’s article, ‘Livid Time: Time, Tenses, and Temporal Deixis in Ulysses’ (JNT 48:i[2018] 1–28), analyses the ‘potential alternatives’ or ‘disnarrated’ in Ulysses, and how that relates to the Wake (p. 1). Concluding 2018’s work on Joyce, Michael Gleason and Anne C. Macmaster consider ‘Nausicaa’ and Portrait in ‘From Bird Girls to Bat Souls: Joycean Transformations of a Homeric Trope’ (Mosaic 51:ii[2018] 189–204). (d) D.H. Lawrence Not only is D.H. Lawrence in Context a highlight of 2018 D.H. Lawrence research, but it is one of those rare books that’s really essential for Lawrentians. Most of the biggest names in contemporary Lawrence scholarship contributed to Andrew Harrison’s edited collection, which was published by Cambridge University Press. The book is something like a broadly conceived Cambridge Companion, with much shorter chapters of around ten pages. In fact, Harrison packs thirty-three chapters into roughly 350 pages. The inspiration for D.H. Lawrence in Context has its roots in another large Cambridge University Press project: the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s work, which began in 1979 with the first volume of Lawrence’s letters, which was edited by James T. Boulton, and culminated more than forty books later in 2018 with volume 3 of Lawrence’s Poems, which was edited by Christopher Pollnitz. ‘The Cambridge Edition’, Harrison writes, ‘has greatly extended and added detail to our understanding of Lawrence’s life, thought, and writing practices; D.H. Lawrence in Context draws closely on it to present a new, clearer, and nuanced image of the author’ (pp. xv–xvi). As with the Companions, Harrison’s volume is suitable for both novices and sages. It offers a good starting point to familiarize oneself with Lawrence but also to expand understanding of the great range of scholarship and theoretical approaches to the author. In ‘Travel Writing and Writing about Place’, Neil Roberts briefly examines the majority of Lawrence’s travel writings, including his nonfictional travel books and his novels and short stories. Roberts states that Lawrence first turned to travel writing for a very practical reason: to provide much-needed income (p. 142). While ‘writing the final draft of Sons and Lovers’, Lawrence composed his first travel book, Twilight in Italy [1916], based upon his experiences living on Lake Garda in northern Italy (p. 142). Roberts notes that Twilight in Italy was the only travel book Lawrence penned that was not planned before his journey. Referring to Sea and Sardinia, ‘The observation of (often disadvantaged) foreigners, which is one of the most important characteristics of travel writing, constantly runs the risk of simply replaying the voyeuristic and objectifying “gaze”. Lawrence counters this by being acutely aware of how he appears to the other’ (p. 145). At the height of his travels, Roberts writes, Lawrence was eventually driven to leave both England and Europe because, in his view, people were ‘succumbing to mechanistic materialism’ (p. 141). In ‘Religion’, Luke Ferretter details Lawrence’s upbringing in the Congregational Church and his evolving thoughts on Christianity throughout his career. At college, Lawrence expressed religious scepticism in correspondence with his pastor back in Eastwood, Robert Reid (p. 184). Lawrence’s ‘objections to Christianity’, Ferretter writes, ‘were more a matter of his emotional life than a result of his reading in modern science’ (p. 184). In 1913, the same year Sons and Lovers was published, Lawrence articulated a ‘belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect’ (p. 184). Ferretter explains Lawrence’s view ‘that it is in physically being, being alive to oneself, to another, and to the universe, that a person truly lives, and not in any kind of socially acceptable relationship which can be articulated in ordinary words and thoughts’ (p. 184). Ferretter traces representations of religion in some of his major novels, including The Rainbow, The Escaped Cock, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. Ferretter also discusses several of Lawrence’s essays. After referring to The Last Poems Notebook, Ferretter concludes that ‘Lawrence had in reality been a religious writer from the beginning to the end of his work. He believes that the universe is living, and that in its living mystery lives and absolutely unknown God’ (p. 191). Despite Lawrence’s resistance to being labelled, Holly Laird’s ‘Modernisms’ argues that ‘Lawrence must count retrospectively among modernism’s most eminent makers’ (p. 91). Laird provides a useful list of major modernist groups and Lawrence’s relationship to them. ‘Modernism is itself a network of contexts, comprised of aesthetic and philosophic precursors, little magazines and their editors, the cosmopolitan city, “movement” alliances, world war, the other arts, and contemporary politics’, Laird says. ‘All of these informed Lawrence’s modernism’ (p. 91). Laird traces Lawrence’s development as a writer from his earliest works resembling their Victorian influences to later developing his own distinctive styles over the genres he mastered, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and painting. Towards the end of his life, Laird writes, ‘Lawrence become engrossed with male power struggles, ceremonial sacrifice, and civilizational end-games. Yet Lawrence remained an outsider, and unlike those other modernists he never joined a church, a faction, or a propaganda unit. Instead he became increasingly critical of those options’ (p. 99). Christopher Pollnitz writes about Lawrence’s ‘Verse Forms’, noting that in ‘Verse Free and Unfree’, his introduction to New Poems [1919], Lawrence philosophically laid the groundwork for the ideal form, which he had not yet mastered (p. 121). Pollnitz meticulously chronicles Lawrence’s experiments as a poet from his early poems in 1909 to his death in 1930. 1909 ‘was a year’, Pollnitz writes, ‘in which he also experimented with triolets and a rondeau redouble, intricate stanzaic forms at the opposite end of the formal spectrum to Whitman’s free verse. In his experiments Lawrence would allow some variant or mistake, as if to authenticate the poem as more than a technical étude’ (p. 123). By Pansies [1929], Lawrence had developed a new style, which is perfectly illustrated in the uncollected ‘Middle-Class Children’, which was in the Pansies notebook and appears in the third volume of the newly released Cambridge Edition of Poems, which Pollnitz edited. Pollnitz writes that this ‘new style was based on English speech rhythms and idioms, and line-to-line shifts in tone’ (p. 126). In a chapter that deals with Lawrence’s legacy, David Ellis’s ‘F.R. Leavis’ (pp. 285–93) notes that Leavis was ‘the critic who played the most significant role in establishing Lawrence as the major English prose writer of the early twentieth century’ (p. 285). The period of Leavis’s work began the same year Lawrence died, 1930, and continued to the mid-1970s. In his 1930 essay, while complimentary, Leavis describes such books as Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love as difficult, but characterizes The Lost Girl as Lawrence’s best novel (p. 287). He is also laudatory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in that essay. Yet in his 1955 book D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, Leavis classifies Lady Chatterley’s Lover as ‘a bad novel’ (p. 291). Ellis writes that ‘One way in which Mellors is able to convey his dislike of the upper classes is by dropping in and out of dialect. Leavis finds this “hateful”, as he does the role dialect plays in the use of the four-letter words and the talks Mellors has with Connie about sex’ (p. 291). Harrison’s collection includes numerous other short essays, including ‘Biographies’ by Michael Squires; ‘The Letters’ by Keith Cushman; ‘The Life in the Writing’ by John Worthen; ‘Book Publishers’ by Joyce Wexler; ‘Journals, Magazines, Newspapers’ by Annalise Grice; ‘Private Publications’ by Harrison; ‘Lawrence and His Contemporaries’ by Suzanne Hobson; ‘Literary Realism’ by Susan Reid; ‘The Short Story’ by Dominic Head; ‘Novellas’ by Bethan Jones; ‘Theatre’ by James Moran; ‘Philosophy’ by Michael Bell; ‘Paintings’ by Jack Stewart; ‘Class’ by Ronald Granofsky; ‘Edwardian Feminisms and Suffragism’ by Elizabeth Fox; ‘Sex, Sexuality, Sexology’ by Howard Booth; ‘The Great War’ by Helen Wussow; ‘Psychoanalysis’ by John Turner; ‘Science and Technology’ by Jeff Wallace; ‘Race and Cultural Difference’ by Judith Ruderman; ‘Ecology’ by Carrie Rohman; ‘Censorship’ by Nancy Paxton; ‘Lawrence and Female Authors/Memorialists’ by Carol Siegel; ‘Feminism’ by Marianna Torgovnick; ‘The Cambridge Edition’ by Paul Eggert; ‘Lawrence and Theory’ by Garry Watson; ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Later Writers’ by Lee Jenkins; and ‘Film Adaptations’ by Louis Greiff. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lawrentian scholarship in 2018 was the appearance of two books making connections between Lawrence, Einstein, and the theory of relativity. D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity is based on Kumiko Hoshi’s dissertation at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, which she completed in 2009. For much of the 1920s, Hoshi writes, Lawrence engaged directly with Einstein and his theory, including such works as Fantasia of the Unconscious, Kangaroo, and Pansies. Hoshi, however, points to a 1921 letter that Lawrence wrote to S.S. Koteliansky, showing Lawrence to be both impressed with and critical of Einstein’s theory, at least on a ‘“metaphysical” level’ (p. 1). Reacting to Lawrence’s musings in Fantasia of the Unconscious, Hoshi writes that ‘Lawrence thinks it natural that men … should “live and see” according to a “metaphysic,” which is “unfolded” into “life and art,” although they are “quite unconscious” of this process of their own thinking. It turns out that the “metaphysic” that “governed” Lawrence’s thinking just before his encounter with Einstein’s theory was the “metaphysic” of relativity’ (p. 4). In fact, Hoshi says, this pre-Einsteinian conception of relativity is represented throughout Lawrence’s works. Hoshi also states that relativity was a concept many Victorian scientists grappled with, including Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer (p. 6). Their conception of the term, of course, was different from that of Einstein. Defining the term, Hoshi writes, ‘Firstly, “relativity” is primarily based on the idea of a mutual relationship between the observer and the observed object. Secondly, “relativity” is the state of being judged when the observer looks at the object. Thirdly, both the observer and the object are moving relative to each other’ (p. 6). Among the works that impacted Lawrence were Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, and Spencer’s First Principles. With Darwin and Huxley, Hoshi writes, Lawrence came to see the ‘vision of an interconnected natural world’ (p. 7). However, with Spencer, Lawrence was exposed to a concept of ‘relative motion’ in which objects move in relation to each other (p. 7). When those objects are ‘“counter-balanced by opposed motions’”, a state of equilibrium is realized (p. 7). This concept of equilibrium was adapted by Lawrence in terms of an ideal in relationships between men and women, Hoshi writes. D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity is split up into five chapters. These include ‘Women in Love: Representing Relativity through Light and Darkness’; ‘The Lost Girl: Representing the Relative Self’; ‘Aaron’s Rod: Representing Relativity through Motion’; ‘The Fox: Representing Relative Sexuality in the Two Versions’; and ‘After the Encounter with Einstein: Kangaroo and Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife’. Hoshi writes that ‘Women in Love [1920] is D.H. Lawrence’s first attempt to present his own concept of relativity before his encounter with Einstein’s theory’ (p. 21). In the chapter, she discusses the novel in relationship to the ideas of Ernst Haeckel and the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. The approach, however, is heavily influenced by Rembrandt. Hoshi writes, ‘For Lawrence, the universe came to have significance only in relation to humans. In order to present “human relativity” in Women in Love, it seems that Lawrence employed the chiaroscuro technique of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’ (pp. 25–6). The technique concerns a balance between light and dark. ‘As in Rembrandt’s pictures’, Hoshi writes, ‘the overwhelming darkness of the novel functions as a contrastive device to emphasise the brightness of light’ (p. 26). The other book covering similar ground as Hoshi’s is Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. This, too, was the result of a dissertation, this one at the University of Oxford. The book is split into three parts: the first two chapters are dedicated to Virginia Woolf, the second two to Lawrence, and two final chapters offer a broader discussion of Woolf and Lawrence in relation to other modernist authors and Einstein. Crossland writes, ‘Unlike other studies of modernist literature in relation to Einstein … Modernist Physics seeks to combine an approach which is not limited to a focus on 1919 and the years follow it with one which will enable a detailed analysis of the similarities between ideas which were appearing in literature and science … in the early years of the twentieth century’ (pp. 3–4). Too much emphasis, Crossland says, has been put on the year 1919, when Einstein’s ideas become more universally accepted; 1905, she argues, is really the date when Einstein’s major thoughts on relativity began to appear. In the book’s third chapter, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s “Theory of Human Relativity”’, Crossland uses Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious to set the groundwork for the critique of his writings. For Lawrence, Crossland says, Einstein ‘had set the universe free’ (p. 73). Yet Lawrence still needed something more. After quoting a section of Fantasia of the Unconscious in which Lawrence discusses the need for ‘a theory of human relativity’, Crossland writes that this idea ‘resonates throughout Lawrence’s works, including those that pre-date Fantasia, as Lawrence struggles to express and resolve the difficulties of contemporary human relationships’ (p. 74). She provides examples from The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, Trespasser, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Like Hoshi, Crossland highlights the importance of equilibrium in Women in Love. The relationship between Birkin and Ursula represents that balance, Crossland writes, but Lawrence provides another example of a relationship in the text: ‘the destructive, and ultimately fatal, relationship between Gerald and Gudrun provides an extreme contrast with the equilibrium which Birkin and Ursula move towards’ (p. 97). Crossland’s next chapter is ‘D.H. Lawrence and “Living Relativity”’, which includes a discussion of how Einstein’s ideas may have influenced Lawrence. He was influenced on relativity, Crossland believes, by William James’s Pragmatism as much as Einstein’s works (p. 109). ‘James’s focus in Pragmatism’, she writes, ‘is on the relative nature of human views of actual reality’ (p. 110). There is also a long section on Lawrence’s Kangaroo [1923], where, aside from Fantasia, ‘Lawrence’s most prolonged, and perhaps most confusing explorations of the nature of relatives and absolutes appear’ (p. 102). Crossland also discusses relationships in Aaron’s Rod and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Einstein’s theories, she claims, ‘suggested to Lawrence the pressing necessity for a theory of human relativity to match them, a theory which would encourage us to develop our own absolute individuality, as well as to learn how to be “together and apart at the same time”, like Lilly and Tanny; together with each other, like Connie and Mellors’ (p. 125). The year also included two issues of journals dedicated to Lawrence. Although it has a publication date of 2017, volume 42 of the D.H. Lawrence Review (a double issue) did not appear in the United States until 2018. Alex Wermer-Colan’s ‘The Accursed Share: Primitivism, Misogyny, and Decadent Sacrifice in D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and “The Woman Who Rode Away”’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 165–87), has many useful insights, but makes several comments without attribution or context. For instance, in the introductory paragraph, Wermer-Colan suggests that The Plumed Serpent [1926] ‘may have ensured Lawrence’s posthumous canonization by such esteemed New Critics as F.R. Leavis’ (p. 165), which suggests Leavis approved of the novel. But Leavis was outright dismissive of it in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist [1956], describing it as ‘a bad book’ and ‘a regrettable performance’, which can hardly be considered a push towards canonization. Wermer-Colan also writes, ‘His early affinity for the eugenics movement, evident in his fantasies of mass extermination during World War I, transmutes during the interwar years into a mournful acceptance of the inevitable vanishing of indigenous peoples’ (p. 168). Elsewhere, Wermer-Colan identifies The Plumed Serpent as ‘central to Lawrence’s reputation as a racist and a fascist sympathizer’ (p. 168). These broad, sweeping comments distract from the otherwise excellent insights offered into ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’. Wermer-Colan points out that the main character expects a certain treatment from the native populations because, like the tribe, she identifies, as a woman, as part of a repressed group, yet to the tribe she is still white and a member of the oppressor class (pp. 177–8). Other articles in the issue include Nick Bennett’s ‘Apocalyptic Ambiguities: D.H. Lawrence, Mythology, and the Meaning of the Great War’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 6–28); David Game’s ‘D.H. Lawrence and Zane Grey: The Idea of North-West Western Australia (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 29–51); Tara Hembrough’s ‘Forging a Shared Heroic Identity: Jack Fergusson’s and Mabel Pervin’s Quest in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 52–71); Tom Ribitzky’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: D.H. Lawrence’s Tristan Legend for the Twentieth Century’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 72–100); Joseph Shafer’s ‘The Haunted Literalization of D.H. Lawrence: “The Daimon, Demon, and Ghost”’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 101–23); Deborah Spillman’s ‘Miming Made Modern: D.H. Lawrence, Jane Harrison, and the Novel’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 124–46); and Theresa Mae Thompson’s ‘The Mystic Text: Living Space in D.H. Lawrence’s Sketches of Etruscan Places’ (DHLR 42:i–ii[2017] 147–64). While the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s works was supposedly completed with the third volume of Poems in 2018, new material and a new edition of Lawrence’s work continues to appear in the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies. This includes ‘Further Letters of D.H. Lawrence’ by John Worthen and Andrew Harrison (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 7–10) and ‘A New Edition of D.H. Lawrence’s “[Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)]”’ by Hiroshi Muto (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 11–58). In her introduction to the volume, the journal’s editor, Sue Reid, calls Muto’s edition ‘a new, more accurate version of Lawrence’s “[Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)]” … which should replace the Cambridge Edition in Late Essays and Articles as the authoritative text’ (p. 5). In ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Georgic’ (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 105–24), Nanette Norris discusses Lawrence’s relationship with the georgic and the Georgian Renaissance in the twentieth century. Norris writes that ‘Lawrence wrote in the georgic mode in both poetry and prose … and employed it in order to render an otherwise inarticulate space—the lived experience of the discordance between an imagined ideal and an historically-bound reality’ (p. 105). Other articles include ‘D.H. Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It’s Ridiculous!’ by Judith Ruderman (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 59–82); ‘Shifting the Axis: Regional Modernism in Kangaroo—A Foreground to Australian Literary Modernism’ by David Game (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 83–104); ‘The “Moony” Chapter of Women in Love Revisited’ by Terry Gifford (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 125–42); ‘Lawrence, Dostoevsky and the Last Temptation by Christ’ by Catherine Brown (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 143–62); ‘The Flute in Aaron’s Rod’ by Ian Thomson (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 163–78); ‘Lawrence in the Limonaia [Lemon Garden]’ by Colm Kerrigan (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 179–96); and ‘Literary Cure: D.H. Lawrence in Post-Fascist Italy’ by Fredrik Tydal (JDHLS 5:i[2018] 197–208). (e) Virginia Woolf This year saw the publication of a number of innovative works of scholarship that promise to advance the field. Cambridge University Press published landmark new editions of Night and Day [1919], edited by Michael Whitworth, and Orlando: A Biography [1928], edited by Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth. The introduction to Orlando meticulously recounts the composition history of the novel, tracking the spoor of Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West not just through Orlando but across Woolf’s contemporaneous letters, diary entries, and essays, as well as in Sackville-West’s novels and other writing, before moving to discuss the ‘fairly substantial’ (p. lii) changes that Woolf made when redrafting Orlando. A separate section of the introduction exhaustively details the novel’s publication history, although it is unclear given Woolf’s working methods where composition history ends and publication history begins: Blyth and Raitt’s observations about corrections and edits that Woolf made to page proofs undercut this neat binary. Night and Day was the final novel that Woolf published under Gerald Duckworth’s imprint and has very few surviving sources. Given the paucity of source material, Michael Whitworth would have been forgiven for providing a less detailed composition history than Blyth and Raitt do for Orlando. However, Whitworth does an admirable job of reconstructing the chronology of Night and Day’s composition from sparse documentary evidence, including letters of Woolf’s that reference writing, the few extant sources for the novel, and contemporaneous essays by Woolf which constitute ‘points of contact’ (p. xxxix) for the novel. A separate section on publication history details the process by which Duckworth published the novel. A section on ‘Editing Night and Day’ laments the ‘thin and intermittent trail of evidence’ (p. lxxx) which the novel leaves in its wake, which ‘make[s] for a simpler collation, but make[s] decisions about textual cruxes harder to reach with any certainty’ (p. lxxxi). This section largely details the documents and states of the text which Whitworth used to make this edition, while a section on ‘Annotating Night and Day’ offers a brief discussion of annotation as a ‘kind of historical anthropology’ (p. xci). As well as constituting major works of scholarship in their own right, these new editions will serve as the touchstone for much more future scholarship. A cluster of biographical and historical works offered productive readings of Woolf’s own life and her presentation of other lives. Barbara Lounsberry’s The War Without, the War Within is the final work in a trilogy which carefully documents Woolf’s diary-writing, as well as her reading of other writers’ diaries. Lounsberry’s monograph examines twelve diary books written by Woolf between 1929 and her death in 1941. Lounsberry reads her novels and diaries of this period as part of ‘one huge, multiform, battle against the advancing war’ (p. 3) and organizes Woolf’s diaries chronologically, providing narrative accounts and close readings of her source material, tracing the flight of Woolf’s mind outwards and her rising alarm at the growth of European fascism and the start of the war. These accounts are imbricated with accounts of the diaries that Woolf read while writing her own: we learn, for instance, that while writing her June 1929 to September 1930 diary, Woolf read Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, finding a ‘kindred soul’ in her (p. 17), or that, in 1937, Woolf read the diaries of Leo and the Countess Tolstoy. One cannot fault Lounsberry’s ambition, neither in this volume nor in her project at large, but the structure of this volume makes it an ungainly read: it feels more like a collection of vignettes or miniatures than the narrative that the work’s form implies. Readers wishing to delve into it as a reference work, however, might not find this is to its detriment. Lounsberry provides an invaluable and meticulous portrait of Woolf at the end of her life, and an analysis of her final diary entry, ‘L. is doing the rhododendrons..’ (p. 323) proves a haunting and lyrical terminus ad quem for such an ambitious and exhaustive project. Rosalind Brackenbury’s brief but breezy Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship avoids the easy answer to the question implied by its subtitle, How Virginia Stephen Became Virginia Woolf (that she took Leonard’s name) in order to explore the young Virginia Stephen’s intellectual development in Leslie Stephen’s household. There is not much here that significantly expands on the standard works of biography by Bell, Lee, and Briggs, but Brackenbury nonetheless provides a stylish and readable distillation of Woolf’s literary prehistory. Claire Battershill’s Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press offers a valuable attempt to read the Hogarth Press’s output of biography and autobiography, drawing extensively on the press’s archives. The first chapter offers a quantitative (and to a lesser extent qualitative) overview of the life-writing published by the press from its inception to its sale in 1946. The following chapters use the press’s publications as case studies to theorize life-writing more broadly, examining books on Tolstoy, different marketing strategies for Woolf’s own biographical works, the Hogarth Press Biography series, and ‘autobiografictions’ (p. 148) by Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood. The Hogarth Press was the subject of Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, edited by Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill the proceedings of a conference celebrating the centenary of the Hogarth Press in 2017. ‘Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf’s Inks’, the keynote address delivered by Edward Bishop, attended to the writing technologies with which Woolf would have been familiar as a writer and publisher, and included a demonstration wherein the audience made their own oak-gall ink. The thirty-seven papers in the collection are divided up into eleven groups. The section titled ‘Craftsmanship’ attends to the valences of craft throughout Woolf’s work and life. The section titled ‘The Hogarth Press’ contains four papers which discuss, variously, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem [1919], figurations of community and group consciousness in The Waves and Leonard Woolf’s After the Deluge, and the press’s World-Makers and World-Shakers series. Papers by Tom Breckin and Anne Reus ask how libraries are coded in Woolf’s writing. In the next section, ‘The Art of the Book’, Claudia Tobin and Maggie Humm investigate the influence of French Impressionist painters and theorists on Woolf, Roger Fry, and Vanessa Bell. Adam Hammond’s essay in ‘The Art of Narrative’ is one of the high points of the collection. He reads Woolf’s ‘Ode to Cutbush’ in light of the recent post-critical turn. Woolf’s poem is an example of a ‘complex system’, he suggests, and its poetics are not just ‘a way of writing but a way of reading and seeing’ the ‘wealth’ of another’s life (p. 147). In the same section, Elisa Kay Sparks tracks cows through ‘An Unwritten Novel’ to read the story as a burlesque on Aristotelian theories of narrative. The next section, ‘Making New Books: Creative Approaches’, contains poems by Jane Goldman, Colin Herd, and Calum Gardner. Two papers in the section, titled ‘The Book in the World: Woolf’s Global Reception’, trace Woolfian resonances in seemingly unlikely places: Adriana Varga reads her reception in Ceauşescu’s Romania, while Maria Oliveria discusses Brazil’s Woolf, asking how a trans-Atlantic, but not necessarily Anglo-American, Woolf is figured. Meanwhile, Riley Wilson’s essay traces the roots of the Riot Grrrl movement from the aesthetics of modernist women’s writing. A section on ‘Editing and Teaching Woolf’ contains dispatches from the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, as well as a roundtable on ‘Editing Woolf’. A section titled ‘Intertextuality’ reads Woolf alongside authors including Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Lady Murasaki, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, while the final section, ‘Lives in Writing’, contains an essay on Woolf and the Well of Loneliness trial, and a paper by Julie Vandivere which reads Woolf’s change in human character (on or about December 1910) alongside a sudden rise in anti-abortion rhetoric in Britain. The final essay in the collection returns to reading the inky trails of the pen in Woolf’s works, and the collection comes full circle. Jane de Gay’s Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture turns to Woolf’s biography in order to make the case that Woolf’s ‘debates with Christianity form a more powerful undercurrent in her work than had been acknowledged’ and that Woolf had a ‘detailed knowledge and understanding of the faith’ (p. 2). De Gay’s first two chapters provide historical context, examining both Woolf’s Christian family background and her Christian contemporaries. In reading Woolf’s correspondence with contemporary writers, de Gay makes much of Woolf ‘refer[ring] to God as an entity’ and ‘capitalis[ing] his name’ (p. 66) in her correspondence: however, one can use a proper noun to refer to a character (say, Mrs Ramsay, or Frodo Baggins) without a concomitant belief in that character’s existence. De Gay then moves to investigate the figuration of the clergy in her third chapter, before discussing sacred spaces in chapters 4 and 5, focusing on Woolf’s 1906 description of the Hagia Sophia in the former chapter, and the figuration of the ‘Angel in the House’ in ‘Professions for Women’ (although, curiously, not in A Room of One’s Own) in the latter chapter. Chapter 6 traces images of the Madonna throughout Woolf, with particular reference to the opening and closing scenes of To the Lighthouse, while the final chapter, ‘How Should One Read the Bible?’ posits Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves as Woolf’s ‘Passion Trilogy’. This is not unproblematic, given the Christ analogue de Gay identifies in Mrs Dalloway, Septimus, is gravely ill, and de Gay’s reading of Percival as ‘the story of Christ in a human figure’ (p. 212) seems to be premised on Percival’s early death, ignoring his ambivalent presence in the novel and his critical afterlives. De Gay’s thesis that Woolf had a detailed knowledge of Christianity which shows throughout her work is sound enough, but there is plenty here that stretches to affirm the consequent. Suzana Zink’s Virginia Woolf and the Spaces of Modernity provides an interesting excursion into Woolf’s figuration of space, and especially those spaces bound by walls. It is strongest where it focuses on Woolf’s under-theorized earlier work, with chapters on The Voyage Out and Night and Day providing new and theoretically rigorous readings of these novels. The first chapter figures the curiously English rooms in The Voyage Out’s Santa Marina as a ‘heterotopic’ space, a Foucauldian ‘counter-site’ (p. 66). Meanwhile the second chapter tracks the Hilbery household in Night and Day as a site of ‘ancestor worship’ (p. 91) and memorialization. Zink’s third chapter explores a somewhat neglected context of Jacob’s Room: the fight for women’s education at Cambridge. Zink’s historical work recovering this context will prove valuable to future scholars. ‘The Woman’s Room: A Room of One’s Own and Its Contemporary Readers’ analyses figurations of space in the letters sent to Woolf following the publication of her 1929 essay. Zink then skips ahead almost a decade to discuss The Years [1937]. This chapter is strongest when it discusses the ‘complex subterranean network’ of plumbing beneath the seemingly monadic Victorian houses (p. 171) with which the novel is populated. The final chapter discusses ‘A Sketch of the Past’ alongside Freud’s analogy of the mind in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ to provide a theoretically sophisticated framework for quite a simple idea, that Woolf’s memory is a memory of places. Zink’s monograph provides valuable insights into the valences of the room in Woolf, It is, however, hampered somewhat by its form since the way that each chapter covers a single work doesn’t allow for cross-currents to be developed more fully. Routledge reissued five works of classic Woolf criticism in 2018: Dorothy Brewster’s Virginia Woolf [1962], Thomas Jackson Rice’s Guide to Research [1984], Mary Anne Caws’s Women of Bloomsbury [1990], Daniel Ferrer’s Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language [1990] and Stella McNichol’s Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction [1990]. These are facsimiles of the original editions in modern binding, with no new material. Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays is a collection of essays by noted textual scholar Hans Walter Gabler. It includes three essays on editing Woolf. ‘A Tale of Two Texts’ (pp. 221–56) begins by discussing the differences between the UK and US editions of To the Lighthouse. Gabler collates variants between these two editions and reads them closely in order to theorize how these seemingly minute but hermeneutically freighted variations complicate readings of the novel. Gabler asks what an edition of To the Lighthouse that shows these variants might look like, proposing a number of solutions. The next essay, ‘Auto-Palimpsests: Virginia Woolf’s Late Drafting of Her Early Life’ (pp. 257–86), examines the ‘Sketch of the Past’ drafts, contending that reading these fragments helps us to understand how Woolf came to conceive of herself as a writing subject, an ‘autobiographical I’ (p. 258). The third and final essay on Woolf in this collection is the weakest: ‘From Memory to Fiction: An Essay in Genetic Criticism’ (pp. 287–300) tracks autobiographical impulses through the drafts of To the Lighthouse and explores how these impulses came to be imbricated in the novel’s form. In tracking a ‘double experience’ (p. 292) within To the Lighthouse that plots a course between autobiography and fiction, Gabler falls back on a curious argument which sees Woolf ‘writing from the body’ (p. 294). This couches Woolf’s novel and Gabler’s reading of it in a biological essentialism which makes for uncomfortable reading. Rebecca Colesworthy’s Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange contains a significant chapter on Woolf which offers a theoretically innovative and deftly argued thesis to the effect that ‘the question of the gift’ (p. 2), following Marcel Maus’s The Gift [1925], is central to the aesthetic project of a number of modernist women writers. The second chapter of the book, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Limits of Feminine Hospitality’ (pp. 63–105), argues that Woolf’s interwar thoughts on epistemology and ethics ‘resonate with Mauss’s call for a “new morality” under the banner of sociology’ (p. 63). Colesworthy argues that the novel itself becomes a ‘form of hospitality—one that works to make us more imaginative, more cooperative, and more hospitable’ (p. 64). The chapter ends with a discussion of Clarissa Dalloway’s differing reaction to Septimus’s death across variant texts of Mrs Dalloway which can productively be read alongside the work by Hans Walter Gabler discussed above. Another work which delves into textual analysis is Jonathan Foltz’s The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Foltz’s second chapter, ‘Out of Character: Virginia Woolf and the Lightness of the Novel’ (pp. 65–102), contains a sensitive and innovative discussion of the drafts of The Waves as a work which partakes in ‘the mind’s cinematographic dimension, consciousness’s “picture-making power”’ (p. 97). This discussion is premised on Foltz’s earlier invocation of two Woolf essays on the cinema, ‘Pictures’ [1925] and ‘The Cinema’ [1926], as media theory avant la lettre. Two chapters in Rachel Crossland’s monograph Modernist Physics are devoted to Woolf, and a further two discuss her in passing. These first two chapters trace the force-field of Einsteinian physics through Woolf, attending closely to the text of Einstein’s revolutionary 1905 papers rather than just tracing his cultural status. Crossland’s first chapter, ‘The Obligation to Choose: Dualistic Woolf’ (pp. 19–44), tracks the debate before 1926 over the status of light as wave or particle through Woolf’s earlier novels, reading these novels’ objects and selves as capable of becoming fluid and amorphous. The next chapter, ‘Orlando the Man and Orlando the Woman: Complementary Woolf’ (pp. 45–71), reads Niels Bohr’s 1927 principle of complementarity, necessary to conceive of light as at once a particle and a wave, alongside Orlando [1928]. This collocation gives rise to a ‘complementary model of the self’ (p. 48). Crossland carefully reads the play of masculine and feminine pronouns in the novel as pointing towards a transcendental ‘Orlando the Man and Orlando the Woman’ who ‘is ultimately more representative of the new quantum world than the radical, but unsustainable “their”’ (p. 51). The final two chapters of Modernist Physics discuss Brownian motion and crowd psychology, invoking Woolf’s crowd scenes, although they do not tarry with Woolf overly long. A lengthy chapter in Kathrin Tordasi’s Women by the Waterfront: Modernist (Re)visions of Gender, Self, and Littoral Space offers innovative spins on well-worn tropes of To the Lighthouse criticism. Tordasi’s chapter is most convincing when it focuses on the littoral, such as its sensitive reading of ‘those moments when the beach seems to infiltrate conventionally stable spaces such as the Ramsay’s summer house’ (p. 90), or its focus on a liminal moment where Mrs Ramsay is figured as ‘a core of darkness’ and her ‘mind takes on beach-like qualities and turns into a threshold’ (p. 111). Erin K. Johns Speese also focuses on To the Lighthouse in a chapter of her Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf (pp. 118–45). Speese attempts to read Slavoj Žižek’s ideological ‘sublime object’ in a number of modernist works including Woolf’s novel, but her account of To the Lighthouse in the chapter devoted to the novel seems more focused on traditional Romanticism-inflected accounts of the sublime than its Žižekian revival. The premise of Petar Penda’s Aesthetics and Ideology of D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf seems to imply that the reader is in store for a dose of Žižek, but this is not delivered. Instead, over the course of three poorly edited chapters, Penda reads Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando in support of the self-evident conclusion that the form of these three texts instantiates their ideologies. A chapter in Natasha Periyan’s monograph The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender discusses Woolf’s interaction with the Labour Party and its late 1930s programme for educational reform (pp. 153–84). Periyan reads The Years, Three Guineas, and ‘The Leaning Tower’ to examine the valences of Britain’s class-fissured education system. This covers similar territory to Periyan’s article, ‘“Altering the Structure of Society”: An Institutional Focus on Virginia Woolf and Working-Class Education in the 1930s’ (TPr 32:viii[2018] 1301–23). The eight critical essays in Christine Froula, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin’s edited collection Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf trace cross-currents between the two authors’ works and lives. The first essay, ‘Powers of Disgust’ by Maud Ellmann, tracks the valences of the disgusting and the disgusted throughout the two authors’ novels and correspondence, cataloguing those moments that make one say ‘Yuck’ (p. 14) with a lively glee. Maria DiBattista’s essay, ‘Together and Apart’, tracks the literary friendship between the two authors in light of Woolf’s theorizing of character in ‘Modern Fiction’ and her essay on Mansfield. Sydney Janet Caplan focuses on Conrad Aiken’s responses to Woolf and Mansfield. Christine Froula’s essay, ‘Katherine’s Secrets’, focuses less on the cross-currents between the two authors, and more on private correspondence by one author about the other, as well as on stories by Mansfield that were not published within her lifetime. Karina Jakubowicz’s ‘A Conversation Set to Flowers’ turns to the correspondence between the two authors which bloomed into Woolf’s short story Kew Gardens, problematizing the traditional reading of the story’s origins. Halyna Chumak’s ‘Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face’ asks why these two authors return to discussions of the face at the same time as Woolf deconstructed the notion of easily legible character. Cheryl Hindrich offers attentive close readings of flies in Woolf’s fiction, focusing on her story ‘The New Dress’ [1927], but her essay feels rushed because it tries to cover Woolf, Mansfield, and Lawrence. Brian Richardson’s essay, ‘Dangerous Reading’, offers a great many citations for other critics’ discussions of Woolf’s scenes of reading before asking why the ‘misogynistic fairy tale’ (p. 123) ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ makes its way into To the Lighthouse. Ali Smith’s lecture ‘Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat’ traces the comic, tragic, and tragicomic figurations of goats throughout Woolf’s work, riffing on the ‘But’ that opens A Room of One’s Own: after all, goats ‘butt’. Smith then goes on to discuss Woolf’s affinities with Mansfield before concluding that Mansfield ‘didn’t just get Woolf’s goat. She got the goat in Woolf, the graceful precipice-balancer’ (p. 153). The collection also contains drama, poetry, and a review essay by Claire Drewery. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley’s edited collection, Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence wins plaudits for being perhaps the most fun new scholarship published on Woolf in 2018. Sentencing Orlando reads the novel ‘on the level of the sentence’ (p. 2): each essay takes a single sentence from Orlando and uses it as the basis for discussion, often with innovative, deftly argued, and lively results. The collection’s emphasis is on play, pleasure, and jouissance, and the essays in this volume largely live up to that. A cluster of essays discuss the erotics of Orlando: the first of these is Jane Goldman’s ‘“The Queen Had Come”: Orgasm and Arrival’, which reads the four-word sentence ‘The Queen had come’ as an ‘orgasmic feminist Sapphic coup’ (p. 15), in light of other coded (and not-so-coded) expressions of lesbian sexual pleasure throughout literary history and in Woolf’s work. In the next essay, Anna Frøsig examines the moment when Orlando becomes a woman, invoking Merleau-Ponty to discuss ‘“chiasm” or intertwining of flesh and world’ (p. 35). Frøsig asks how Orlando’s changed body affects his/her existence as a subject in the world, gesturing towards an ‘erotic structure of perception’ (p. 39) based upon a body which comes to contain its own other. Amy Bromley’s essay uses Roland Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse to show how Orlando (and Orlando’s language) interpellates the lover as subject. Bromley contends that Orlando creates amorousness and is itself amorous. Another cluster of essays contend with Orlando’s writing and rewriting of history. Jane de Gay’s considered and sensitive contribution invokes Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray in discussing a sentence whose form forces its readers to scan back and forth. De Gay uses this sentence as the basis for a discussion of Woolf’s creative anachronism, which is given form in Orlando’s poem ‘The Oak Tree’. Angeliki Spiropoulou’s essay uses the novel’s figuration of ‘Glawr’ and Orlando’s own anonymity to consider the place of obscurity within the mock-biographical framework of Orlando, gesturing towards the novel as a ‘spoof Künstlerroman’ (p. 109). Bryony Randall’s ‘The Day of Orlando’ asks how Orlando interacts with, and complicates, the ‘very notion of history’ (p. 128) by reading Orlando as occurring on the single Present Day with which the novel ends and reaching backwards. Randall tracks historical echoes across this day’s prehistory to ask how Orlando complicates the ‘now-ness’ (p. 135) of the present day. Essays by Sanja Bahun, Suzanne Bellamy, and Benjamin Hagen all deal with Orlando’s intertexts. Bahun’s discusses her chosen sentence as an intertext with T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, offering a very close and sensitive reading of the two texts, and indexing this reading to Julia Kristeva’s figuration of intertextuality. Bahun’s essay asks how Orlando reads and rewrites the nascent modernist canon in a bid to escape the masculine-dominated literary past. Bellamy reads her chosen sentence as richly intertextual, not with other modernist works, but with Woolf’s own writing. She suggests that the form of her chosen sentence invites the reader to act as a co-creator of meaning alongside Woolf. Benjamin Hagen’s essay describes Woolf’s mode of reading as an ‘autocritical and reparative work of engaging with the living and the dead’ (p. 175). He reads Orlando’s baroque syntax alongside that of Sir Thomas Browne and alongside Woolf’s earlier writings on Browne. His essay contends that both Woolf’s and Browne’s sentences force readers to read slowly and deliberately, to doubt and question. Essays by Alice Stavely, Vasiliki Kolocotroni, and Judith Allen invoke figurations of writing. Stavely writes about the dual births of ‘The Oak Tree’ and Orlando’s child, rescuing metaphors of `birthing' from a discourse that is often uncomfortably essentialist, reading these literary births as an expression of freedom. Kolocotroni’s essay ‘Orlando, Greece, and the Impossible Landscape’ reads Orlando’s jaunt to Mount Athos in the wake of Woolf’s classicism, and asks how Orlando’s presence on the male-only holy mountain as both a woman and a pastoral poet allows Woolf to rewrite a landscape she would not have been able to visit on her own trips to Greece. Allen’s essay, ‘Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness’, largely recapitulates tropes from her monograph, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language [2010], invoking discussion there of ‘wildness’ and asking how the ‘wild’ language of Orlando collides with the rigid constraints of the Victorian period and its literature. Todd Avery’s essay for Sentencing Orlando can be productively read alongside Jane de Gay’s Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Avery connects Orlando not to literary modernism but to the works of Pericles Lewis and ‘theological Modernism’ (p. 169), reading the plethora of religious loci and artefacts in Orlando as ‘trac[ing] a spiritual quest of sorts, while commenting on spirituality’ (p. 163). Randi Koppen traces the reverberations of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism through Orlando. Steven Putzel’s essay works as a fitting summary for the whole collection: he reads a chaotic, jostling sentence after Roman Ingarden’s satzdenken, or the ‘flow of thinking the sentence’ (p. 140). Putzel posits that this mode of reading creates a community of ‘active’ readers of Woolf (p. 140). The collection finishes with Rachel Bowlby’s ‘Aftersentence’, a creative response to the essay collection as a whole. The annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture in 2018 was delivered by Stephen Barkaway: ‘This Sheet Is a Pane of Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters makes the case for taking Woolf seriously as a writer of letters. Her letters are, for Barkaway, the work of an ‘author practising her art unguarded, and for an audience of only one’ (p. 5). This year also saw the publication of a number of innovative journal articles dealing with Woolf. A number of essays, most notably by philosopher Jacques Rancière, seek to use Woolf to offer novel answers to the question ‘How should one read a book?’. Rancière’s essay ‘The Politics of Fiction’ (QP 27:ii[2018] 269–89) is a wide-ranging article which engages with Auerbach’s reading of To the Lighthouse to draw out a ‘poetics of the random moment’ (p. 278) which is ‘not only the random atom of a time of coexistence’ but also ‘the experience of the precarious balance between the “nothing” and the “something”’ (p. 278). Alexander Howard’s ‘Solid Objects and Modern Tonics’ (Angelaki 23:i[2018] 32–47) uses Woolf’s story, ‘Solid Objects’ to posit a ‘fresh and solid object of critical study: camp modernism’ (p. 45), which delights in self-consciousness, duality, and theatricality. These tropes may not be new to modernist studies, but Howard’s figuration ‘camp modernism’ is likely to prove valuable. Mark David Kaufman’s ‘True Lies’ (TCL 64:iii[2018] 317–46) provides a lengthy and unfocused, but genuinely fun excursion into the trope of spying throughout Woolf’s work, and, intriguingly, two spy novels that feature Woolf as a protagonist. Part of Modernism /Modernity’s special cluster on ‘weak theory’, Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde’s ‘Obliterature: Toward an Amateur Criticism’ (Mo/Mo 25:iii[2018] 517–49) argues that Woolf was fascinated by the divide between professional and amateur, tracing this distinction from ‘The Mark on the Wall’ through A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. They read Woolf alongside Kate Zambreno’s Heroines [2012] to theorize ‘obliterature’, an ‘amateur riposte to the modernist memory project’ which ‘holds itself open to the possibility that error and even failure … can be intellectually and aesthetically enabling’ (p. 520). This year’s Woolf Studies Annual was a special issue, with four essays paying tribute to the late Jane Marcus. The first essay, ‘Flirting with the HRC’ (WstA 24[2018] 5–10), is a newly uncovered essay by Marcus herself. It takes the form of a love letter of sorts and provides an interesting, if brief, account of her feminist archival research in the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas Austin. Matthew Cheney’s ‘The Reader Awakes: Pedagogical Form and Utopian Impulse in The Years’ (WstA 24[2018] 55–74) reads amongst Woolf, Marcus, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, tracing utopian impulses in the form of The Years. Cheney contends that The Years does not offer its readers a conventional utopian imaginary, but rather the form of the novel asks its readers to cultivate a ‘critical pedagogy’ teaching its readers to read and become ‘activists of the imagination’ (p. 61). Margaret Kotler’s essay, ‘After Anger’ (WstA 24[2018] 35–54), traces Marcus’s figurations of anger throughout Three Guineas and asks what might ‘come after anger’ (p. 35) for feminist critics, turning to contemporary affect theory. Paulina Pająk’s ‘“Echo Texts”: Woolf, Krzywicka, and The Well of Loneliness’ (WstA 24[2018] 11–34) follows Marcus’s work, showing that A Room of One’s Own responded to the censorship prevalent at the time. She does so by tracing the dual (and rather exciting) histories of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness first in Poland and then in England, including Woolf’s response to Hall’s novel and its censorship in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf Studies Annual prints four more essays. Robin Adair and Ann Martin’s ‘A Driving Bloomsbury’ (WstA 24[2018] 75–99) traces the valences of the motor car throughout Woolf’s work and social circle, providing an interesting and at times drily funny glimpse into the material culture of Bloomsbury. Brett Rutherford’s ‘Virginia Woolf’s Egyptomania’ (WstA 24[2018] 135–64) reads To the Lighthouse [1927] as partaking in the Egyptomania of the late 1920s: Rutherford reads Woolf’s novel as engaging directly with Egyptian mythology. He does so through onomastic gymnastics, which can feel a stretch too far. His discussion of ‘a matrilineal, feminist Egypt’ (p. 157) is tantalizingly brief. Darin Graber’s ‘H.M.S. Orlando’ (WstA 24[2018] 165–84) reads the ways in which people are written about as ships, and vice versa, throughout Woolf’s work to ‘posit, then, that Woolf creates the character of Orlando as a multiply-signifying vessel’ (p. 171). Siân White’s ‘The Dramatic Modern Novel’ (WstA 24[2018] 101–34) suggests that Woolf had reconceptualized the Aristotelian unities in Mrs Dalloway, creating a written space ‘that protects the autonomy of the reader’s imagination’ (p. 103). A double edition of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany also contains tributes to Jane Marcus, in the form of a section titled ‘Jane Marcus Feminist University’, a conference held to celebrate her life and works. The other half of the VWM is devoted to Woolf and biofiction, with perceptive essays by Bethany Layne and Michael Schrimper among others. A number of scholars published journal articles about style and craft this year. Adèle Cassigneul’s article ‘Betwixt and Between: Virginia Woolf and the Art of Craftsmanship’ (EBC 55[2018] 35 paras.) reads the deliberately amateurish labour of producing books for the Hogarth Press as a ‘primary original poetic gesture’ (para. 22), which created a ‘modernist bricolage’ (para. 24). Philip Arrington’s ‘A Most Copious Digression’ (CollL 45:iii[2018] 543–66) reads Jacob’s Room alongside Erasmus’s De Copia, attempting to show that Erasmus’s method of reading and analysing the ‘Protean’ flows of language described in De Copia is a productive way of figuring language. Arrington’s reading of Woolf is microscopically detailed and exhaustive, but some of Erasmus’s tropes do not seem particularly innovative now. Daniel Hartley’s ‘Style in the Novel: Toward a Critical Poetics’ (PoT 39:i[2018] 159–81) offers innovative close readings of To the Lighthouse as the exemplum for a ‘narratological and relational’ definition of style (p. 161), reading it alongside Raymond Williams in order to figure ‘style as a linguistic mode of social relation immanent to the more general relations of a given social formation’ (p. 162). Fang Li and David Kellogg read Woolf’s critique of Middlemarch alongside Eliot’s novel in their article, ‘Mountains in Labor: Eliot’s “Atrocities” and Woolf’s Alternatives’ (L&L 27:iv[2018] 258–70), deploying a complex systemic-functional linguistic analysis whose jargon and diagrams are somewhat impenetrable to a reader not versed in such linguistics. All this is offered in support of a less than radical conclusion, that Woolf wrote differently to her Victorian forebears. A cluster of essays discuss Woolf’s response to war. Anne Fernald’s article, ‘Resisting a Culture of War: Rukeyser and Woolf’ (TPr 32:vii[2018] 1165–79), compares Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry to Three Guineas, on the basis that both texts critique ‘not only battles, but everything that contributes to war and violence and detracts from working for peace and justice’ (p. 1165). Fernald pays close attention to the form of these two texts and their respective historical contexts: Rukeyser was American, and her arguments instantiate a different history from Woolf’s. Marie Laniel’s ‘“A tear formed, a tear fell”: Virginia Woolf’s Elegiac Landscapes’ (EBC 55[2018] 26 paras.) traces the footfalls of three classical elegies in Woolf’s work in the aftermath of the Great War. Laniel offers an innovative reading that tracks the ‘stray airs’ (para. 8) of the classical elegy through the ‘Time Passes’ chapter of To the Lighthouse, asking how the postwar elegy reconfigures the traditional scene of pastoral mourning. Barbara Will’s ‘Into the Silence: Hemingway, Woolf, and Beckett in the Wake of War’ (SCRev 35:ii[2018] 90–102) posits that ‘war serves as a kind of limit case for the question “Why write?”’ (p. 90), asking what role language has to play in the aftermath of war. Several more essays offered readings of Woolf alongside other authors. Justin Keena’s ‘David Hume in To the Lighthouse’ (P&L 42:ii[2018] 376–93) traces David Hume’s footfall in To the Lighthouse, as a specifically Scottish atheist and sceptic. Keena argues that Hume’s epistemology is instantiated in To the Lighthouse’s narrative and stylistic innovations. Nicolas Pierre Boileau and Rebecca Welshman’s ‘Walled-in’: The Psychology of the English Garden in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Rachel Cusk’s The Country Life’ (EBC 55[2018] 22 paras.) traces the figurations of rose gardens in Woolf and Cusk, while Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka’s ‘Kate O’Brien and Virginia Woolf: Common Ground’ (IUR 48:i[2018] 127–42) traces connections and intertexts between Kate O’Brien and Virginia Woolf. Katye Stokoe reads Woolf alongside Monique Wittig in her essay ‘Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text’ (Paragraph 41:iii[2018] 301–16). She contends that both of the texts she examines ‘can be perceived as proto-queer’ (p. 302), indexing Orlando to Judith Butler’s analysis of drag to illustrate what the article calls ‘textual drag’ (p. 303). In a sensitive and theoretically innovative essay, Elizabeth Abel reads Woolf between Roland Barthes and Sigmund Freud in ‘Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning, Mania’ (CritI 45:i[2018] 1–28). Abel places Woolf’s evocations of elegiac light alongside Barthes’s mourning work in an attempt to reimagine the Freudian binary between mourning and melancholia, introducing ‘mania’ as a third term. Much of Abel’s essay only touches on Woolf, but it is nonetheless an inventive and moving piece. Two essays in Modernist Cultures discuss Woolf’s interactions with and receptions in other cultures. Daniel Göske’s ‘Virginia Woolf in German’ (ModCult 13:i[2018] 55–76) discusses how Hogarth ‘quickly began to operate in a global print culture’ (p. 56). Göske reads closely the early German translations of Woolf’s novels published by the Insel Verlag, analysing them side by side with their English counterparts, before turning to the history of their translations. Ira Nadel’s ‘The Russian Woolf’ (ModCult 13:iv[2018] 546–67) discusses cross-currents between the Russian avant-garde and Bloomsbury, taking a broadly historical approach to this task, and giving plenty of space for the Russians with whom Woolf interacted, rather than simply viewing them as objects for Woolfish consumption. Nels Pearson’s sensitive and innovative article ‘Recovering Islands’ (ModCult 13:iv[2018] 546–67) posits that To the Lighthouse ‘profoundly evokes the archipelagic nature of the Anglo-Celtic Isles’ (p. 348), asking how the novel ‘both interrogates and participates in problematic cultural and geographical constructs of Britishness’ (p. 348). Somaye Mostafaei and Nooshin Elahipanah’s article, ‘Dialogic Multivoicedness in To the Lighthouse’ (Neoh 45[2018] 807–19) also discusses To the Lighthouse, recapitulating old narratological tropes without adding much that is new. Katerina Koutsantoni and Madeleine Oakley offer a foray into the medical humanities with their article ‘Laura Makepeace Stephen: What Was Wrong with Woolf’s Half-Sister?’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 280–94), diagnosing her with ‘autism with a co-morbid intermittent psychotic condition’ (p. 292). They do so through recourse to Woolf’s father’s diaries and case notes from the institution where she spent much of her life, as well as through a little light phrenology, using photographs of Makepeace Stephen as a baby to diagnose her. They do so without questioning the diagnostic validity of these sources, or the historical situatedness of current medical and diagnostic categories and whether or not they can be applied to historical figures, or indeed, whether or not it is appropriate to imply that a person diagnosed with autism (spurious or not) has something ‘wrong’ with them. 3. Fiction Post-1945 (a) Fiction 1945–2000 Some of the most notable work in the field published in 2018 was to be found in two special issues offered by the journal Textual Practice. Early in the year it dedicated a volume to Christine Brooke-Rose, and followed this by marking the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth in its penultimate issue of 2018. This followed Glasgow University’s centenary conference on Spark, held in February. The depth and breadth of the work presented in these two issues warrant detailed summary. ‘The Prime of Muriel Spark: A Centenary Retrospect’ is composed of ten essays and four creative responses to Spark’s work. Allan Hepburn’s article, ‘Memento Mori and Gerontography’ (TPr 32[2018] 1495–1511) argues that ‘narratives about old people present an anti-novelistic proposition; time being against them, dottering characters learn nothing from experience, then they die. They have no growth and no Bildung’ (p. 1495). Firstly, the essay establishes the sociological and literary context for Spark’s 1959 novel, taking in essays and books on ageing by Colin MacInnes, John Cowper Powys, and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as offering a brief discussion of the lengthening of life expectancy between 1851 and 1951 and the post-war Labour government’s establishment of the welfare state. In the essay’s second section, Hepburn uses research conducted in Spark’s archive at the University of Tulsa to show how her ‘objective, even clinical’ (p. 1496) style ‘elaborates a novelistic “gerontography”, namely a technique for writing about old age that takes into account declining physical abilities and spiritual disposition to death’ (p. 1495). Michael Gardiner’s ‘Spark versus Homo economicus’ (TPr 32[2018] 1513–28) considers a wide range of Spark’s fiction from the late 1950s and early 1960s: Robinson [1958], Memento Mori [1959], The Ballad of Peckham Rye [1960], The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1961], and a number of short stories. As in Hepburn’s article, Gardiner is concerned with reading Spark’s work through a socio-economic and political lens, placing this fiction in both an immediate post-war context and a broader Enlightenment context. For Gardiner, both The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie stage disruptions or critiques of ideologies of productive efficiency epitomized in time-and-motion studies, making both novels part of a ‘moment’ that included ‘a wave of late ’50s creative and political output with similar criticisms … taking in Situationism, anti-psychiatry, decolonization, critiques of logical positivism/language philosophy, “kitchen sink” fiction and film, CND membership, and legal debates on parliamentary sovereignty’ (p. 1516). Martin Stannard’s essay, ‘The Crooked Ghost: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and the Idea of the “Lyrical”’ (TPr 32[2018] 1529–43), offers a close reading of Spark’s novel in order to examine the relationship in her work between the lyrical and what Spark herself called ‘the nevertheless principle’, which Stannard defines as the fact that ‘Things can be two (or more) things simultaneously’ (p. 1530). He suggests that the protagonist of Ballad, Dougal Douglas, is a ‘“lyrical” presence’ (p. 1536) in the novel through his role as a ‘pre-eminent liar and fiction-maker’ and an ‘image of the artist’ (p. 1534). Bringing together ‘fundamentally opposed approaches’ (p. 1537), the narrative propulsion of the ballad and the anti-realist nouveau roman, Spark’s novel represents for Stannard ‘the nevertheless principle in action: opposed conceptions of the “real” operating symbiotically in tandem, no one set of assumptions gaining intellectual victory over the others’ (p. 1537). Vassiliki Kolocotroni’s ‘The Driver’s Seat: Undoing Character, Becoming Legend’ (TPr 32[2018] 1545–62) reads Spark’s novel as her crème de la crème and as her most confounding. The essay astutely traces the way The Driver’s Seat remains elusive to critics, placing its protagonist Lise in a variety of literary and theoretical contexts to show the complications of her construction: is she or isn’t she a feminist and in what ways can she be said to be enacting or not enacting a kind of feminist vengeance? Does her apparent drive for death owe something to Spark’s fascination with Emily Brontë, and her own death? In what ways does the novel indulge in and resist the pleasures of plotting? Marina Mackay takes on the subject of ‘Muriel Spark and Self-Help’ (TPr 32[2018] 1563–76) in her very funny essay, reading Spark’s work alongside bestselling works of self-help literature from the middle of the twentieth century in order to ask what wisdom Spark thinks the novel form can hold about life. Adam Piette’s fascinating ‘Muriel Spark and Fake News’ (TPr 32[2018] 1577–91) offers a pre-history of the twenty-first-century phenomenon and shows how Spark’s wartime experiences in intelligence operations bleed into her work, primarily in The Hothouse by the East River [1973] and The Only Problem [1984]. The latter, Piette argues, is ‘a novel that stages the construction of fake news stories as psychological and political manipulation of the public sphere’ (p. 1578). Offering a close reading of this novel, Piette examines the way its central couple are subject to the kind of fake news encouraged and enabled by the society of the spectacle theorized by the Situationists. ‘The subjection to the slanderous procedures of the society of the spectacle stimulates Harvey’s love and nostalgia for Effie’ (p. 1588), he argues, suggesting that criminal guilt and marital love ‘come together into a single image conjoining erotic fantasy and state apparatus data projection’ (p. 1588). Marilyn Reizbaum’s ‘Waiting for Godot at The Mandelbaum Gate’ (TPr 32[2018] 1593–1613) proposes that Spark’s Middle East novel develops a ‘literary Zionism … a narrative movement dictated by an ideal which by its nature cannot be realised’ (p. 1594). For Reizbaum, this can be read either ‘positively in terms of a modernist sensibility of narrative open-endedness or alternatively (or at once) as driven by’ the ‘cruel optimism’ (p. 1607) of Lauren Berlant. This is ‘cruel’ because ‘the objective/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to obtain the expansive transformation for which a person or people risks striving’ (p. 1594). Drawing connections between the tensions of Israel and narrative form, Reizbaum characterizes The Mandelbaum Gate as a novel of ‘knots, loose ends and competing narratives’ (p. 1608). Finding such literary Zionism in Spark’s juxtaposition of the Eichmann trial and Beckett’s Godot, Reizbaum argues that the ‘Eichmann trial might stand as a metonymy for the Mandelbaum Gate, a crucible of passage, that “goes nowhere for nothing”, if “nothing” is “what is to be borne”, rather than an elusive ideal’ (p. 1608). Carla Sassi’s lucid article examines ‘Muriel Spark’s Italian Palimpsests’ (TPr 32[2018] 1615–32) and attempts to reveal what she calls the ‘overlooked’ (p. 1616) importance of ‘Italy and Italianness’ (p. 1615) in Spark’s work. Focusing on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Public Image [1968], The Takeover [1976], and Territorial Rights [1979], Sassi reads widely across Spark’s career, ‘taking the palimpsest as a trope of transformation and construction that implies bordercrossing and transit’ (p. 1615). Within The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sassi sees Spark ‘collapsing the borders of heterogeneous discourses of Italy’ (p. 1619) in the form of Jean Brodie’s collages on her classroom wall, which take in fashion, Renaissance art, and newspaper reportage of fascists. ‘Fascism’, argues Sassi, is thus ‘treated as one of the multiple, half-obscured but co-existing layers that constitute Italianness’ (p. 1619). Sassi teases out the intertextual relationships to Pirandello and Leopardi, and the filmmakers Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in The Public Image. These, she says, help readers understand ‘how Italian culture represented for Spark a rich source of inspiration for her own investigation of the elusive border separating reality from fiction’, a world in which ‘truth and aesthetic form stand equal to one another and are indeed interchangeable’ (p. 1621). Sassi calls The Takeover ‘Spark’s most Italian novel’ (p. 1624), in which the country is ‘repeatedly represented as an intrinsically conservative culture, in touch with the most ancient layers of its past history’ (p. 1624). Sassi suggests that in this conservatism Spark shows the way ‘Italy resists globalisation’ (p. 1625), something depicted in the novel by its close attention to contemporary politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, Sassi turns her attention to Territorial Rights, which, she argues, is a novel of ‘structural instability’ (p. 1628), in which artistic styles as diverse as Italian neo-realism, the Gothic, and ‘dark, chaotic comedy’ (p. 1628) are thrown together. What holds this together, says Sassi, is the city of Venice itself, which is the novel’s true protagonist. In ‘Muriel Spark’s ‘Informed Air’: The Auditory Imagination and the Voices of Fiction’ (TPr 32[2018] 1633–58), Patricia Waugh examines how Spark ‘refashioned’ (p. 1634) T.S. Eliot’s concept of the auditory imagination. She reads Spark’s biography and her novels alongside one another, comparing her descriptions of inner voices, methods of composition, and formal decisions. As Waugh puts it: ‘the conversion and the breakdown together provided the means of recognising others’ voices as parts of and yet singularly other than her own … Together they gave her the opportunity to find her own “voice” as a novelist and a self as a plurality of “voices”—and to exploit the resources of that most dialogic of genres in her remodelling of it’ (p. 1636). Waugh astutely connects this dialogism of the novel to a novelistic ethics that, she argues, Spark embodies: the ability to ‘to think in and hear the voice of the other in one’s own’ (p. 1636). This Waugh finds across her work, and her article is noteworthy for its range of reference, taking in Spark’s early writings, short stories, and around ten of her novels. The collection’s final essay, Brian Cheyette’s ‘Spark, Trauma, and the Novel’ (TPr 32[2018] 1659–76), takes as its focus Spark’s ‘abiding sense of the realist novel as nothing more than an all too human form of deception’ (p. 1660). It begins with a discussion of Spark’s early life and her formation as a novelist, describing the ‘distinctions between aesthetic conversion—turning life into art or narrative—and religious conversion’ (p. 1662). It then uses Spark’s African stories (her early work and Aiding and Abetting [2000]) to develop its main argument that the reason the realist novel is deceptive is because it gives false promises of ‘clarity and order’ (p. 1662). Spark was particularly interested this in because she was concerned with making ‘peripheral’ certain ‘traumatic aspects’ of her life (p. 1663) through transfiguring them into fiction. It was for this reason, argues Cheyette, that Spark advocated absurdity and satire. In addition to these essays, the special issue also includes some creative responses to Spark’s work which may be of interest to scholars of the period. Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Willy Maley talk (TPr 32[2018] 1677–80) to the playwright David Greig about Spark’s play Doctors of Philosophy [1963]; Zoe Strachan considers Spark’s advice for writers (TPr 32[2018] 1689–93); the novelist Louise Welsh examines Spark’s craft (TPr 32[2018] 1695–1700); and the writer Leila Aboulela describes ‘Muriel Spark’s Religious Vision of the World’ (TPr 32[2018] 1681–7). The special issue of Textual Practice on the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Christine Brooke-Rose: Remade’, begins with two introductions by Natalie Ferris (TPr 32:ii[2018] 191–2) and by Jean-Michel Rabaté (TPr 32:ii[2018] 193–9). The latter recounts his encounters with Brooke-Rose at Paris VII University in the early 1970s and offers a moving account of their friendship afterwards. These are followed by eight essays. ‘Christine Brooke-Rose: An Algorithmic Appreciation’ by Joanna Walsh (TPr 32:ii[2018] 201–3), who is herself an experimental writer, offers an ‘algorithmic appreciation’ (p. 201) of Brooke-Rose in a piece that blends academic criticism and creative writing. The second essay, Joseph Darlington’s ‘Truth, Death and Memory in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Autobiographical Writings’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 205–23), uses Brooke-Rose’s archive to examine her various attempts to ‘transcrib[e] life’ (p. 205). In ‘“I Think I Preferred It Abstract”: Christine Brooke-Rose and Visuality in the New Novel’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 225–44), Natalie Ferris examines Brooke-Rose in the context of the nouveau roman, especially its emphasis on the visual apprehension of reality. In her article, ‘The “Difficult” Relationship: Christine Brooke-Rose, Catholicism and Muriel Spark’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 245–63), Stephanie Jones reads Brooke-Rose biographically, particularly her friendship with Spark, and argues that her personal relationship to Catholicism has been under-explored by scholars thus far. ‘Indeterminate Brooke-Rose’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 265–81), by Julia Jordan, examines the relationship between ‘scientific discourse about uncertainty and indeterminacy’ (p. 266) and the notion of experimental writing in Brooke-Rose’s work. Offering a reading of her novel Such [1966], Jordan argues that Brooke-Rose’s writing is not itself ‘indeterminate’ (p. 265) but that Such nonetheless represents ‘a critique of any system of knowledge that impinges upon the indeterminate, the uncertain, and the latent’ (p. 278). For Jordan, this does not just signal Brooke-Rose’s affinities with poststructuralism, but establishes an ethics that recognizes the absolute difficulty ‘of gaining epistemic purchase’ (p. 278). In her lucid and fascinating article, ‘Selling Difficulty: The Case of Christine Brooke-Rose’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 283–99), Rebecca Pohl also makes use of archival materials. Investigating what she calls ‘the complex relationship between difficulty, pleasure and sales’ (p. 284), Pohl reads Brooke-Rose’s novel, Textermination [1991] alongside her letters to friends and publishers, as well as surveying reviews and obituaries. Across these she examines the forms and politics of the notion of difficulty, carefully showing how it is variously conceived but also how ‘ reviewers, journalists and academics describing Brooke-Rose as “difficult” are all contributing to the formation and securing of a commonplace through a process of repetition. Difficulty becomes the dominant quality of Brooke-Rose’s oeuvre’ (p. 285). Pohl shows how this dominant quality also entails a ‘grammatical slippage’ (p. 286) and, borrowing the term from Sarah Ahmed, helps to construct Brooke-Rose herself as a ‘feminist killjoy’ (p. 286), the ‘difficult woman, the non-conformist, unmanageable troublemaker whose stridency ruins everybody else’s pleasure’ (p. 286). Pohl uses this as a springboard to argue for Brooke-Rose’s work to be understood as pleasurable in a Barthesian sense, as encouraging the working through of apparent difficulty as itself a pleasurable activity. At the heart of this is the question of recognition, the matter of whether a text is familiar or confronts the reader with the unfamiliar. In Textermination, argues Pohl, that tension is central. In ‘“Groping Inside Language”: Translation, Humour and Experiment in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Brigid Brophy’s In Transit’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 301–16), Carole Sweeney reads these two novels (from 1968 and 1969 respectively) together in order to show how they ‘reveal the power of language systems to shape the social order and, far more treacherously, its susceptibility to ideological abuse and ability to whitewash itself with its own sly manoeuvres’ (p. 302). Both books, says Sweeney, work against these orders, instead showing how language can be used to destabilize and liberate. In the issue’s final essay, ‘Christine Brooke-Rose: Motes, Beams and the Horse’s Mouth’ (TPr 32:ii[2018] 317–36), Glyn White draws on personal correspondence with Brooke-Rose to examine her ‘relationship to academic criticism as a critic and novelist’ (p. 317). The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley, and Melanie Seddon, is an excellent addition to the indispensable Decades series from Bloomsbury. It manages to shuttle between a commanding overview of the decade’s key genres and themes, its aesthetic and political concerns, and its wider cultural milieu, forging space for excellent, insightful close readings of key texts. This kind of scalar reading is seen across the collection, beginning in Seddon’s chapter, which focuses on youth, followed by Joseph Darlington’s chapter on ‘The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels of the 1960s’. Chapters by Tracy Hargreaves on women’s fiction, Yvonne Salmon on gay fiction, and Graham K. Riach on black writing register the often dialectical relationship between literature and society. The remaining chapters focus on particular writers or genres: Michelle Phillips Buchberger writes on ‘The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles’; Philip Tew offers close readings of Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and Muriel Spark in order to elaborate their position as hinges between modernism and postmodernism; James Reich’s ‘Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe’ focuses on science-fiction writing of the 1960s and features readings of Anthony Burgess, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke; while the final chapter, by James Riley, continues the focus on science fiction, reassessing characterizations of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition [1970] and Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme [1969] as marking the end of the 1960s and arguing that such a narrative obscures their particular textual characteristics. Contemporary literary studies in 2018 demonstrated its alertness to cultural and literary trends (autofiction, dystopian fiction) and to urgent political concerns (animal studies, ecocriticism). Hywel Dix’s edited volume of essays Autofiction in English is part of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series, edited by Clare Brant and Max Saunders. It distinguishes anglophone autofiction from its French predecessors, staking out the key characteristics of the English version of the form. While many of the essays deal with American authors and works of twenty-first-century British fiction, scholars of British literature before 2000 will be interested in Lorna Martens’s chapter, entitled ‘Autofiction in the Third Person, with a Reading of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake’ (pp. 49–64). Martens begins her essay with a general consideration of third-person autobiographies before offering a reading of Brooke-Rose’s novel as a piece of autofiction. Martens examines Remake as ‘conceptually of a piece with the post-structuralist theory that dominated the intellectual scene in the 1970s and 1980s’ (p. 59) and argues that on the one hand, through her use of ‘alter-egos, Brooke-Rose artfully undermines our everyday understanding of the concept of identity by signalling that she is not self-identical but multifarious and intersubjective’ (p. 62). On the other hand, says Martens, the book’s language implies ‘a unity that is reinforced by the emergence of a conclusive, seemingly authorial voice’ (p. 62). Martens concludes by suggesting that Brooke-Rose’s intent, as an author, is to ‘undermine … her attempt at undermining identity’ (p. 62). Hilary Thompson’s Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium considers a range of anglophone novels, contrasting the treatment of the relationship between humans and animals in pre-2000 novels and post-9/11 fiction. Scholars of British literature 1945–2000 will take particular note of Thompson’s second chapter, which considers Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus [1984] (pp. 57–87), and her third chapter (pp. 88–119), which reads Michel Faber’s Under the Skin [2000] alongside Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go [2006]. Thomas Horan’s Desire and Empathy in Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction covers British, American, Canadian, and Russian dystopian fiction from across the twentieth century and offers a reading of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1948] that argues that the novel ‘illustrates [his] faith in sexual desire as a source of social responsibility’ (p. 147). Horan understands Winston and Julia’s affair in terms of its ability to foster an ‘empathetic sense of shared humanity’ (p. 147). Nineteen Eighty-Four was also the subject of Aşkın Çelikkol’s ‘“In the Place Where There Is No Darkness”: Sexuality, Ideology and Space in George Orwell’s 1984’ (Expl 76:iv[2018] 198–203), which seeks to reassess notions of surveillance in the novel through the prism of privacy and private spaces. Edited by Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger, Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle is a collection of essays that offer a thorough overview of the genre. Scholars of post-war British fiction will be particularly interested in the chapters on A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye [1994] by Louisa Hadley (pp. 142–58), and on Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel [1996], by Janine Hauthal (pp. 159–80). Hadley places Byatt’s work in the context of other feminist rewritings of fairy-tales, most notably Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories [1979]. Hauthal uses Barnes’s depictions of Anglo-French encounters as exemplary texts for exploring the short-story cycle’s ability to represent collectivities. The work of J.G. Ballard continues to be a touchstone for scholars of the period. Repeater Books published K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, edited by Darren Ambrose, in which Ballard’s depictions of late capitalist society feature prominently, while Louise Nuttall dedicates a chapter of Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction to Ballard’s figurative style in The Drowned World (pp. 153–76). In 2018 the two stand-out essays on Ballard were dedicated to exploring his work from an ecocritical perspective. Thomas S. Davis’s excellent ‘Fossils of Tomorrow: Len Lye, J.G. Ballard, and Planetary Futures’ (MFS 64:iv[2018] 659–79) compares The Drowned World [1962] with Len Lye’s film The Birth of the Robot [1936], made for Shell. Applying contemporary ecocriticism and theories of the Anthropocene to these mid-twentieth-century texts, Davis reflects on the effect the concept of the Anthropocene has had on literary studies, before offering readings of two texts that remain important for ecological futures despite their relative lack of scientific knowledge. Davis argues that Lye’s film dramatizes the rise of ‘a new posthuman figure who has surpassed human limits of life and death’ thanks to their harnessing of the benefits of oil (p. 669), while Ballard’s novel ‘urges us’ to ‘see human beings not merely as resilient psychological and biological beings but as complex forms of life that will evolve and end like other species’ (p. 675). What links these two works, for Davis, is that they register ‘the return of the geologic as a shaping force in human life’ (p. 675). Andrew Hageman’s ‘“The Key to This Immense Metallized Landscape”: Reading J.G. Ballard’s Crash as an Ecological Structure of Feeling’ (Extrapolation 59:i[2018] 47–69) places Ballard’s 1973 novel in its eco-historical context, reading the novel as emblematic of the way the 1970s represented ‘a period of radical shifts in ecological consciousness—in the relations not only amongst human beings but amongst human beings and the myriad non-human elements with which we co-exist, including those we build and those we don’t’ (p. 48). Meanwhile, Robert S. Lehman’s ‘Back to the Future: Late Modernism in JG Ballard’s The Drowned World’ (JML 41:iv[2018] 161–78) reads Ballard’s novel as a piece of late modernism that directs modernist ‘ground clearing’ (p. 161) at modernism itself. Postcolonial and diasporic literatures continue be a major focus for scholars of the period. Books like Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations, by Baidik Bhattacharya, and The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov as part of the Cambridge Critical Concepts series, will surely prove important theoretical overviews in future years. Salman Rushdie’s work features in both of these books, and was the most prominent area of literary study, along with that of Caryl Phillips. Three articles were particularly notable for bringing refreshing critical perspectives and methodologies to Rushdie’s work. Sayan Chattopadhyay’s ‘From Indianness to Englishness: The Foreign Selves of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Salman Rushdie’s Salahuddin Chamchawala’ (JCL 53:iii[2018] 412–29) sets Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses [1988] against the background of two centuries of Indian travel to England. In ‘Secularism and the Death and Return of the Author: Rereading the Rushdie Affair after Joseph Anton’ (JCL 53:ii[2018] 316–31), Stephen Morton examines the reception history of The Satanic Verses, reading this alongside Rushdie’s own characterizations of it in his memoir Joseph Anton [2012]. For Morton, this poses new implications for ‘the relationship between the ideology of secularism and postmodern theories of reading’ (p. 316). Sam Goodman’s ‘“Ain’t It a Ripping Night”: Alcoholism and the Legacies of Empire in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’ (ES 99:iii[2018] 307–24) considers the medicalization of empire and, bringing literary criticism together with discourses on alcoholism and drunkenness, argues that ‘Rushdie’s decision to employ alcohol and alcoholism so prominently is a means through which to undermine the general contemporary belief in the widespread benefits that British colonialism brought to India [and] reveals the British presence as having had a debilitating effect on the physical, psychological and social health of newly independent Indian individuals and the wider nation alike’ (p. 309). Meanwhile, Vijay Mishra’s book, Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial, uses archival materials and literary analysis to do valuable work revealing the influences and sources underlying Rushdie’s work. Vanessa Guignery’s ‘Pastiche, Collage, and Bricolage: Caryl Phillips’ Hybrid Journal and Letters of a Slave Trader in Crossing the River’ (ArielE 49:ii–iii[2018] 119–48) argues that Phillips’s use of pastiche and collage techniques is in service of an attempt to balance two seemingly opposed impetuses. Phillips aims, she argues, to properly speak of the horror of slaves’ experience while simultaneously showing how historical accounts are constructed and unstable. Elisabeth Bekers’s ‘Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives’ (LW 15:i[2018] 23–42) begins with an overview of the political and aesthetic concerns found in slave narratives, before comparing Phillips’s novel Cambridge [1991] with Jackie Kay’s play The Lamplighter [2008] and Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song [2010]. Like Guignery, Bekers sees Phillips as attempting to reorient historical narratives towards those who have been previously silenced. This impetus in Phillips’s work that Guignery and Bekers pick up on is described by Bénédicte Ledent in ‘Radio Drama and Its Avatars in the Work of Caryl Phillips’ (JPW 54:i[2018] 32–42) as a ‘demythologising practice’ (p. 40), using a phrase by Charlotte Croft. Ledent argues that Phillips’s radio plays between 1984 and 2016 are part of this practice that extends to his novels, and suggests that these hitherto neglected works should be read as important intertexts and as pieces that help Phillips explore more polyphonic histories. Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge, a collection of essays edited by Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca, featured ‘Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow’ (pp. 63–80) by Su Ping, which connects mental health disorders like schizophrenia and mania to the diasporic experience in Phillips’s works from 2003 and 2000, respectively. In The Falling Snow was also the subject of Pietro Deandrea’s chapter in the collection New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, edited by Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes and Lucinda Newns, entitled ‘British New Slaveries in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand and Caryl Phillips’ In The Falling Snow: Diachronic and Synchronic Reflections’ (pp. 115–30). Pamela Osborn’s ‘“Stop. That’s Wicked”: Sexual Freedom in Brigid Brophy’s The Burglar and Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head’ (CWW 12:ii[2018] 222–32) compares two novels that will be of interest to scholars of the period. Reading Brophy’s 1968 play and Murdoch’s 1961 novel as iterations of an ‘ongoing dialogue between the two writers’ (p. 222), along with letters they exchanged and other Murdoch archival papers, Osborn examines the way both writers grappled with notions of sexuality and liberation in the 1960s. Scholars of Brophy’s work will also be interested in Robert McKay’s ‘Brigid Brophy’s Pro-Animal Forms’ (CWW 12:ii[2018] 152–70), which uses archive material to cast her as a ‘pro-animal writer’ (p. 152). Offering a reading of The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl [1973], McKay seeks to ‘recognize Brophy’s significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes towards animals’ (p. 152). While Ian McEwan received comparatively little attention in 2018, his position in the literary landscape was fascinatingly examined in Chris Clarke’s excellent article ‘“Unconsciously Influenced”: Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the Lasting Legacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction’ (MFS 64:i[2018] 104–28). Clarke interrogates the economies of prestige surrounding Alan Burns, who was a member of a group of experimental writers in the 1960s that also included Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, and McEwan, who was Burns’s first student on the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Contrasting their careers, and reading a number of Burns’s 1960s texts alongside McEwan’s ‘refracted autobiography’ (p. 104) Sweet Tooth [2012], Clarke’s article will be interesting to scholars of British fiction published between 1945 and 2000 for its wide-ranging investigation of the ‘lasting imprint of postwar British experimental writing on contemporary fiction’ (p. 105). (b) Fiction Post-2000 C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, which is now the official journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literature, released three excellent issues in 2018. The first, ‘The Literature of the Anthropocene’, evolved from an e-mail roundtable in which the Contemporary Studies Network responded to the 2016 Guardian article by Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet Forever’ (C21 6:i[2018] 1.26–44). Rachel Dini’s ‘“The Problem of This Trash Society”: Anthropogenic Waste and the Neoliberal City in Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come’ (C21 6:i[2018] 4.1–26) analyses the role that waste objects play in J.G. Ballard’s post-2000 novels. She argues that these novels taper the general critique of the Capitalocene that characterizes Ballard’s oeuvre into a specific critique of neoliberalism. Dini focuses on ‘the myriad forms of waste that threaten to obstruct the flow of capital and goods, and to pollute what are otherwise friction-free environments’ (p. 3). This includes not only manufactured waste but also ‘refugees, economic migrants, and the unemployed, all of whom are both products of capitalist modernity and necessary to its functioning’ (p. 3). The article’s methodology employs a blend of historical materialist, new materialist, and structural anthropological approaches. This might sound dizzying, and Dini notes that these approaches perhaps seem incompatible (p. 5), but it works very well. It facilitates a reading of Ballard’s writing, and particularly his later fiction, as a striating corrective to the (theoretically) smooth space of neoliberalism. Alla Ivanchikova’s ‘Geomediations in the Anthropocene: Fictions of the Geologic Turn’ (C21 6:i[2018] 3.1-24) analyses the geologically infused aesthetics of A.S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ [2003] alongside Margaret Atwood’s ‘Stone Mattress’ [2013]. Ivanchikova argues that these stories ‘allow us to imagine and capture the immense depths of geologic time’ (p. 20). This is a big claim to make of two short stories, especially because the difficulty of imagining deep time is something that many Anthropocene thinkers grapple with. Nonetheless, Ivanchikova’s close readings, especially of the way that trauma is mediated via geological rather than linguistic means in Byatt’s story (p. 16), do convincingly decentre the Anthropos and gesture to alternative relations with the geos that go beyond extraction and destruction. The second issue of C21 in 2018 contains a single article dealing with British fiction, Sara Helen Binney’s ‘How “the Old Stories Persist”: Folklore in Literature after Postmodernism’ (C21 6:ii[2018] 5.1-20). Binney analyses the legacy of postmodern fairy-tale reworkings in twenty-first-century fiction by way of John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning [2011]. She makes a strong argument that Burnside’s novel, as well as a number of other twenty-first-century retellings of fairy tales, have ‘learned the lessons of postmodernism’ and ‘exhibit the aesthetics and preoccupations which critics are beginning to delineate as specific to now’ (p. 3). The article ties this argument up neatly by explaining ‘the fantastic as a particularly contemporary literary mode’ (p. 17) produced by the tension between contemporary literature’s realist turn and the magical aspects of postmodernism’s legacy. The third and final C21 of 2018 is a special issue on the works of David Mitchell that resulted from the International David Mitchell Conference in 2017 and contains a foreword by the author himself. Martin Paul Eve’s ‘The Historical Imaginary of Nineteenth-Century Style in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 3.1-22) employs computational analysis to ascertain the extent to which Part I of the Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing accurately imitates the linguistic style of the period from 1850 to 1910 in which it is set. The article explains that this section is ‘a very good attempt at linguistic mimesis within a work of purported historical fiction’ (p. 8). Eve then argues that the outlying metaleptic slippages are not only metafictional devices that gesture to the editing of Adam Ewing’s journal, but an authorial strategy to produce a faux-nineteenth-century style that would gesture to colonial discourses and racism while remaining accessible to readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Jo Alyson Parker’s ‘Mind the Gap(s): Holly Sykes’s Life, the “Invisible” War, and the History of the Future in The Bone Clocks’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 4.1-21) situates The Bone Clocks [2014] as an Anthropocene text. Parker argues that Mitchell writes a history of the future to give ‘figurative shape to those formless, dispersed threats’ (p. 17) of climate change. Thus, the novel encourages readers to consider the causal destructive forces of this future that are already at work in our present. Kristian Shaw takes his analysis of The Bone Clocks in another direction with ‘“Some Magic Is Normality”: Fantastical Cosmopolitanism in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 5.1-19). Like Parker, Shaw argues that The Bone Clocks provides ways of thinking about threats facing the twenty-first century. He then goes on to situate Mitchell’s novel in cosmopolitan theory, and makes a compelling case for the ways that its supernatural register ‘becomes an aperture through which to explore individual and communal ethical agency’ (p. 16). Eva-Maria Schmitz’s ‘“No Man Is an Island”: Tracing Functions of Insular Landscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 6.1-25) uses Yi-Fu Tuan and Michel de Certeau’s conception of space as relational, to analyse the recurring motif of islands in Ghostwritten [1999], Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet [2010], and The Bone Clocks. Scott A. Dimovitz contends that Mitchell’s recent works have established a ‘retroactive Mitchellverse’ (p. 1) as a critique of contemporary apoliticism, in ‘Schrödinger’s Cat: Metalepsis and the Political Unwriting of the Postmodern Apocalypse in David Mitchell’s Recent Works’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 7.1-23). In ‘Spirits in the Material World: Spectral Worlding in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 8.1-26), Ryan Trimm brilliantly examines the novels’ production of an interconnected, complex, and dynamic global space that acts as both inversion and critique of a capitalist globalization whose distant perspective tends to flatten the world. In ‘The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 9.1-26), Gautama Polanki takes an analysis of the comet birthmark in Cloud Atlas as a meta-figure for the novel’s form and content and resituates it in the contexts of biblical messianism and Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence. ‘Oblique Translations in David Mitchell’s Works’ (C21 6:iii[2018] 10.1-16) by Claire Béatrice Larsonneur investigates the associations between translation and autobiography in Mitchell’s Black Swan Green [2006] and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, as well as two translations of non-fictional works that Mitchell undertook with his wife. Larsonneur suggests that the ‘Japanese tradition of translation, devolved narratives and autobiofiction, all partake of the aesthetics of oblique discourse’ (p. 14) and have informed Mitchell’s practice and facilitate a form of lateral (re)writing that has the potential to navigate power dynamics. Similar thematic concerns cropped up not only across the three issues of C21, but also in other journal articles on contemporary British literature. The role of capitalism in mediating the individual’s relation to the global space provides the bedrock for Joel Evans’s ‘Ali Smith’s Necessary-Contingent, or Navigating the Global’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 629–48). Evans extracts the concept of what he dubs the ‘necessary-contingent’ (p. 629) from Ali Smith’s The Accidental [2005] and There but for the [2011] and employs it as a way of reading the two texts. He goes on to analyse the interconnectedness of necessity and contingency in the two novels, and argues that they are drawn together in the domain of the global and provide a vantage point from which to examine the contradictions of capitalism. A sense of interconnectedness underpins much critical writing on the Anthropocene and globalization, and it drives Jill Marsden’s ‘Thought on the Outside: Twenty-First-Century Modernism in Will Self’s Umbrella’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 689–706), albeit in a different direction. Marsden suggests that Self repurposes modernist stream of consciousness in Umbrella [2012] to dismantle the textual illusion of the isolated mind and instead locate thought alongside the ‘implication of persons, bodies and things within larger, transpersonal processes’ (p. 692). Through a series of excellent close readings and theoretical interventions, Marsden makes a claim for the political importance of this shift away from the individual and towards an understanding of relationality. Huw Marsh’s ‘Narrative Unreliability and Metarepresentation in Ian McEwan’s Atonement; or, Why Robbie Might Be Guilty and Why Nobody Seems to Notice’ (TPr 32:viii[2018] 1325–43) puts narrative theory to work in a revised reading of Atonement [2001] that doubts the reliability of protagonist Briony Tallis and, by extension, reconsiders the role of the implied author. Jackson Ayres takes on a new British literary phenomenon in ‘Hitler Wins Now: New Nazi Alternate Histories in British Popular Fiction’ (ConL 59:iii[2018] 308–32). Ayres reads Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy, Farthing [2006], Ha’Penny [2007], and Half a Crown [2008], as an ‘eerily prophetic parable for the past decade in Britain’ (p. 307). He uses his reading of Walton’s trilogy to make a broader commentary on contemporary texts that employ the plot in which Hitler wins, and argues that they parallel neoliberalism with mid-twentieth-century fascism. In ‘“Takes You Back Even If You Were Never There Originally”: Class, History, and Nostalgia in Gordon Burn’s The North of England Home Service’ (TPr 32:viii[2018] 1405–23), Phil O’Brien tracks the tensions between British social realism and American postmodernism in Burn’s writing. He explains that spectres of the past appear as ways of dealing with or seeking solace from the present moment. The article then argues, however, that the ‘compulsion to repeat banal and inauthentic modes of historical experience creates a cultural impasse, a form of hyperreality which blocks any access to a positive subjectivity’ (p. 1407). In other words, history is treated as a spectacle. O’Brien reveals the ways that The North of England Home Service [2003] depicts the appropriation and marketization of the nostalgic mode by capitalism, and the alienation of the nostalgic subject. Katy Shaw examines the spectral presence of the past in the present through a different lens in Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First-Century English Literature. She argues that hauntology is a peculiarly English phenomenon that dissolves the separation between now and then and contains not only ‘the compulsion to repeat the past’ but ‘an anticipation of the future’ (p. 2). Shaw does justice to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx [1993], whence she draws hauntology as a concept capable of thinking beyond the post-liberal end-of-history narrative that dominated the end of the twentieth century. Each of the book’s four chapters is focused on a specific text, and develops different aspects of hauntological literary analysis. Shaw’s analysis of Zadie Smith’s NW [2012], for instance, establishes the spectral topographies of the novel and depicts London as a distinctly haunted city that is at once both living and spectral. The chapter on David Peace’s Patient X [2018] explores the uncanniness of the spectral double through extra-textual authorial presence, and suggests that the form of the short story is haunted in distinct ways. Hauntology is not only an important contribution to British contemporary literary studies, but a necessary political intervention that seeks to open up possibilities for the future. Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter, is the first scholarly volume to bring together a range of essays on Mantel, one of the most prestigious English novelists writing today. Wolfgang Funk’s contribution, ‘Becoming Ghost: Spectral Realism in Hilary Mantel’s Fiction’ (pp. 87–100), argues that Mantel’s fiction counteracts the rampant consumerism of the contemporary moment by privileging the unseen and the supernatural. He investigates the ghost as a literary metaphor and, although he does not mention hauntology, leans on Derrida to expand a description of what he terms ‘spectral realism’ (p. 88). Hauntings characterize many of the later chapters of this collection. Kathryn Bird analyses the way that the home is haunted by unseen physical and psychological violence in ‘“I Am a Settlement, a Place of Safety, a Bombproof Shelter”: Hauntings, Hospitality and Homeland Insecurity in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black’ (pp. 133–46). Lucy Arnold’s chapter, ‘Holy Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in Wolf Hall and Fludd’ (pp. 117–32), takes an analysis of haunting into the realm of authorship and suggests intertextuality is a spectral and haunting form. Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness, edited by Katy Shaw and Kate Aughterson, is a timely contribution to the burgeoning field of Crace studies. This essay collection grew out of a symposium on Crace’s writing that was facilitated by Man Booker’s charitable ‘Big Read’ programme (p. 4). Each chapter is thought-provoking in its own right, and taken as a whole the book provides critical insight on themes ranging through ecocriticism, spirituality, gender studies, temporality, cognition, and the pastoral. Diletta De Cristofaro’s chapter, ‘“False Patterns out of Chaos”: Writing Beyond the Sense of an Ending in Being Dead and The Pesthouse’ (pp. 65–79), examines the way that Crace’s fiction subverts the traditional sense of apocalyptic revelation and exposes ‘the sense of an ending as a construction’ (p. 66). Through a series of astute close readings, De Cristofaro demonstrates that these two texts underline our reliance on the sense of an ending to make sense out of time itself, while also emphasizing that such teleological sense-making is an exercise in narrative construction. In ‘Searching for the Gleaning Fields: Gleaners and Leanness in Jim Crace’s Harvest’ (pp. 131–48), Natalie Joelle explores Crace’s fascination with gleaners, and the practice of gleaning, in his fiction. She argues that Harvest [2013] is a distinctly political novel that depicts a moment of transition from gleaning, and a sense of enough, towards leaner thinking, accumulation, and the ‘increasingly capitalised economies of coming large-scale agriculture’ (p. 138). Edited collections on single authors seem to be on the rise this year, with Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire, edited by Philip Tew, joining those on Crace and Mantel. The latter half of this collection focuses on Coe’s post-2000 fiction. Sebastien Jenner takes on ‘Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle and a Satiric Mirror’ (pp. 125–40), while Francesco di Bernardo tackles ‘A Terrible Precariousness: Financialisation of Society and the Precariat in Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim’ (pp. 141–54). Both deal with the onset of neoliberalism and the withering away of state support, and Jenner contrasts the political homogenization of the early twenty-first-century Third Way with the hotly contested politics of the 1970s. Philip Tew and Vanessa Guignery focus their critical attention on Coe’s Number 11 [2015]. Guignery’s ‘Gothic Horror and Haunting Processes’ (pp. 169–84) considers the novel’s reliance on Gothic horror alongside international British politics, such as the invasion of Iraq, while Tew’s ‘Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity’ (pp. 185–200) examines the novel’s narrative concern with the suffering of disempowered individuals under an indifferent sociopolitical system that serves the privileged few. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau edited The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest, a collection of essays that consider heroes who embrace, rather than overcome, their struggles. Renate Brosch’s contribution, ‘Reading through the Body: The Damaged Mind in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’ (pp. 178–99), considers the emergence of the neuronovel subgenre alongside the notion of the wounded hero. He explains that a major common feature of these novels is the presence of an injured or ill character. Unlike typical event-driven hero narratives, Brosch argues, these contemporary fictions tend to deal with the after-effects of traumatic events. Remainder [2005] emerges as a case study that reflects this broader trend in neuronovels, and the chapter analyses the way that the novel utilizes the injured body to elicit empathy despite a narrative tone of emotional indifference. Rosario Arias’s chapter, ‘Wounded Characters and Vulnerable Lives and Places in Ian McEwan’s Saturday’ (pp. 114–29), draws a somewhat tenuous parallel between the cultural aftermath of 9/11 in the United States and that of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. Arias looks to Saturday [2005] as an example of wounded hero fiction, in which the protagonist discovers through his interactions with vulnerable others his own precariousness in a wounded world. The chapter goes on to make insightful points about the wounding of spaces, especially those that used to be associated with the sense of the heroic, in the twenty-first century. Other chapters on post-2000 British fiction include Jean-Michel Ganteau’s ‘Espousing the Wound: Dispossession as Practice in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin’ (pp. 60–73), Georges Letissier’s ‘The Eclipse of Heroism and the Outing of Plural Masculinities in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child’ (pp. 42–59), and Laura Colombino’s ‘Caring, Dwelling, Being: The Phenomenology of Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ (pp. 203–22). Merritt Moseley’s ‘Julian Barnes and the Contemporary English Sequel’ (pp. 128–41), Isabelle Robin’s ‘P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley: A Sequel with Many Twists’ (pp. 163–73), and Georges Letissier’s ‘Uncanny Repetitions: The Generative Power of the “Reader, I Married Him” Mantra in Tracy Chevalier’s Anthology of Short Stories’ (pp. 177–92) are all collected in Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, edited by Armelle Parey. Terrorism and Literature, edited by Peter C. Herman, contains some important contributions to post-2000 British literary studies. Most notable here are Michael C. Frank’s ‘“Why Do They Hate Us?”: Terrorists in American and British Fiction of the Mid-2000s’ (pp. 340–60) and Tim Gauthier’s ‘Conceptual Confusion: The Ambiguities of the War on Terror in Roy Bhattacharya’s The Watch and Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations’ (pp. 412–31). Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story began as Bettina Jansen’s Ph.D. thesis. Through a focus on black British writing from the 1950s to the twenty-first century, Jansen traces the complex and heterogeneous communities that comprise Britain and places them in direct opposition to ‘populist and nationalist evocations of an “original” ethno-racial community’ (p. 1). The latter third of the book deals with post-2000 fiction, namely the work of Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Hari Kunzru. Jansen’s chapter on Saadi’s renegotiation of his Scottishness is particularly interesting. It explains a lack of critical interest in Saadi’s work in the context of his Scottish nationality, Muslim faith, Pakistani community, and his writerly interest in working-class lives. Jansen examines Saadi’s Scottish stories as challenges to ‘the reductive image of white, Celtic Scottishness’ (p. 188). She distinguishes between two different forms of literary exploration in Saadi’s writing, suggesting that his urban writing tends to offer a postcolonial rewriting that culminates in a mythical vision of an all-encompassing unified future, while his rural stories caricature stereotypes to undermine essentialisms. These two forms work in tandem to keep each other in check. The final section of Narratives of Community considers black British writing in the context of cosmopolitanism, and especially the post-9/11 shift towards a cosmopolitanism that ‘acknowledges conflict, crisis and threat’ (p. 251). Jansen does an excellent job of problematizing the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ itself by explaining its roots and historical trajectory before landing on contemporary postcolonial theories of plural ‘cosmopolitanisms’. A chapter on Kunzru’s development of a ‘global vista’ (p. 261) in spatial and thematic terms is followed by the book’s closing chapter, which returns to Saadi and asserts that he is the ‘contemporary black British writer who is most concerned with cosmopolitanism in his short fiction (p. 279). Though this claim is not necessarily defended to the extent it deserves, the chapter of analysis that follows convincingly demonstrates the cosmopolitan strain in Saadi’s writing. Emily Spiers’s Pop-Feminist Narratives: The Female Subject under Neoliberalism in North America, Britain, and Germany dedicates its fourth chapter to contemporary British fiction (pp. 135–83). Spiers analyses the ways that the writing of Scarlett Thomas, Helen Walsh, and Gwendoline Riley problematize subjectivity by fragmenting coherent identities. She argues that these writers present female transgression as a complex oscillation between liberating and containing agency. The chapter is built upon reading these literary fictions against pop-feminist handbooks by British journalists like Caitlin Moran and Haley Freeman that offer an explicitly feminist identity ‘packaged as a ready-made, celebrity-endorsed ontological product’ (p. 135). This proves to be an exceptionally interesting method to critique these ready-made pseudo-feminist products that doubles up as a remedy to the paucity of critical attention paid to writers like Scarlett Thomas. Incest in Contemporary Literature, edited by Miles Leeson, collects a series of essays in an attempt to work through the fractious relationship that literature has with the depiction of incest. Most of the essays consider the multiple ways in which incest is deployed as a political metaphor. Richard Duggan, in ‘“Our Close But Prohibited Union”: Sibling, Incest, Class and National Identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale’ (pp. 180–97), for instance, identifies the motif of sibling incest in this novel as signifying a shift in Banks’s reflections on Scottish national identity towards a sense of Scotland existing between cultures rather than in isolation. This book tends towards thinking of a long contemporary moment, with scant offerings on post-2000 fiction beyond Duggan’s chapter. Nicole Falkenhayer’s Media, Surveillance and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States offers a cultural study of the integration of surveillance into everyday life. She interrogates the affective implications of social control, and explores not only the ways in which we imagine and narrate surveillance but also the ways in which surveillance has itself been used to narrate stories of Great Britain. This is an interdisciplinary book that analyses film and even CCTV footage as well as literature. The third chapter of the book contains the most sustained engagement with British literature, focusing on Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost [2007] and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English [2011]. Falkenhayer defines these as fictions of being captured, and contends that they narrate a world in which we are always already captured by the pervasive and invasive apparatus of surveillance. Media, Surveillance and Affect is a captivating appraisal of technologies that have become normalized exceptionally fast in contemporary life, especially in Britain, but have enormous implications in the social and political realms. Twenty-First Century British Fiction and the City, edited by Magali Cornier Michael, is a wonderful collection of essays. The entire book is an important contribution to twenty-first-century British literary studies. Ella Mudie’s chapter, ‘Convulsions of the Local: Contemporary British Psychogeographical Fiction’, uses close readings of Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Nick Papadimitrou on the unique capacity of psychogeographical writing to ‘question neoliberal capitalism’s pervasive restructuring of everyday life’ (p. 208). While its uniqueness in this regard is somewhat taken for granted, the chapter impressively elucidates the myriad ways in which psychogeographical fiction destabilizes neoliberal spatiality. For example, Mudie uses an analysis of Iain Sinclair’s Dining on Stones, or The Middle Ground [2004], which she characterizes as a psychogeography of the A13, to think about the liminal zones outside of the capital city’s boundaries and the significance of shifting beyond and outside of the parameters of ‘Literary London that was very much the focal point of psychogeographical practices in England in the 1990s’ (p. 211). Cosmopolitanism crops up again in Magali Cornier Michael’s chapter, ‘The Cosmopolitan Potential of Urban England? Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’. She examines fictional representations of and responses to the tension between universal concern and respect for difference in the cosmopolitan ideal, and identifies If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things [2002] as a particularly strong case in point. Cornier Michael links the novel’s alternation between two narrative strands, one made up of short sketches and the other an omniscient narrative, with the oscillation between the universal and the particular that cosmopolitan thought must mediate. By emphasizing everyday material existence alongside bodily vulnerability, Cornier Michael argues, the novel champions a grounded sense of potential connection that gestures towards a hopeful cosmopolitanism in spite of that which appears to stand in the way. Nick Bentley’s chapter, ‘“Why Should You Go Out?”: Encountering the City in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, considers the spatial politics of the city/village dichotomy which he reads alongside other binaries, such as modernity/tradition, public/domestic, and multiculturalism/monoculturalism. He is quick to emphasize that Brick Lane [2007] cannot simply be explained through these binary oppositions. Like Cornier Michael, Bentley shifts his focus to oscillation and the way the novel depicts interstitial spaces between binaries. This chapter deals not only with the poetics and aesthetics of space in Brick Lane, but also the political implications of the novel within and beyond the real space of Brick Lane. Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, edited by Deirdre Flynn and Eugene O’Brien, is a collection of essays that address loss in Irish literature in a number of ways, ranging from ‘loss of language to personal loss, sovereign loss to economic loss’ (p. 1). The essays assembled here engage poetry and drama as well as the novel. Two chapters are of particular interest to scholars of post-2000 fiction: Maria Beville’s ‘In Search of Lost History: Embodied Memory and the Material Past in Post-Millennial Irish Fiction’ (pp. 21–36) takes a new materialist approach to Anne Enright’s The Gathering [2007] and John Banville’s The Sea [2005] in order to explore the relationship between objects, the material past, and memory. Beville succinctly explains the new materialist desire to centre the body in cultural criticism, and makes an excellent observation that the transition from poststructuralism to new materialism is ‘literally the plot of Enright’s The Gathering’ (p. 22). She argues that both of these novels chart a shift away from a relativizing and destabilizing relationship to memory and history towards a resolute, material-reliant approach to the past. Deirdre Flynn’s chapter, ‘Holding on to “Rites, Rhythms and Rituals”: Mike McCormack’s Homage to Small Town Irish Life and Death’ (pp. 37–52) explores the effects of neoliberalism, with particular emphasis on the fall of the Celtic Tiger, through McCormack’s Solar Bones [2016]. The novel’s protagonist, Marcus Conway, has died and returns for All Souls’ Day. Flynn argues that, in order for him to come to terms with his own loss of life, he must first come to terms with economic loss and the effect this has had on the rites and rituals of his small-town home. She suggests that the liminal space between life and death that Marcus inhabits provides a unique vantage point from which he can see through the chaos to find connections, between life and land, and the personal and political. 4. Drama Pre-1950 (a) General Interest in the impact of the two world wars on theatre continues to be high, with the publication in 2018 of several books that look at representations of the Great War, musical theatre, and developments in the immediate period after 1945. There have also been additions to the growing studies of suffrage drama, theatre in Ireland, and a welcome reprint of a book on left-wing theatre. There has been a pleasing rise of interest on theatre between 1914 and 1918. Roger Foss’s book, Till the Boys Come Home: How British Theatre Fought the Great War, is a useful addition to this, and it is lavishly illustrated with pictures of plays, programmes, and sheet music. He starts with a description of Gerald du Maurier’s An Englishman at Home [1909], in which an ordinary middle-class family is invaded by foreign soldiers. The themes of national fear and patriotism picked up on concerns at the time about the country’s lack of national defence. Lord Kitchener approved of battalions made up of professions, and only a few months into the war, 600 ‘actor-warriors’ had joined up. Ivor Novello’s ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was described by the Daily Mail as ‘the battle hymn of the Great War’, providing morale for the troops. Programmes advertised shops that sold all-British products, publicity photographs showed cast members knitting items to be shipped abroad, and everywhere there was huge support for jingoistic material. The theatre had already been at the forefront of recruitment campaigns, encouraging men to enlist to protect ‘their’ country. When war was declared in 1914, any even remotely patriotic piece was greeted with enthusiasm, whether that was Clara Buck singing ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’ or a tableau of actresses representing Russia, Belgium, Britannia, and France in the revue Not Likely at the Alhambra [1914]. Many productions were altered to include topical references or at least one patriotic song or address. It was important for theatre workers to stress British credentials. The Lorch family, the highest-paid circus troupe in the world, was arrested in Middlesbrough because they were German-Jewish. Others anglicized or changed their names, including the royal family (although that didn’t happen of course until 1917). There are also lively descriptions of what happened to men who had not enlisted, such as when a seaside concert party in Colwyn Bay nearly provoked a riot on the erroneous presumption that the performers were shirking their duties. Foss’s book has a chapter dedicated to each year of the war, which means that there is less emphasis upon the cross-fertilization of ideas across the period; however, this structure does provide a useful trajectory of the rise, decline, and rise again of the theatre during the war years, much of which was affected by the privations of war and interference of the government. While the book focuses on the home front, Foss conveys the excitement felt by soldiers abroad of visiting concert parties, including those headed by Lena Ashwell, who established a scheme to have theatres in every camp in the country and took her concert parties to the front from 1915. By 1916 enlistment had been so successful that women had to take over many traditionally male roles: stage-door keepers, theatre managers, producers, and so on. This is an under-researched area and it would have been useful to hear more on this topic, but altogether this is a valuable book on theatre during the war years. Naomi Paxton continues her researches into women and theatre in Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–58, and like Foss’s book it contains illustrations of artefacts of the time. Chapters are entitled: ‘Exhibition’, ‘Sisterhood’, ‘Visibility’, ‘Militancy’, ‘Hope’, and ‘Legacy’. The introduction sets out to re-evaluate the AFL, explaining that while much has been written on the topic, there has been so much emphasis upon the AFL’s links with the suffrage movement that its wider nuances have been left under-explored. Acknowledgement is given to Julie Holledge, whose Innocent Flowers sparked the first wave of interest in suffrage drama in 1981. Paxton’s book draws on this seminal work and other studies, but goes further by making connections, not just between the AFL and suffrage drama but wider theatre history at the time, such as socialist and political drama. In this way, greater weight is given to the influence of its many male supporters, including J.M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Israel Zangwill. Paxton draws upon ‘micro history’ (p. 2), such as details of factual data and oral narrative. There is much information here on how the AFL used large-scale exhibitions to publicize its work. One important aspect is the commodification of women in general and the suffrage movement in particular at this time. The AFL made good use of exhibitions to promote the work of the suffrage movement. The greatest was the WSPU Women’s Exhibition at the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge during 1909; but these also became testing places for performers to try out their work, thereby aiding professional development. Again, the AFL acted as a counterpoint to the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ with a strong sisterhood forming between members, not just within the suffrage movement, but in the theatre industry as a whole, as female playwrights, actresses, directors, and technical staff made connections that helped their careers. This was perhaps an earlier incarnation of the ‘consciousness-raising groups’ of the Women’s Liberation Movement, with spaces provided for women to explore their similar experiences of patriarchal oppression which then fed into the kind of plays being written. One important aspect of the AFL was the development of the Woman’s Theatre, headed by Inez Bensusan in 1913. This put women in charge of a theatre designed by and for them: more female roles, greater opportunities for theatre workers, improved employment conditions, and a better share of the profits. This fed into a wider international network, aided by a large foreign contingent of workers in the AFL: Bensusan herself was a Jewish Australian. The AFL’s presence in the form of respectable working women at mass marches and demonstrations helped to dispel the equation made between theatre and prostitution, women as the weaker sex, and ‘populist stereotypes of ugly, hysterical, disorganized, militant suffrage campaigners’ (p. 87). The AFL had to be careful not to align itself with the militant activities of the suffrage movement but rather to maintain a neutral stance, even while putting forward a social and political agenda. This helped to increase the longevity of the group. Indeed, past works on this topic have sometimes petered out after the start of the First World War, but there is plenty of information here about the AFL’s work during both world wars and beyond, showing how its legacy lasted until the end of the 1950s. While it was in existence for fifty years, suffrage drama only accounts for the first six years of this and has been, up to now, the most written about. Paxton’s book is therefore a welcome account of the wide range and impact of this politically based theatre group. Unusually but effectively, each chapter of Leslie Hill’s book, Sex, Suffrage and the Stage, starts with an anecdote about Elizabeth Robins, who is accorded her rightful position as a pioneer of women’s theatre and feminism. Hill uses the premiere of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1889 as her starting point and ends with the outbreak of war in 1914. This is treated as ‘one theatrical “generation” in terms of its understanding of theatrical conventions and innovations, literary associations, experiences and memories of current events, and interpersonal connections between people in overlapping social circles’ (p. xix). There are explorations of how the binary dualistic representations of the Victorian ‘fallen woman’ and the ‘angel in the house’ gave way to the role of the New Woman in the 1890s, and then how female stage roles became more politically charged in the Edwardian period. The broad sweep of this is well-trodden material, but Hill invigorates it with her mention of other works. For example, Robins’s book My Little Sister [1913] was initially a success, but failed when adapted for the theatre, not so much because of its subject of sex trafficking but because its indictment of the complicity of the establishment was deemed too problematic for the public stage. Perversely, Robins’s work may well have inspired Christabel Pankhurst to publish The Great Scourge and How To End It [1913], a condemnation of the sexual double standard and suffering of women infected with sexually transmitted diseases. In this way the interconnections between art and politics are therefore persuasively made. The usual suffrage plays are discussed: How the Vote Was Won [1909] by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John; A Chat with Mrs Chicky [1912], by Evelyn Glover; and Lady Geraldine’s Speech [1909], by Beatrice Harraden [1909]. It is pleasing, though, to see that there are also references to less well-known works such as Mary Cholmondeley’s Votes for Men [1909], Netta Syrett’s Might is Right [1909], and Joan Dugdale’s 10 Clowning Street [1913]. In the latter play, the prime minister’s daughters return from a stint working in low-paid jobs and challenge their father on his out-of-touch views on female working conditions. This is one of the plays at this time not just concerned with enfranchisement, but with social injustice as well. There is also a fascinating selection of photographs, including the ‘Trafalgar Square’ scene from Robins’s Votes for Women [1907], Marjorie Annan Bryce as Joan of Arc at the huge Women’s Procession in June 1911, and Indian suffragists on the Women’s Coronation Procession in the same year. One of the male supporters of female suffrage, J.M. Barrie, is the focus of a small book on Peter Pan by Lucie Sutherland. This is part of Routledge’s Fourth Wall series, which is designed to give new critical perspectives on plays in a short format. Its size may be unusual (it is not even a hundred pages long) but it includes much useful information. Sutherland looks at Peter Pan, for too long seen as merely an entertaining children’s Christmas show, to explore not only why it has become a perennial favourite since its first performance on 27 December 1904 (the use of spectacle, action, nostalgia, and the power of imagination), but also its darker elements. Her book covers such issues as loneliness, loss, and death (Peter’s line ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ was the title of one of Beryl Bainbridge’s novels). However, while they are raised, there could have been much further analysis of these areas, not just in terms of Barrie’s personal relationship with the ‘Lost Boys’ but how this gained greater sociopolitical resonance after the First World War with its own ‘Lost Generation’. The author considers the commercial aspects of the play, the royalties from which are given in perpetuity to Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Children’s Charity. Much of the book is given over to aspects of staging and the myriad ways in which the play has been adapted. This includes Barrie himself, who continued to revise the text until his death in 1937, suggesting perhaps his inability to comes to terms with the traumatic roots of the subject. We learn that, while Barrie disapproved of Ibsenite realism, the stage directions of Peter Pan demand that all elements of the play, even including the fantastical, be treated with the same level of meticulousness. It is indebted to commedia dell’arte: Peter is a trickster based on Harlequin (who also influenced the role of the principal boy in pantomimes); similarly, Wendy is Columbine, who often takes control of the situation, as this female character does at the end of the play. Much enlightening information is provided about the ‘age-blind’ casting of the first production. Creating the role of Peter, Nina Boucicault’s unhelpful instruction from Barrie was to play him as a ‘one-day-old bird’ and she was so relieved to hear thunderous applause from the first-night audience that she burst into tears of relief. In the same production, Peter’s costume gave the appearance of dying vegetation so that he could blend into the landscape of Never-Never Land, and Tinker Bell did not wear a fairy outfit with wings, but one that gave the impression of a shimmering mirage of coloured lights. The genre of pantomime also appears in Ben McPherson’s book Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre 1890–1939, which is a handsome hardback, although it would have been greatly enhanced by the use of illustrations. McPherson is commendably concerned with the representation of identity on stage, especially in relation to Britishness and the empire, and shows how this intersects with issues of class and gender. Evidence is provided of the complexities of national identity, noting the differences between English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, and how the concept of being British changed under the three monarchs who ruled from 1837 to 1936. This was also affected by developments in the way that the empire was seen, as well as the First World War. The author notes that musical theatre is a catch-all genre, encompassing burlesque, comedy, music hall, and English comic opera. McPherson shows how this genre afforded the perfect opportunity for the cultural performance of Britishness, though the increasing use of terms such as Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Scottish, and Anglo-Welsh had the effect of redefining ‘Britishness’ as more specifically meaning ‘Englishness, with London at its metropolitan centre’ (p. 37). Musical comedy soon became a genre that showed the pressure of modernity: its issues often focused on the clash between the rural and the urban, as well as charting the changing role of women. There is an especially interesting chapter on how the representation of the ‘shop girl’ in musical comedy helped to problematize the Victorian division of the spheres. As McPherson explains, ‘In an era where a woman’s place was in the private domestic sphere, young, working class woman …quickly became part of the public sphere; a potent symbol of materialism and female empowerment (or “transgression”) in modernity’ (p. 67). This is more evident in plays such as The Shop Girl [1894], The Girl from Kays [1903], and The Girl Behind the Counter [1906] rather than in the commercially advantageous relationship between the stage and the fashion and beauty industries. The war changed the late Victorian view of masculinity as imbued in Christian stoicism based on the Protestant work ethic to one more concerned with the self-effacing loyalty of the working classes in The Lads of the Village [1917], as well as expressing anxieties about the lessening of the power of the patriarch, demonstrated in Betty [1915]. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the section on empire: ‘Ornamentalism and Orientalism’. The author reminds us of the power and spread of the British empire and shows how this was represented on stage, obviously in terms of the depiction of racial difference, but McPherson also shows how this is shown too via class, rank, and status. Much has previously been said about representations of China and Japan, but here there is also mention of other colonies, most specifically in India, in The Cingalee [1904] and The Blue Moon [1905], and Sri Lanka in In Sweet Ceylon [1905]. Gill Plain’s edited collection British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar provides a persuasive argument that literature of the period between the landslide victory of the Labour Party in 1945 and the start of the Swinging Sixties was an important (and oft-overlooked) period of rapid transformation. Plain sees ‘post-war’ as referring not only to a historical period but also a ‘“cultural sensibility”, reaching back into the war and forward into the second half of the twentieth century; it is a political condition and a state of mind’ (pp. 3–4). This consists of a tension between the need for change but also for the stability of the familiar. Two chapters relate specifically to the theatre. Rebecca D’Monte’s ‘Democracy, Decentralisation and Diversity: The Renaissance of British Theatre’ (pp. 68–84) suggests that the theatre of the immediate post-war period is far less conservative than generally thought. Instead, this was a period that continued the radicalization of theatre during the Second World War, especially in terms of location, staging, and subject matter, the latter of which was heavily influenced by European pioneers, including Brecht, Ionesco, and Sartre. It was also a time that the boundaries between amateur and professional and regional and the metropolis were redrawn, along with the bringing together of the commercial and the avant-garde. Class and gender lines were being renegotiated well before the appearance of the Angry Young Man in the mid- to late 1950s, some expressions of which, like John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger [1956], were dramatically far less radical than, say, Bridget Boland’s Cockpit eight years earlier in 1948. The shifting population of the war years, with the concomitant growth in regional theatre, had led to a new type of audience, triggering a growing egalitarianism, furthered by interest in the civic function of theatre as a place to educate and enlighten, not just to entertain. Clare Cochrane’s chapter, ‘Creating Vital Theatre: New Voices in a Time of Transition’ (pp. 313–30), again considers how the canon of this period’s drama was set by Look Back in Anger, a play that marked the watershed moment which seemingly separated the past and the present. However, figures like Joan Littlewood and George Devine were more essential to the concept of a ‘vital theatre’, promoted by Encore magazine between 1956 and 1965 as bringing together the theatrically avant-garde with the socially concerned. It is good to see mention made of N.F. Simpson (seen by William Gaskill as a link between the Goon Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus), Arnold Wesker, and John Arden, all underrated playwrights of the period. Cochrane’s research shows how the Royal Court theatre championed not only plays about the working classes and regions but also (if only occasionally) work that reflected the growth of multi-cultural Britain with its racial issues, including plays by Barry Reckord, Errol John, and Wole Soyinka. Lady Augusta Gregory appears in most studies of Irish theatre, but Eglantina Remport’s Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics is the first full-length account of her vision of her aesthetic and social ideals. Ample demonstration is given of how she was affected by, or was part of, several key artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Pre-Raphaelites, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. Her plays Spreading the News [1904] and Hyacinth Halvey [1906] were very much taken up with the co-operative ideals put forward by Horace Plunkett and George Russell, but she was mainly impacted upon by John Ruskin’s views on social reform and artistic freedom, and much is made of his influence. In this, she differed from Yeats, with whom she co-founded the Abbey Theatre (originally known as the Irish National Theatre) in 1904. During her time Gregory worked tirelessly to promote change in Irish politics and the arts, but Remport interrogates the view that she was merely a member of the landed aristocracy, patron of the arts, and dilettante dramatist. Along the way the myth is also exploded that she was a consistently militant Irish nationalist. Cathleen Ni Houlihan (written with Yeats in 1902) and The Rising of the Moon [1907] are regularly touted as nationalist plays, but this ignores later texts which differ from this political view, such as The Canavans [1908] or The Wrens [1914]. Here we are given a fresh perspective which focuses on Gregory as an important social reformer whose Ruskinian beliefs brought about significant changes. Her artistic vision was shaped not just by the European Grand Tours that she took, but also Ruskin’s view that art should be for the many, not the few. Remport therefore highlights the reciprocity for Gregory between social reform and art to a level that has not been done before. In this way she puts forward a persuasive argument for Gregory as a social, political, and theatrical pioneer who did much to shape Ireland in the first part of the twentieth century. Fabio Luppi’s Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904–1938) also offers a fresh look at the history of the Abbey Theatre, this time by focusing on the tension between fathers and sons. He argues that the father figure on stage is a representation of a patriarchal figure (familial and religious) as well as a political metaphor for a crucial period in Irish history. Luppi makes reference to classical father–son relationships—such as Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus, Priam and Hector—to show how these figures were subverted in a way that underpinned the tragedy of post-colonial Ireland. Reference is also made to the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, Jung, and Lacan. One of the best aspects of the book is that it does not just draw on familiar dramatists associated with the Abbey Theatre, including Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Lady Gregory, but also on some of the less discussed playwrights of the period: Padraic Colum, George Shiels, and Teresa Deevy. St John Ervine, better known as a theatre critic, also crops up. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [1907] is perhaps the most commonly cited Irish play in which a son imagines the death of his father, illustrating the desire to escape from authority and the constrictions of the past. Interestingly, Luppi points out that at this time there were many more theatrical instances in which a father destroys his son, such as On Baile’s Strand [1904], The Blind Wolf [1928], and Purgatory [1938], suggesting that even across four decades the forces of tradition, religion, and politics were still too strong to break. The book continues the view that the history of the Abbey Theatre and that of the politics of the time can be mapped onto one another, and this is used as a way to structure the book. From the opening of the theatre in 1904 to the Easter Rising of 1916, the plays tended to debate the impossibility of a non-violent response to British colonialism versus Irish paralysis. From 1916 to 1922 there was emphasis upon pro-independent views; 1922 to 1932 was the most tumultuous period, witnessing violence and riots, while the period 1932 to 1938 was both more peaceful yet ironically less experimental. As Luppi cogently points out, the father–son relationship calls ‘into question basic concepts regarding social life: the concept of blood, intended as family values and the transmission of legacy; the idea of progress; the concept of familial cohesion that did not coincide with an increase in the Irish population; the natural conservative structure of rural societies in contrast with the need for change felt by new generations; social friction in urban areas’ (p. xvi). At the end of the book a short but useful chapter gives brief biographies of some of the playwrights, especially Yeats, to consider how their own relationships with their fathers might have influenced their work. Finally, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America, edited by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, appears as part of the Routledge Revivals series, which reprints important past works on theatre. First published in 1985, this is an excellent sourcebook of documents and commentary from the high point of working-class theatre. It takes into account the history of theatre and socialism from 1880 to 1935 and how this led to the founding and development of the Workers’ Theatre Movement between 1926 and 1935. There are also several of their propaganda pieces here, including The First of May [1932] and The Rail Revolt [1932]. Roy Waterman gives his experience of Proltet, the Yiddish-speaking arm of the WTM, and Ewan MacColl explains how Theatre of Action came into being in Manchester. An international perspective is given by referencing the Workers’ Theatre in America, with scripts including the famous play by Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty [1935]. (b) George Bernard Shaw This year saw four notable new additions to Palgrave’s Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries series. The first of these, Christopher Wixon’s Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives, delves into Shaw’s understanding and use of advertising both in the fashioning of his public persona as ‘GBS’ and in the expression of ideas in his plays and other works. After an introduction that connects Shaw personally and professionally with the rise of modern advertising, chapter 2 contextualizes the influence of the marketing of medicine in London at the turn of the century and Shaw’s own views about both. This, in turn, informs an analysis of Misalliance that focuses on the elements which, like the Turkish bath, epitomize the novel phenomenon of health products as modern commodities. This question is also connected to Shaw’s personal habits in diet, hygiene, clothing, and exercise, for example. The portable bath unit becomes an iconic element in a household that Shaw depicts as ‘toxic, contaminated not only by mass cultural consumption but also by idleness and physical degeneration’ (p. 44). Chapter 3 illustrates how ‘the continued honing of the testimonial technique in commercial advertising would prove anything but a misalliance’ with Shaw’s ‘rhetorical prowess’ (p. 62). As the rhetorical and technical aspects of this type of advertising evolved, to the point of being ‘marred by both overusage and improper attribution without consent’ (p. 67), Shaw took issue with this phenomenon. Chapter 4 discusses how ‘Shaw’s participation in two product campaigns in 1929, one for Harrods and one for Simmons mattresses, plants him in the middle of the industry controversy over what to do with the testimonial’ (p. 95). Along these lines, this chapter provides insights into ‘how executives and writers in the industry worked to render profitable mergings of literary personality with commodities’ (p. 97). Chapter 5 describes how, as the industry was fighting ‘for legitimacy and seek new ways to regain the public’s attention and trust’, Shaw again became ‘the linchpin of a campaign that sought to counteract the technique’s beleaguered public reputation’ (p. 135). Shaw’s hand in the campaign to promote Ireland as a tourist destination is then described in great detail, from its genesis and relative success to the part the playwright played in its delineation and ultimate outcome. All of this is done against the backdrop of Shaw’s views on the travel industry and its connections with imperialism and the political situation of Ireland, particularly as shown in John Bull’s Other Island. The book, in conclusion, encapsulates the idea that Shaw had a ‘prophet motive’ in his engagement with advertising, as he seems to have foreseen the industry’s growth and ramifications. Concentrating on Shaw’s novels, Stephen Watt’s Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect studies concepts that are rather elusive, like affect or value, alongside others that are more palpable, like money. Chapter 1 argues that the confluence of ‘economics, psychology, affect theory, and, perhaps surprisingly, performance studies’ is necessary to Watt’s approach (p. 1). This introductory chapter connects the feelings of worthlessness, anger, and disgust that Shaw often felt as a result of his ‘chronic impecuniosity’ (p. 3), which to some extent led to his study of economic theory. This resulting interest, in turn, made him the acquaintance of a number of his contemporaries who were knowledgeable in this field. These circumstances, Watt argues, sparked ‘The Theatre of the Future’, a work that constitutes ‘both a forecast of and a prescient “shorthand” for Shaw’s understanding of human subjectivity’, especially in relation to performance, ‘the substitution inherent to it’ and the vital role of money in the ‘psychical life of the human subject’ (p. 19). These intersections lead to the introduction of key characters in Shaw’s plays as subject studies for Watt, whether it be because they are ‘self-made’, like Undershaft (Major Barbara), or because money is at the root of their ethos, like Crofts (Mrs Warren’s Profession). Chapter 2 uses psychoanalytic theory in order to link Shaw’s psychological scope on value and affect with his symbolic use of money in plays like On the Rocks, ‘which braids affect with money but also comments on profectitious and adventitious money’ (p. 52). The second part of the chapter does likewise with Georg Simmel’s economic theory, which serves as the basis for a discussion of Shaw’s own understanding of value in technical terms. This, in turn, goes full circle when we understand ‘the manner in which the discourse of marginalist economic thought informs both Freud and Shaw’ (p. 66). In this regard, Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money is a fundamental text for the author at the intersection of economics and affect. As such, it shapes the interpretation of Shaw’s works: the psyche of Shaw’s characters is deeply influenced by money, even though his plays are still ‘plays of life, character, and human destiny’ and not essays on economics (p. 79). Chapter 3 explores the ‘power of money’ in all its manifestations. The power of money for Shaw involved ‘money’s relationship to respectability in both social and psychical arenas’, as well as ‘the analogous relationship of affect and psychical drive’ (p. 91). Watt connects the young, impecunious Shaw who was writing these novels (and the negative feelings associated with his largely unsuccessful drive for money) with the process of ‘how the naïve young writer evolved into a knowledgeable economist’ (p. 96). By and large, the ‘affective value’ of money and the feelings it generated for the young Shaw are the backbone of this chapter, whose social and psychological ramifications are illustrated using the characters in The Irrational Knot and Immaturity. Chapter 4 stems from Watt’s assessment of ‘Shaw’s framing of highly emotive action within the context of money’ (p. 140) in two chapters of Love Among the Artists. Apart from the Simmelian elements that these passages anticipate, the use of ‘the theatre in these novels functions like’ many other ‘places where fiction meets the psychical realities of its audience, where conceptions of value are debated and either endorsed or toppled’ (p. 144). Chapter 5 uses Shaw’s fourth novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, as the basis for a discussion of psychic economy and the ubiquity of economic elements in the society of the turn of the century, as studied by Freud. This combination of the psychological and the material accounts for ‘the confirmation of shame’s existence through the blush, the stooped shoulder, or the averted gaze’ (p. 149), since shame is one of the negative feelings associated with poverty. The chapter then goes on to provide examples of a ‘taxonomy’ of ‘facial coloring in Shaw’s fiction’ as well as other examples of reactions that suggest shame, disgust, and other negative feelings brought about by economic questions (p. 156). Chapter 6 draws on the apparent paradoxes that critics have pointed out in An Unsocial Socialist in order to scrutinize ‘the overdetermined nature of Trefusis’s unsocial “heartlessness”’ and ‘the broadly subjective dimensions of “industrial kingship”, particularly its mechanizing and fracturing of the human subject’ (p. 182). Trefusis’s behaviour is read against the backdrop of Shaw’s biography and a Freudian approach to narcissism. It should also be noted that the original project of the novel was ‘intended as either the inaugural installment of a multivolume chronicle of the “dissolution” of capitalism or as a social comedy aimed at eviscerating the arrogance, enervation, and greed of the privileged class’ (p. 183). In light of these premises, the consequences of industrialization are then studied from the perspective of Shaw’s own understanding of Marxist theories and marginalism. Here value is usually embodied by production and material objects, which ‘emerge as metaphors both in analyses of the failings of Victorian society and in more innocent observations about love, desire, and emotion’ (p. 203). A final chapter stresses how the combination of Shaw the socialist and the radical thinker on sexuality should be taken into consideration when trying to disentangle the difficult relationship between ‘sexual revolution and politico-economic theory—or, expressed more precisely, between desire and socialism’ in Shaw’s case (p. 218). The fourth and final monograph from Palgrave, Joan Templeton’s Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-appraisal, takes up a long-standing challenge in Shaw studies, recapitulating the immense critical tradition of both Ibsen’s influence on Shaw and Shaw’s critique of Ibsen. It also, perhaps most importantly, reassesses a series of fossilized ideas about the intellectual and artistic concomitances between both playwrights. The book follows a chronological progression from Shaw’s formative years as a budding dramatic critic to the revised edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism [1913]. Chapter 1 covers the period in which Shaw was introduced to Ibsen and how his ideas were shaped by the different works he had access to and the different Ibsenists he was in contact with, such as Eleanor Marx. Shaw’s friendship with William Archer is a case in point, for his translations of Ibsen were a ‘transformative experience’ for Shaw (p. 9). ‘Even in another language’, Templeton argues, ‘without the rhyme and meter of the original, Peer Gynt shocked Shaw into an awareness of Ibsen’s power’ (p. 10). Much of the rest of the chapter is concerned with Shaw’s ‘spirited defense of A Doll’s House’ (p. 22) during its successful London run in 1889. In chapter 2, Templeton delves into the genesis of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The primal spark here was the 1890 lecture to the Fabian Society. Ibsen’s anti-idealism is here placed in context with a succinct section on the development of his revolutionary ideas, especially through his intellectual (and largely epistolary) relationship with Georg Brandes. By outlining the scheme of Shaw’s train of thought in an orderly manner and by pointing out the qualities that Shaw stressed in each of Ibsen’s plays, Templeton manages ‘to explain both the essential core of Ibsen’s thinking and the meaning of the term “Ibsenism” in contemporary parlance’ (p. 55). Chapter 3 examines Ibsen’s influence on Shaw as a playwright and critic during this period. Templeton revisits classic connections, such as those between A Doll’s House and Candida, but also explores interesting, sometimes obscure intellectual, circumstantial, or personal links between other plays by both authors. Exploring Shaw’s dramatic criticism too, Templeton shows how he put his ‘Ibsenite lens’ (p. 185) to good use, whether in his reviews of Ibsen productions or in his habit of using ‘Ibsen as his standard for making invidious comparisons’ (p. 187). Chapter 4 offers commentary upon Shaw’s obituary of Ibsen in 1906 as well as the revised edition of The Quintessence, published seven years later. Templeton argues that, apart from a largely laudatory tone, Shaw is able to pinpoint the ‘new element’ in Ibsen’s work—modernism—as well as technical innovations that effectively brought about a new genre: the drama of ideas. The journal SHAW began 2018 with a themed issue on ‘Shaw in Performance’ that is more eclectic than is customary. This begins with a general introduction by the guest editors, Robert A. Gaines and Michael O’Hara, who declare their intention to veer off the road ‘of literary criticism and theory’ (p. 1). The resulting volume incorporates contributions from the ‘the emerging field(s) of performance studies/theory’ (p. 1), alongside several articles which cast light on the practical conundrum of how ‘the director, dramaturg, and actress’ make decisions that give ‘her the dignity and respect Shaw envisioned for her’ (p. 4). Susan Felder’s ‘Finding Shaw: A Hard Look at American Theatre Trends, Dwindling Technique, and the Next Generation of Actors’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 6–19), reproduces a conversation between the author and two directors known for their productions of Shaw, Robert Scogin and William Brown. Their prognostic opinions about Shaw’s legacy are based on reflections about how actors are trained, the intellectual habits of audiences, and the role of ‘discussion plays’ in the age of Twitter, among other things. The practical implications of these reflections can be seen in four subsequent essays: John M. McInerney’s ‘Directing Shaw Plays for Community Theatre Audiences’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 41–7) uses a production of Arms and the Man he directed at the Providence Road Theatre in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the basis for comment on what separates Shaw from other playwrights. Susan Frances Russell and Mary Christian use their respective essays to discuss whether or how to update certain aspects of Shaw’s dramatic works. More specifically, Russell’s ‘The Personal Is Political: Performing Saint Joan in the Twenty-First Century’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 88–112) explores how future productions of the play could benefit from the success of two one-act plays about the Maid of Orleans written by women. ‘Looking at Shaw’s Saint Joan side by side with Carolyn Gage’s deliberately provocative polemic The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Martha Kemper’s autobiographical collage Me, Miss Krause and Joan’, Russell argues, allows ‘directors, dramaturgs and actors’ to access ‘a more feminist performance of Shaw’s play’ (p. 89). Of particular relevance are the passages that relate to intertextuality and how, in general terms as well as in the plays mentioned here, our reception of a play is inevitably shaped by other works that have been written ‘in dialogue with it’ (pp. 91–2). Mary Christian focuses on ‘Plays Present and Unpresent: Updating Shaw’s Drama in Performance’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 113–25), commenting on the challenges and opportunities of modernizing Shaw’s plays by ‘setting [their] characters and action in the present’ (p. 123). Christian takes the 2015 production of Pygmalion at the Shaw Festival as a case study. In doing so, she looks into techniques that were unheard of when the play was originally written. These vary from utilizing BBC video to portraying Higgins as a snob who own lots of ‘expensive gadgets’ from the digital era (p. 119). Other ways of updating the setting of the play have to do with changes in costume design, the professions of some of the characters, and even the ‘racial otherness’ of the actress playing Eliza (p. 121). All of these aspects, as the author eloquently points out, have deep ramifications for the play’s meaning, and not only its social meaning. The other three articles in this issue take a historical approach. Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín’s ‘Santa Juana: The Opening Season in Spain (1925–26)’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 20–40) analyses the premiere of Saint Joan in Spain. Actor and impresario Margarita Xirgu, who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the first Shaw success in Spain, led a production that toured the country for over a year. The argument of the essay is informed by circumstantial elements, such as the influence of the political situation in the country and the composition and accuracy of the translated text or the inevitable comparisons with other simultaneous productions in Europe. Soudabeh Anisarab’s ‘Too True To Be Good at the 1932 Malvern Festival’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 48–65) explores this particular production to illustrate how Barry Jackson’s change of direction in the mandate of the festival—which involved an ‘emphasis on overseas visitors’ and consequently ‘the announcement of plans for presenting a pageant of English drama’ (p. 51), conflicted with Shaw’s pessimistic (‘dystopian’) views about the future of England. Anisarab singles out Shaw’s critical views towards religion and the empire in the play, not only to explain the conflict that is at the heart of the essay, but also to introduce later opinions expressed by Shaw about ‘his sense of estrangement from’ the Malvern Festival (p. 62). Finally, Keith Dorwick’s ‘Joined Together as One: The Animal Dances in Androcles and the Lion’ (ShawR 38:i[2018] 66–87) pinpoints a very concrete, and very Shavian, aspect of this play: the dances between the two title characters. A likely elaboration on a drawing from the Comic Almanack, the dance is one of the novel elements that Shaw incorporates into the traditional accounts of this legend, which Dorwick summarizes at length. The author then moves on to explain the genesis of the play and of the features that deviate from the original fable, especially the unlikely friendship between slave and lion and its theatrical expression. The other issue of SHAW from 2018 contains some articles that follow on from or complement previous work published there, inevitably prompting avid Shavian readers to reach for earlier issues. Thus, for example, Daniel Leary’s ‘Anagogue/Archetype in Arms and the Man: Shaw, Virgil, and Jung’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 196–213) is a continuation of the article he wrote for the themed issue on ‘Shaw and Classical Literature’ in 2017. Here, Leary closes his comparative arguments between Arms and the Man and Virgil’s Aeneid by focusing on the anagogical level of this intertextual study. In his part-Jungian, part-spiritual analysis of the hero that was later to become the Superman, Leary draws from varied sources to illustrate the genesis of the play and Shaw’s true intentions in writing it. In addition, there are relevant parallels between the characters, as archetypes, and between the structure of plot and sub-plot (or supra-plot) in both works. Similarly, Peter Gahan had already outlined in previous work some of the elements discussed in ‘Bernard Shaw’s The Glimpse of Reality and the Iconography of Saint Barbara’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 133–61), albeit with reference to other plays. This time, instead of Major Barbara, Gahan focuses on a play that has been neglected by critics for the most part. The main tenet of his article is that Shaw’s first-hand knowledge of fifteenth-century Flemish art, especially after his 1902 visit to Bruges to see an exhibition of the Flemish primitives, underlies some of the visual imagery in the play. The article begins by establishing the relevant background for his discussion, succinctly outlining the traditional iconography of St Barbara and describing the relevant paintings from the Bruges exhibition. In light of this evidence, Gahan explores Shaw’s ‘“serious” intent’ (p. 135) in writing The Glimpse of Reality through the potential connections between specific artwork and some of the elements in the play, particularly Van Eyck’s Saint Barbara. Lagretta Tallent Lenker writes on ‘Shaw’s Interior Authors: Censored and Modern’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 162–95). This essay looks into Shaw’s controversial relationship with the Lord Chamberlain and censorship at large through the exploration of those characters in his plays who either self-censor their work or are censored by fellow characters. More specifically, Lenker singles out Mrs Clandon in You Never Can Tell, John Tanner in Man and Superman, Fanny O’Dowda in Fanny’s First Play, the Brothers Barnabas in Back to Methuselah, and the Maid in Saint Joan. After a preliminary discussion of the general situation of censorship in Shaw’s time and his own views on the matter, Lenker sees Shaw’s fictional authors as reflections of the playwright himself ‘against the dialectic of censorship and modernism that shaped Shaw’s work’ (p. 167). Howard Ira Einsohn’s ‘Prophetic Comedy: Bernard Shaw, Flannery O’Connor, and the Sacred Laughter of Distance Realism’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 214–39) finds more parallelisms between Shaw and Flannery O’Connor ‘than perfunctory assessments might suggest’ (p. 214). Einsohn uses ‘Good Country People’ and Major Barbara as case studies that illustrate the similarities between the two authors. These lie both in the methods they employed, such as shocking comedy, and in the ideological basis of their ‘gospel’: a set of beliefs anchored in what may be loosely termed as Christianity. An article in this issue that will surely serve as a reference to Shaw scholars in the future is Michel Pharand’s ‘A Gospel of Shawianity’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 240–53). After some brief introductory remarks about Shaw’s very personal religious beliefs, this ‘Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Bernard Shaw on Religion’ lists the primary sources chronologically and the secondary sources alphabetically. After the usual section devoted to book reviews, this issue features ‘A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana’ (ShawR 38:ii[2018] 272–330). Edited by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín, this annotated bibliography is a more detailed version of the present bibliographical essay—at least in the sense that it also lists and comments on items that deal with Shaw studies only tangentially. The only other monograph devoted to Shaw-related questions is Bernard Shaw’s Postmistress, edited by Leonard W. Conolly. This is the memoir of Jisbella Lyth, whose tenure at the post office of Ayot St Lawrence and her acquaintance with Shaw make her an invaluable witness to the life and epistolary exchanges of the Irish playwright. This is not to mention the fact that Lyth was the inspiration for Z, the postmistress in Village Wooing. Of special interest also are her recollections of daily life around Shaw’s residence and her personal anecdotes about the writer, including her acquisition of interesting pieces of Shaviana through her contact with him. This memoir was originally recorded by Irish teacher and author Romie Lambkin, whose manuscript lay largely forgotten in David Grapes’s theatre collection until it was published by Conolly, who puts his scholarly acumen and his knowledge of Shaw’s life and works to good use in this edition. Elsewhere, Shaw continues to excite scholarly interest for his reinterpretation of historical figures. His study of Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra features importantly in Miryana Dimitrova’s Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife. Among some of the peculiarities of Shaw’s treatment of Caesar, Dimitrova observes ‘Shaw notably refused to accentuate the romance plot’ with Cleopatra, something that foreshadows what happened between Eliza and Higgins in Pygmalion (p. 105). Dimitrova also stresses the fact that Shaw’s Caesar is a man of action, who ‘confirms his reputation by demonstrating impatience symptomatic of his efficiency’ (p. 106). However, the most Shavian element is ‘the pronounced contemporizing’ of the protagonist (p. 185). Such use of history and historical figures by Shaw is famously anachronistic, largely because it is often a way of deploying his social critique while detaching the obvious subject matter of the play from contemporary concerns. Along these lines, Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín argues in his essay ‘Bernard Shaw and the Subtextual Irish Question’ (in Villanueva Romero, Amador-Moreno, and Sánchez García, eds., Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context, pp. 187–208) that there exists a series of overt and covert references to the political situation in Ireland in his two most famous historical plays: Caesar and Cleopatra [1899] and Saint Joan [1923]. The references occur in semiotic elements that range from paratexts and phraseology to symbolism and imagery. Jennifer Janecheck’s ‘Gendered Information Networks and the Telephone Voice in Shaw’s Pygmalion and Village Wooing’ (TSLL 60:i[2018] 32–55) explores the representation of the ‘telephone voice’ in two of Shaw’s plays, claiming that these two plays utilize the ideal of the voice of the Romantic Mother, which still polices the articulations of flesh-and-blood women through their adherence to and reproduction of ‘BBC English’. Janecheck argues that Pygmalion and Village Wooing trace the desexualization of textual production, with the male–female relationships they depict imagining the new experience women might have with language in a telephonic world. Shaw’s musical criticism is a major area of study among scholars of his work. A case in point is Paul Watt’s ‘The Rise of the Professional Music Critic in Nineteenth-Century England’ (in Golding, ed., The Music Profession in Britain, 1780–1920, pp. 110–27). This describes the careers and professional qualities of Bernard Shaw alongside two other ‘versatile critics’ (p. 112) of the period, namely, Ernest Newman and Neville Cardus. Watt stresses the features they shared, like coming ‘to their profession almost by accident’ and the connections they enjoyed, while also pointing out the differences in the ‘style in which they wrote’ (p. 118). A more specific approach is taken in Harry White’s ‘“Making Symphony Articulate”: Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History’ (in Dibble and Horton, eds., British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950, pp. 102–22), where the author discusses Shaw in the intellectual and stylistic context of his contemporary critics, particularly as pertains to Shaw’s championing of Wagner and Elgar. All of this without losing sight that ‘Shaw’s sense of musical history was deeply inflected by his own search for a voice and subject-matter in the theatre’ (p. 104). Shaw’s career as a playwright and critic is inextricably linked to his outspoken political activism, especially as regards the Great War. This is at the core of Philippa Burt’s discussion in ‘From the Western Front to the East Coast: Barker’s The Trojan Women in the USA’ (NTQ 34:iv[2018] 320–38). Shaw’s opinions reveal themselves as truly relevant to understanding the ramifications of this production, when Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season in New York following the outbreak of the First World War. In recent years little attention has been paid to the history of Shaw productions, particularly in the second half of the last century. In this regard, Audrey McNamara has singlehandedly filled some of that niche with two publications. ‘Longford Productions, Bernard Shaw, and the Irish Big House’ (in Clare, Lally, and Lonergan, eds., The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft, pp. 181–92) focuses on two high-profile productions of Heartbreak House, in 1946 and 1956, which are responsible for properly introducing Ireland to the play and where the ‘way of life portrayed demonstrates recognition that war is a consequence of boredom and lack of purpose as much as international tensions’ (p. 192). McNamara seeks to illustrate why Shaw was ‘a staple part’ of the repertoire of the Gate Theatre during the twenty-four years of Longford Productions’ existence (p. 182). A more contemporary scope is to be found in her chapter, ‘Reflections on Bernard Shaw and the Twentieth-Century Dublin Stage’ (in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, pp. 819–25), where she comments on the Shaw productions at the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre in the 2000s and 2010s. Special attention is paid to Mrs Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, and Heartbreak House to conclude that Shaw’s ‘plays still resonate in the twenty-first century in harmony with the work of the playwrights who have succeeded him’ (p. 824). Shaw’s personal life is also the subject of much scholarly debate, his sexuality being a case in point. Such is the focus of A.M. Gibb’s ‘Erica Cotterill and the Passionate Self of G.B. Shaw’ (ELT 61:iv[2018] 450–74). This essay ‘presents a new exploration of the Shaw–Cotterill relationship and of Shaw’s experiences of, and attitudes towards, sex’ in a way that challenges the view that he was a ‘bloodless, asexual vegetarian’ (p. 450). 5. Drama Post-1950 Amongst trends to the fore in this field during 2018 have been neoliberalism, Brexit, feminism, and issues around the body of the performer. The tenth anniversary of Harold Pinter’s death has been marked by two monographs, and Simon Stephens’s work continues to attract considerable critical attention. Stephen Wilmer’s Performing Statelessness in Europe examines a whole host of performative work about refugees that has emerged in recent years, a situation resulting, he believes, from collective government inaction in providing an ethical asylum policy. Wilmer argues that theatre enters this vacuum and becomes an important forum for debate and representation. The book considers responses by artists and theatre companies across Europe. Chapter 2 considers how Aeschylus’s tragedy The Suppliants (adapted in 2016 by the dramatist David Greig) can be understood against the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, and the way that refugees informed many debates held during the referendum. Chapter 3 discusses work that attempts to produce empathetic responses to the figure of the refugee. One case study here is Anders Lustgartern’s Lampedusa [2015], a monologue that uses direct address to its audience, a technique Wilmer identifies as reminiscent of Brecht’s Lehrstücke plays such The Mother [1931]. Wilmer also believes that the internet podcast of Lampedusa by the Guardian newspaper represents another method of reaching other sympathetic audiences. This search for a wider constituency has also included performances of Lustgarten’s play throughout Europe as well as Malta. Wilmer sees this venue as significant given its near location to the island itself. Anna Harpin’s Madness, Art & Society: Beyond Illness is a fascinating study that crosses the disciplines of film, theatre, and television. The book is organized into two sections: ‘Structures: Psychiatrists, Institutions and Treatments’ and ‘Experiences: Realities, Bodies, Moods’. The former focuses on how sites of power associated with mental illness, such as asylums, are represented. Chapter 1, ‘R.D. Laing and the Figure of the Psychiatrist’, looks at David Edgar’s Mary Barnes [1978]. This is still the key play that examines the relationship between the patient and Laing’s methodologies for the treatment of psychosis. Harpin is critical of some modes of representation employed in the play, commenting for example that ‘we only look at and never with Mary’ (p. 34). Chapter 2, ‘Sites of Madness’, includes a discussion on two plays by Joe Penhall, Some Voices [1994] and Blue/Orange [2000]. These both examine the treatment of the schizophrenic subject within the institution of the psychiatric hospital and post-treatment discharge in society. Some Voices is also considered through the ways that the patient is constructed and sometimes misunderstood following discharge from hospital and out into the wider community, while Harpin focuses on pedantic demarcations in the diagnoses of mental illness in Blue/Orange. In Part II, chapter 4, ‘Imagining Reality: Figuring Perceptual Experiences on Stage and Screen’, focuses discussion on aesthetic representation: here Anthony Neilson’s Realism [2006] and debbie tucker green’s nut [2013] come under scrutiny for the ways in which reality and delusion are both demarcated and demonstrated onstage. Two major studies on the work of Harold Pinter mark the tenth anniversary of the playwright’s death. In what might be seen as a companion to his previous study A Harold Pinter Chronology [2013], William Baker’s Pinter’s World: Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavours incorporates published and unpublished documents (mainly from the Harold Pinter archive housed at the British Library) as well as new interviews that map out key areas in Pinter’s life that held particular importance for him. Chief amongst these is the correspondence between his childhood friends, whom the actor, director, and writer (and member of the circle) Henry Woolf refers to as ‘the Hackney gang’. The book is a combination of biography and chronological reference guide. Other chapters are divided into ‘Passions’, ‘Restaurants and Friendships’, ‘Women’, ‘Religion’, and ‘Literary Influences and Favourites’. Taken together, the latter encompasses Pinter’s work in theatre, as actor, director, and of course playwright; his lifelong passion for cricket, both as spectator and player, as well as a later interest in the game of bridge; and his musical tastes. The book also outlines Pinter’s extensive network of friendships, with chapter 4 focusing on the women who were involved in his life, both personally and professionally. Not surprisingly, the chapter ‘Politics and Religion’ focuses on Pinter’s shifting attitudes to his own Jewish background and his growing engagement with political issues. The concluding chapter, ‘Literary Influences and Favourites’, makes excellent use of Pinter’s personal library, which Baker has monitored closely since the playwright’s death. This knowledge affords an appraisal of authors who drew Pinter as a youth, such as Kafka and Beckett, as well as his less well-known literary tastes, including Wordsworth. This chapter also looks at the network of artists Pinter got to know and sometimes collaborate with in his professional career. Farah Ali’s Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in Selected Works of Harold Pinter is clearly the work of a doctoral thesis (the introduction still calls it a dissertation) with all that this implies. ‘The objective of this study’, the introduction explains, ‘is to bring a new concept of how identity is conceived in Pinter’s plays’ (p. 11). Apart from chapters on Betrayal [1978] and A Kind of Alaska [1982], this study focuses on Pinter’s shift to writing overtly political drama form the mid-1980s onwards. In this respect it is like other recent work such as Basil Chiasson’s The Late Harold Pinter [2016]. Chapters are divided into single case studies in which plays are subjected to readings through the lens of a particular theorist. The aim of this approach, we are told in the introduction, is to be ‘useful and original’ (p. 10). One for the Road [1984] and Mountain Language [1988] are examined linguistically through the work of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while Party Time [1991] and Celebration [2000] are paired up with Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Hegel. How useful the reader will find this approach will depend upon their level of receptivity to the usefulness of high theory as a critical tool, especially when attempting to write about a free-floating signifier such as ‘identity’. There have been two new additions to Routledge’s innovative Fourth Wall series of detailed short books that explore a particular landmark play. David Ian Rabey looks at Alistair McDowell’s Pomona [2018], while Glen D’Cruz’s contribution examines Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis [2000]. In both, analysis is developed and heightened by their own practice of directing these plays in university productions. Rabey begins by offering a tour of Pomona itself, an uncanny district within the city of Manchester that forms the setting of the play and an area that Rabey describes as a ‘mutating wasteland’ (p. 8). The second chapter is given over to a highly detailed and perceptive reading of each scene of the play, while chapter 3 consolidates this with ‘some of the connections and echoes which may become apparent on a second viewing, reading or consideration’ (p. 39). Chapter 4, ‘Aftershocks and Resonances’, continues this process of assessment and placement of Pomona against McDowell’s existing work and that of other dramatists. Rabey concludes that one of his distinctive characteristics is the ‘incorporation of fantastic and (sometime nightmarish) transformative effects which offer sometimes hauntingly unsettling rather than escapist wish-fulfilment’ (p. 61). D’Cruz’s book on 4.48 Psychosis is more focused on the practical aspects of the play, where analysis is informed by his experience gained from directing it, as well as productions by the Belarus Free Theatre in 2005 and Melbourne’s Red Stitch theatre in 2007. Chapter 1 engages with the issue of Kane’s suicide in 1999, and with it the perhaps inevitable impulse towards interpreting the play through this particular lens. It also provides a brief contextual account of Kane’s place in 1990s British theatre and her association as an ‘In-Yer-Face’ dramatist. Chapter 2 provides a series of alternative interpretations of the play, drawing on psychoanalysis and theories of depression and melancholia through loss and mourning for a beloved, as well as the play’s own bitter attitude towards the figure and institution of psychiatry, and ends with a brief, but useful discussion on the relationship between madness and artistic creativity drawn from Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Chapter 4 considers claims by some critics that 4.48 Psychosis is a representative example of Han-Thies Lehmann’s term ‘post-dramatic’ theatre, offering space for advocates of and sceptics regarding this view. The final chapters consider Kane’s play in the context of performance and pedagogy, approaching it within the differing contexts of the seminar room and the rehearsal studio, before ending with detailed reflections on productions by the Belarus Free Theatre and Melbourne’s Red Stitch theatre. Several articles this year looked at the work of Simon Stephens. John Bull’s ‘Add-Adaptation: Simon Stephens, Carrie Cracknell and Katie Mitchell’s “Dialogues” with the Classic Canon’ (JCDE 6:ii [2018] 280–99) concentrates on Stephens’s English-language versions of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House [2012], Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard [2014], and Brecht’s collaboration with Weill, The Threepenny Opera [2018]. Taking the act of translation as the starting process for adaptation, Bull considers how these versions fare in traditional debates over questions of fidelity and how they contrast with appropriative works that move away from the original source texts. Bull attempts to address these questions by seeing Stephens’s versions as combinations of adaptation and appropriation and calling them ‘Add-Adaptation’. At the same time, he notes that these works shift more towards the realm of appropriation through the intervention of Carrie Cracknell and Katie Mitchell, directors who shift the plays ‘even further away from any sense’ that they attempt ‘to be “true” to the original’ (pp. 282–3). In the same journal, Basil Chiasson’s ‘Simon Stephens, Birdland, and a Few Affects of Neoliberalization’ (JCDE 6:ii [2018] 331–57) uses the play as a case study to explore how neo-liberalization functions on a subjective level, but also how the ‘free market penetrates cultural forums such as the music industry’ (p. 332) through its central character, the rock star Paul. Chiasson identifies Stephens’s attitude as being formed during the Thatcher governments of the 1980s and at the beginning of his career as a dramatist in the late 1990s. Chiasson’s article provides a close reading of Birdland, while also pointing out how the play draws heavily on the plot and structure of Brecht’s early play Baal [1923], as well as demonstrating how forces such as consumerism might operate on the individual with dehumanizing effects. Lara Kipp’s ‘“What Is This Place…?”: Howard Barker’s Spatial Scenography’ (JCDE 6:ii[2018] 249–64) looks at playwright Howard Barker’s practical involvement as a scenographer in his own work since the 1990s. Comparison is made between A House of Correction [2010], Found in the Ground [2008], and Und [2012], where specific stage directions given in the texts come to be realized in production, most frequently placeless or uncanny locales such as bottomless wells and endless courtyards. Not surprisingly Kipp conclude that the ‘imaginative limitless … upheaval of boundaries coexists with the necessarily limited and physically defined stage space’ (p. 250). Kipp argues that the audience’s imaginations are required to bridge this gap, but Barker achieves this in part through the introduction of domestic objects, such as the tea tray in Und or the bed in A House of Correction, which take on powerful significance within a largely empty stage space. The Journal of Beckett Studies contains several articles on drama, all of which in one way or another focus on the body of the performer. James Little’s ‘Beckett’s “Mongrel Mime”: Politics and Poetics’ (JBeckS 27:ii[2018] 193–210) focuses on the unpublished play Mongrel Mime, set in a series of prison-like rooms. This becomes the basis for a wider discussion about how confined spaces in Beckett’s work impinge upon political readings. Little uses successive drafts of Mongrel Mime to argue that Beckett’s gradual inclusion of such spaces in his drama makes this ‘a key case study when analysing the politics of Beckett’s writing’ (p. 198). He also speculates that one of the main reasons for Beckett’s abandonment of the piece might have been an aversion to making the relationship between space and incarceration too explicit. Patrick Bixby’s ‘“this…this…thing”: The Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethics of Witnessing’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 112–27) discusses a production of Endgame by the American actors Dan Moran and Chris Jones. Both suffer from Parkinson’s disease, and this became central to their performances as Hamm and Clov. Bixby argues that the production highlights the issue that in the past the play has been mined for its comic, theatrical, and literary merit, but the issue of disability has been largely ignored. Bixby contends that the uniqueness of this production lies in the way it communicates to its audience the relationship between the actors’ bodies so that audiences are ‘called on to witness not just Hamm and Clov’ (p. 125), but the actors playing them. Cal Reveley Calder’s ‘Choreographed Footfalls’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 54–68) also concerns itself with how the body of the performer expresses meaning from the scripted text. Calder asks us to consider Beckett’s Footfalls [1976] as a piece of choreography, drawing attention to similarities in the series of poems, the Mirlitonnades, written between 1976 and 1980, that coincided with the writing of the play. Calder observes that these poems also contain ‘a strong focus on physicality and clearly audible rhythmic tread’ (p. 61), and she concludes, ‘Beckett’s mid-1970s poetry, then joins his mid-1970s drama in pacing out the difficulties of a spectator’s or reader’s attention to the body’ (p. 65). Footfalls is also the subject of Julie Gaillard’s article, ‘Esse? Percipi? Referentiality and Subjectivity in Footfalls’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 54–68), which sees the ambitious use of names attributed to the body of the performer on stage as having a destabilizing effect on notions of subjectivity and identity, in which the audience or reader become unsure whether they are witnessing an interior dialogue or two separate voices belonging to May and her mother. The work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the drama of Samuel Beckett are the subjects of a monograph study and article this year. Daniel Koczy’s Beckett, Deleuze and Performance: A Thousand Failures and a Thousand Inventions believes that ideas from Deleuze’s writings on the body and cinema can provide ‘fertile terrain’ for coming to an understanding of why Beckett’s drama can ‘stir our passions and our sympathies and yet stubbornly resist interpretative security’ (p. 3). The book concentrates mainly on Beckett’s later work, including Come and Go [1965], Not I [1972], and Footfalls [1975]. Amanda Dennis’s article, ‘Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Beckett and Agency in the 21st Century’ (JBeckS 27:i[2018] 5–21), also brings Deleuze’s work on embodiment to her reading of Beckett’s Quad [1981], addressing how ‘the compulsive repetition of bodily movement, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, may harness a loss of individual control’ (p. 6). At the same time Dennis also points out that this has the potential to produce a kind of agency through the performers, which is at odds with most readings of the play up until now. In a special edition of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review entitled ‘Feminisms Now’, two articles engage with the politics of neoliberalism. Trish Reid’s ‘Killing Joy as a World Making Project: Anger in the Work of debbie tucker green’ (CTR 28:iii[2018] 390–400) productively draws upon the work of Sara Ahmed’s term ‘feminist killjoys’ in her discussion of tucker green’s hang [2015]. Reid describes this as a ‘grim satire’ (p. 392) on the remorseless logic of neoliberalism in a projected future dystopia in which a black female victim of an unnamed crime is allowed to choose the method by which her attacker is executed. Reid also draws attention to how the normally passive representation of victimhood is overturned in this play, with the victim demonstrating her anger through a refusal to play by the rules, so undermining assumptions often posited in white feminist criticism. Reid sees this character as a black female embodiment of Ahmed’s killjoys, who resists expectations that cast her as a passive victim. The other article, Elaine Aston’s ‘Enter Stage Left: “Recognition”, “Redistribution”, and the A-Affect’ (CTR 28:iii[2018] 299–309), argues that a return to socialist feminism has been used as a counter-measure to the malign effects of neoliberalism. Aston uses two case studies: Laura Wade’s stage adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel, Tipping the Velvet [2015] and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone [2016]. The representational strategies that the two plays adopt, she argues, serve to defamiliarize (as implied by the tile of Aston’s article) neoliberal hegemony. Aston also returns to another play by Laura Wade, Posh [2010], in a separate article this year: ‘Structures of Class Feeling / Feeling of Class Structure: Laura Wade’s Posh [2010] and Katherine Soper’s Wish List [2016]’ (MD 61:ii[2018] 127–48) examines Wade’s best-known play to date, alongside the less well-known Wish List. Aston marshals several critical works in her close readings of these two plays, including by Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu. Sara Ahmed, and Owen Jones. This article reads as a companion piece to Aston’s contribution to Contemporary Theatre Review, where she argues that both plays offer resistance to the processes by which neoliberalism classifies and entrenches class positions, but more pessimistically point out how both Posh and Wish List confirm these same entrenched class positions in British culture. Papers from the annual German Contemporary Drama in English conference at the University of Reading, UK, in 2018 on the theme of crisis largely make up the contents of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. Liz Tomlin’s ‘A Victory for Real People: Dangers in the Discourse of Democratisation’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 234–48) identifies a potentially worrying recent trend in verbatim theatre whereby the playwright and actor are displaced in favour of the public, either in person or through personal testimonies. Here, subjectivity and non-expertise become prized in the context of suspicions of expertise and the so-called ‘liberal elite’. Looking at work produced since the 2016 referendum, Tomlin cites the National Theatre’s My Country: A Work in Progress [2017] as a case study. Despite its claims for authenticity, this is used to demonstrate how the very same derided ‘experts’, whose views the play purports to question, are quite literally working behind the scenes in the form of the play’s production team to shape what appears to be an outpouring of genuine public sentiment. Tomlin exposes the irony of a situation where the views largely expressed within the play in favour of leaving the European Union were unlikely to be the same as those shared by the regular patrons of the National Theatre who attended the performance. Tomlin identifies these prominent views coming to the fore at the end of the play, where Brexit itself takes on the form of a tragedy, expressed through the stage figure of Britannia, who interprets it as an act of matricide. Tomlin also saw the production as a missed opportunity for the National Theatre to interrogate the ways that the media and political interest groups manipulated events leading up to the EU referendum. William C. Boles’s ‘Theatricalizing the National Housing Crisis in Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 55–68) presents both plays, which opened around the same time in 2015, as offering dystopian commentaries on the exclusion of a so-called ‘underclass’ brought about though rising rents and property prices in many of the UK’s larger cities. Boles sees the two plays as following a number of other examples such as Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz [2010] and Che Walker’s Britain’s Got Tenants [2016], where housing issues have featured. In the plays by Bartlett and Ridley, however, the poor are either exploited by being used as unpaid labour in making property habitable for later, wealthier, clients or become the hunted targets for the sport of the middle classes. Boles sees these two extreme scenarios as acts of unjustified vengeance against the poor by the wealthy. Chris Megson’s ‘“Can I Tell You About It?”: England, Austerity and “Radical Optimism” in the Theatre of Anders Lustgarten’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 40–54) looks in some detail at one of Lustgarten’s most celebrated plays, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep [2013]. Focusing on the play’s response to economic austerity and mass protest as ways of forming nationhood, Megson identifies it as coming from a tradition of the British ‘state of the nation play’ established by dramatists such as David Hare and Howard Brenton in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellen Redling’s ‘Fake News and Drama: Nationalism, Immigration and the Media in Recent British Plays’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 87–100) looks at the strategies employed by a number of contemporary British playwrights to counter rising nationalism and populism in what has been called a culture of ‘post truth’. Here, plays including Mark Jagasia’s Clarion [2015], Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby [2007], and Nathanial Martello-White’s B.S. [2017] employ (and manipulate ) documentary drama or revisit postmodern techniques surrounding truth. Through these methodologies, Redling borrows from Brecht and Rancière to identify an intention within these dramas to appeal to what she calls ‘the alert spectator’ (p. 87). Lastly, Dan Rebellato’s ‘“Nation & Negation” (Terrible Rage)’ (JCDE 6:i[2018] 15–39) is the longest article in the journal and presents a closely argued and nuanced account, not only about the treatment of Brexit in recent work by British dramatists, allied to a trend that he calls ‘detachment of place’ (p. 15). Rebellato questions the implications of what this means when it comes to depicting nation, its borders, and the relations between localism and globalism. A wide variety of recent plays is discussed and Rebellato explores how different forms of placelessness manifest themselves in work ranging from Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone [2016] to Moria Buffini’s Dinner [2002]. Roger Porter’s ‘Oscar on the Boards: Playwrights Represent the Playwright on Stage’ (NTQ 34:i[2018] 47–57) sits somewhat apart from other work produced this year in the respect that it offers a comparative approach to theatrical adaptations since 1938 of Oscar Wilde’s three trials in 1895. These include Eric Bentley’s Lord Alfred’s Love [1979], Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar [1989], and David Hare’s The Judas Kiss [1998]. Porter explores the way each play looks at how verbatim court documents shape the representation of Oscar Wilde. The article concludes that ‘each writer on Wilde tells his own story [and] fantasizes a Wilde most in keeping with his own needs’ (p. 57), but Porter observes that that ‘the most fruitful way to represent him on stage is to find a new, innovative form and a Wilde unfamiliar to us’ (p. 57). 6. British Poetry 1900–1950 (a) General Bonnie Costello’s The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others is a highlight of this year’s publications on W.H. Auden. Costello focuses on the rhetorical and ethical problems and possibilities around the word ‘we’ in poetry, using Auden (the poet of ‘private faces in public places’) as a case study. She investigates how it can create and promote community in the face of social fragmentation, alert us to the pronoun’s capacity to exclude and shift between restrictive and inclusive forms. Among her book’s many original contributions is a rethinking of lyric: not simply the space of the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, it creates a shared subjectivity that accommodates a ‘we’. The word ‘we’ recurs throughout Auden’s writing: he finds it most slippery in the 1930s, as a public poet grappling with the role of ‘we’ as a tool in political rhetoric. Costello suggests further that pluralized selves can be key to the lyric’s capacity to imagine community. After a consideration of how Auden’s love poetry expands to perform a civil or didactic function, which involves reflections on the nature of love poetry which are startlingly original, the book investigates how Auden’s use of ‘we’ relates to questions of tribal and community loyalty. Costello studies Auden’s treatment of poetic audience, particularly in The Sea and the Mirror but also in relation to pedagogy, before using Auden’s poetry to cast fresh light on the nature of crowds and multitudes. The penultimate chapter considers how Auden’s aphoristic moments bring poet and reader on to common ground, before the coda widens out from Auden to consider the ‘we’ in George Oppen, Adrienne Rich, and Nathaniel Mackey. Costello’s book reads both closely and widely, offering brilliant studies not just of different sorts of ‘we’, but of small words in poetry more widely: ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘here’, ‘now’ are all rethought. This forceful and eloquent book will be essential to scholars of poetry across all periods. Other publications on W.H. Auden included Carolyn Steedman’s Poetry for Historians, or, W.H. Auden and History. This unusual book, integrating the author’s own experience with detailed, witty, and readable literary-historical work, sets out to unpick what theory of history Auden’s poetry expresses, and why it is so expressed. Steedman focuses on the ‘perfect silence’ of Clio, the Muse of history, in Auden’s ‘Homage to Clio’; she asks what might be at stake in a history which is silent, with nothing to say (p. 193). She concludes that Clio in the poem ‘is not History, or about history, or about doing history. She is about some other form of time that isn’t historical time; she is—about—Christian time’ (p. 206). In Haunted By Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith, Richard Harries includes short chapters on Edward Thomas, Stevie Smith, and W.H. Auden, considering these writers’ relationships to faith: Thomas’s dislike of Christianity is simultaneous with his yearning ‘sense of an elusive call’ (p. 60) which Harries sees as having much in common with a religious orientation; Haunted by Christ also explores Smith’s fierce ambivalence towards religion and Auden’s return to Anglo-Catholicism, which he experienced as a celebration of the worldly and the human. Formerly the bishop of Oxford, Harries foregrounds in the introduction his Christian perspective and is open about how it mediates the readings that he offers. Natasha Periyan includes a chapter on Auden’s pedagogy in The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender (pp. 21–57). She examines his engagement with contemporaneous educational movements to develop readings of his politics and aesthetics, finding that Auden considered education’s value to be in its capacity to develop moral freedom and individual responsibility for decision-making. Periyan examines Auden’s use of pronouns in Ode V of The Orators, as well as the Raynes Park School song, which he composed, to consider his conception of the relationship between pupil, pupils, and teacher: as ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘them’, and ‘us’ become muddied terms, clear lines of allegiance and hierarchy break down, heightening the sense of the moral weight of individual choice. This belief that education should equip individuals with the tools to make rational decisions underpinned, Periyan finds, Auden’s response to fascistic political crisis. Two chapters in Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten’s Vocal Works, edited by Kate Kennedy, relate to Britten’s collaboration with Auden. John Fuller’s ‘Britten, Auden and the 1930s’ (pp. 31–48) acknowledges the six-year age difference between the two men as he explores Auden’s influence on Britten across the GPO films, the setting of poems and writing of songs, the music to Auden and Isherwood’s plays, and Britten’s first opera. Joanna Bullivant’s ‘“Practical Jokes”: Britten and Auden’s Our Hunting Fathers Revisited’ (pp. 206–22) urges a more substantial engagement with Auden’s contribution to Our Hunting Fathers. Bullivant writes well on how Auden’s poetry articulates man’s longing to imitate animals and subverts that longing by underscoring difference: a subversion achieved through an interchanging of violence and practical jokes which exposes hypocrisy. In ‘What the War Is Doing with Us: W.H. Auden, Total War, and War Literature’ (Mo/Mo 26:ii[2018] 309–27), Christopher Patrick Miller explores how the ‘pervasive, ongoing, uneven reality’ of war informs Auden’s The Orators (p. 310). Miller notes persuasively how Auden refuses his auditors stable human characters, identifiable pronouns, or durable private voices to situate this pervasive violence; the result is that there is no virtuous entity against which ‘the enemy’ can be measured (p. 325). A short but eloquent article by Edward Mendelson, ‘Authorship, Intimacy, and an Editorial Question about Auden’ (EiC 68:iii[2018] 273–82), puzzles over whether to include Auden’s private writings for friends in his Complete Works, connecting this quandary to the different kinds of intimacy implicit in writing for publication and for private friends. Finally, Jian Zhang’s ‘W.H. Auden’s Anti-Japanese War: “Sonnets from China” and Its Historical Context’ (Neoh 46:i[2018] 145–58) argues against both abstractionist and orientalist readings of Auden’s text to emphasize the extent to which the poet’s experiences in China informed the sonnets; the author finds in the sequence a transition from viewing the war as ‘other’ and foreign to seeing it as ‘a war of our own’ (p. 149). William Empson figured more briefly this year. In ‘Vector Semantics, William Empson, and the Study of Ambiguity’ (CritI 44[2018] 641–73), Michael Gavin finds a common set of assumptions between vector semantics (a subfield of computational linguistics which models the meaning of words using statistical measurements) and Empson’s critical practice; both are concerned with multiple meanings of words, and the interrelations of those meanings. Shuang Shen’s ‘Empson and Mu Dan: Modernism as “Complex Word”’ (CL 70:i[2018] 1–24) suggests that both Empson’s second stay in China and his Complex Words were relevant to the 1940s modernist experiment. This article charts the overlapping paths of Empson and Chinese modernist poets to cast light on the global context from which both 1940s Chinese poetry and Empson’s own work emerged. Edward Thomas continues to attract significant criticism. Edward Thomas’s Roads from Arras, edited by Andrew McKeown and Adrian Grafe, sets out to collate fresh appraisals of the poet. Their introduction explores reasons for his ‘uncertain public appeal’ (p. ix), attributing this to his own love of uncertainty. The volume begins with McKeown’s essay ‘Edward Thomas: Standpoints’, (pp. 1-12) exploring where Thomas ‘is or isn’t to be found in his poems’ (p. 1); this is a relevant question not only in poems about place and time, but in those about relationships with others. McKeown identifies ‘something wilfully deadlocked’ in Thomas’s writing (p. 3). Thomas cannot locate himself, he suggests, and therefore he cannot identify stable ground on which a relationship might occur successfully. Next comes Ralph Pite’s ‘Edward Thomas’s Poems on Enlisting: “As if the Bow had Flown off with the Arrow”’, (pp. 13-32) which sets Thomas’s treatment of soil against Rupert Brooke’s famous reference to ‘richer dust’, suggesting that Thomas’s relationship to soil disavows Brooke’s notion, together with its attendant nationalism and consolation (p. 19). William Wootten’s ‘“A Richer Opportunity”: Walter de la Mare’s Representations of Edward Thomas’ (pp. 33-46) goes on to explore the ‘uneasy but powerful’ bond between de la Mare and Thomas (p. 34). Arguing that they are both innovative, but that those innovations tend in different directions, Wootten unpicks how de la Mare’s tributes to Thomas are simultaneously admiring and ‘tinged with ambivalence towards friend and poetry’ (p. 45). In ‘Mapping the Furrow: Edward Thomas at the Headland’, (pp. 47-58) Jack Thacker suggests that Thomas’s ‘Digging’ poems trace the poet’s realization that the richness and complexity of the soil, as well as his own work, derive from violence and death. Thacker’s argument widens to encompass Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Paul Muldoon, tracing Thomas’s influence on the later poets to argue for the plough’s sophistication as a poetic motif. Emilie Loriaux’s ‘Converging Views, Poetic Voices: The Connection with Thomas Hardy’(pp. 59-69) finds in both Thomas and Hardy a common interest in rural rootlessness and an attentiveness to nature, especially birds. In the next essay, ‘“A Songless Plover”: The Delayed Arrival of Edward Thomas in the Spanish-Speaking World’, (pp. 71-83) Mario Murgia explores the reception of Thomas’s poetry in the Hispanosphere, noting that his poetry was not published in Spanish translation until 2012. Notable in this essay is Murgia’s own translation of ‘The Sorrow of True Love’. ‘Lines on a Literary Landscape: Edward Thomas and Derek Walcott’, (pp. 85-95) by Helen Goethals, explores the ‘literary landscape’ of Walcott’s ‘Homage to Edward Thomas’ (p. 85). Ian Brinton’s ‘Paths to the Past’ (pp. 97-106) investigates Thomas’s yearning for an Edenized past. Adrian Grafe’s ‘Feminine Influence’(pp. 107-118) explores ‘feminine influence’ in and on Thomas’s writing to suggest how he treats poetry, love, and food as inseparable (p. 107). The next chapter, ‘Edward Thomas at Arras: A Response in Word and Image’, (pp. 119-133) is illustrated, and comprises a conversation between the poet Deryn Rees-Jones and the artist Charlotte Hodes as they discuss their collaboration on And You, Helen [2014], which approaches Helen Thomas’s life through words and images. The volume concludes with ‘New Biographical Perspectives’ (pp. 135-150) by Thomas’s biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson. This returns to the question which recurred in last year’s criticism, of whether or not Thomas is a war poet. Edited by Jem Poster, Biographies, the third volume of the Selected Edition of Edward Thomas’s Prose Writings, contains the biographies of Richard Jefferies and George Borrow. Poster’s introduction argues powerfully for the crucial role played by Jefferies’ writing in Thomas’s artistic development, suggesting that his influence might even be greater than that of Robert Frost. He identifies the common thread between Thomas’s two subjects as ‘a sense of vigorous extraversion’ (p. xxvii) to which Thomas was drawn, and ends by connecting the biographical work of the Borrow biography, with its emphasis on the impression rather than objective reality, to a literary modernist context. Nevertheless, Poster is impressive in his refusal to overstate this argument, noting that this ‘biographical impressionism’ does not recur in Thomas’s other biographies (p. xxxvi). The editorial work is scrupulous, acknowledging the difficulties implicit in editing what is essentially (due to Thomas’s habit of extensive quotation from his subjects’ writing) Thomas’s own editing. With its illuminating notes, this edition will be essential to scholars focusing on Thomas’s treatment of geography and place. Samuel Hynes’s On War and Writing republishes a selection of Hynes’s essays, including ‘Hardy and the Battle-God’ (pp. 69–90) and ‘The Odds on Edward Thomas’ (pp. 145–52). Hynes suggests that Hardy’s The Dynasts is the closest thing to a war epic in English poetry, and argues that Edward Thomas deserves greater public and critical attention. In ‘Keep Innocency: Edward Thomas and Fatherhood’ (CQ 47:iv[2018] 301–24), S.J. Perry traces how Thomas’s bond with his children offered an important stimulus for his writing, examining his use of children’s literary forms. Ralph Pite’s ‘Edward Thomas Lighting Out for the Territory’ (PQ 97:ii[2018] 197–218) describes how Thomas developed Twain’s relationship to the romance of departure. This hinges on the phrase ‘to light out’: finding beyond the boundaries of civilization somewhere radically unknown (p. 197). Pite studies Thomas’s poem ‘Lights Out’, finding that its verbal texture positions Thomas as seeking the possibility of entering an unknown. Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature contains a chapter of relevance to this period, on Edward Thomas and Walter de la Mare (pp. 117–44). Leighton suggests that knocking is de la Mare’s keynote, the sound of ‘lingering questions for the ear … irresolvably caught between a ghost and a rhythm’ (p. 118). This ear for echoes and knockings made de la Mare an important figure for Edward Thomas; they were regular companions between 1907 and 1913, and Thomas’s ‘The Stile’ encodes his feelings for de la Mare in line with his use of walks, gates, and crossroads as the territory for difficult friendships. Leighton focuses on de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’; noting that what eventually greets the Traveller ‘is the sound of his own listening returned, listeningly’ (p. 129), Leighton suggests that de la Mare shapes the house’s silence into ‘a speaking sound that the knocked-on door both resists and releases’ (p. 133). The chapter goes on to trace how birdsong for both Thomas and de la Mare figures as a loaded combination of real-life hearing and poetic recalls. Birds appear as indecipherable, yet live and compelling, offering a language to the listener that is ‘recognized yet unremembered’ (p. 143). Several chapters in Elizabeth Black’s The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew relate to this section. Beginning with a survey of ecocritical contexts, Black goes on to argue that Edward Thomas’s ‘proto-environmental thought’ (p. 52) reveals a continuity between rural-centred poetry and the cosmopolitan urbanism associated with modernism. Thomas positions the countryside as subject to change and disruption, rather than being a static idyll. By focusing on war’s environmental impact on the British countryside and the ways it disrupts rural society, Thomas creates, Black argues, a new form of war poetry which challenges conventions around both nature poetry and war poetry; nature poetry gains the power to confront global events. The sixth chapter positions Edith Sitwell as using modernist techniques to revitalize poetic representations of nature, infusing them with childlike wonder; here, Black moves away from direct engagement with ecocritical theory to provide more of an overview of Sitwell’s engagement with nature. A chapter follows on Charlotte Mew, using her poetry to explore the connection between engagement with nature and social marginality and investigating how alienation and trauma shape responses to nature. For instance, trauma may disturb perception into something heightened and intensified, which offers its own renewed understanding. The otherness of the female subject, argues Black, is expressed through an alliance with the natural rather than the human world; she notes, interestingly, that this affiliation is dangerous in a patriarchal context where nature is relegated merely to a source of profit and personal gain. Leah Budke’s ‘Reading Edith Sitwell’s Annual Poetry Anthology Wheels through the Lens of Female Aestheticism’ (ELT 61:iii[2018] 232–49) argues that Wheels drew on traditions of aestheticism and Decadence. Budke suggests that this is specifically female aestheticism, and identifies it within tropes of the garden, the tempting fruit, and appropriated soldierly bodies in Wheels. Interest in Thomas Hardy remains strong. In ‘Thomas Hardy’s Poem “The Aërolite” and Panspermia’ (N&Q 65[2018] 415–17), Gillian Daw contextualizes ‘The Aërolite’ against the hypothesis of panspermia: the belief that life did not originate on earth, but was carried here from another part of the universe by comets, stellar radiation, or (as in Hardy’s poem) meteorites. The Thomas Hardy Journal’s accommodation of a breadth of scholarly approaches made for a range of fresh work on Hardy’s poetry in 2018. ‘Hardy’s Poems and the Reader: The Power of Unmaking’ (THJ 34[2018] 17–34) by Linda M. Shires. This draws on Timothy Bewes’s model of ‘reading with the grain’ to articulate the pleasures which emerge from reading Hardy’s poems: her close readings emphasize Hardy’s ambiguous puns and echoes, framing the act of reading Hardy as a rhythm of ‘unmaking’ (taking apart and dwelling in multiple meanings) and acts of reconstituting based on a search for value. Francis O’Gorman’s ‘Hardy Getting Out Of…’ (THJ 34[2018] 35–51) frames Hardy compellingly as a writer absorbed in the question of ‘getting out of’ things: histories, relationships, responsibilities (p. 36). O’Gorman focuses on ‘Poems of 1912–13’, following Emma’s unexpected death, tracing how Emma’s ‘getting out’ of life offers the relief of release for Hardy himself from their unhappy relationship (p. 41). The poems negotiate, therefore, between frankness about the failure of their marriage and untruthfulness in foregrounding only love or grief, trying to ‘get out’ of both (p. 42). Finally, Roger Ebbatson’s ‘“The Face at the Casement”: Window Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry’ (THJ 34[2018] 77–86) traces window imagery in Hardy’s poetry, exploring the capacity of windows to both separate and connect inside and outside, and concluding that Hardy’s window poems are proto-modernist in their problematization of the relationship between perception and reality. John Hughes’s startling and absorbing study The Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction and Poetry argues that selfhood in Hardy is best understood through accidents, events, and encounters that surprise and discompose it, creating conditions for desire or tragedy. Noting Hardy’s insistence that his work possessed no philosophy, Hughes proposes that the poet’s suggestion that his poetry constituted ‘impressions of the moment’ is not simply vague: bears on a view of writing that explores how thought is forced through bodily encounters that provoke interpretation (p. 11). In this line, Hughes is extremely good on Hardy’s use of dialect words and neologisms: they force a response from the reader while displacing the false ideological coherences of educated language. He suggests, beautifully, that ‘Hardy’s self-portrayal often involves a shrinking, as of someone prone to retreating into an inexpressive kind of privacy or secrecy’ (p. 17); that ‘a feeling that it is impossible to make oneself fully understood, to speak with one’s own voice, was inextricable from a hyper-sensitivity that shame was all too legible, and that the traces of it … must be destroyed or covered over’ (p. 17). Accordingly, he sees ‘Neutral Tones’ as a poem expressing a shared failure of private expression as an unwilled public condition. Hughes spends substantial time considering how music, in Hardy, reveals the mind as ‘an endlessly responsive power of self-variation’ (p. 41). He argues that Hardy uses music to trump social and philosophical fictions of the self. Paying detailed attention to metre, Hughes lays out how, repeatedly, Hardy positions music as the occasion for a secular epiphany, where the sympathetic capacities of human beings turn over the poet’s attention. The book goes on to develop a subtle and convincing argument around how Hardy’s poems proceed from purely private experiences—a mundane yet haunting pretext, around which the speaker’s mind revolves—which threaten to become obsessional and privative unless they can be turned outwards into words. Hughes ends by exploring, through a close examination of metre, how Hardy’s poetic sensibility occupies a location abandoned by belief, yet still open towards hope. Nilüfer Özgür’s Hardy Deconstructing Hardy: A Derridean Reading of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry sets out to do two things. The first is to position Hardy as a modernist or proto-modernist poet, a topic well trodden in recent and not so recent years. The second is to draw parallels between Hardy’s poetry and Derrida’s deconstructionism. The question remains open as to whether this seeks to illuminate Hardy or Derrida. Hardy’s dramatized personae, his double selves, his experimental language, and his unconventional treatment of time and space are all assimilated into a model of Derridean theory which is positioned as capaciously equivalent to all sorts of subversions and disruptions. Özgür examines a range of poems in detail, offering some contentious readings: her analyses of ‘In the Study’ and ‘The Temporary The All’, in particular, might attract lively debate. In Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement, Galia Benziman argues that Hardy critiques the late Victorian move away from extravagant grief, positioning it alongside personal forgetfulness and disrespectful neglect of the dead. Yet Hardy also implicates himself in this cultural and psychological ‘amnesia’ (p. 2). His work collapses long-standing binaries between remembrance and forgetting, grief and consolation. After a lucid overview of elegy and mourning more broadly, Benziman traces how Hardy’s grieving subjects seldom resolve their mourning and defer to the finality of death. He subverts conventional elegiac patterns, undermining the psychoanalytic healing model and positioning human relationships as fundamentally based on projection. In the first chapter, Benziman notes how Hardy often positions death as exit rather than extinction; though he introduces down-to-earth sentiment into his poetry, he does not, as modern elegy often does, directly confront the finality of loss. The dead saturate Hardy’s landscapes, but they bring no reassurance, only perplexity. The third chapter focuses on prosopopoeia, noting how Hardy portrays returning from the grave as an emotional and practical encumbrance on the living rather than wish-fulfilment. Hardy’s dead are not comforting figures; their feelings, Benziman demonstrates, are unpredictable and unknowable, since death involves undergoing a transformation. In speaking for the dead, prosopopoeically, the dead are obliterated as distinct subjects, and the contrast between self and other is blurred. After a chapter on Hardy’s fiction, Benziman turns back to the poetry, examining poems in which survivors benefit from deaths. She writes well about how poems like ‘The Pink Frock’ and ‘By Her Aunt’s Grave’ trace the jarring disparity between the loss of a human being and the trivialities that occupy the survivors; all the while they simultaneously acknowledge the human value of those very trivialities. Hardy implies that benefiting from a death and using the dead might be alternative means of enduring mortality in a world no longer sustained by belief in an afterlife. In the final chapter, Benziman studies how mourning and memory fuel creative energies. In a society guilty of cultural forgetfulness, the poet assumes the role of preserver of memory, though it is experienced as an arduous one. FATHOM, a journal which focuses entirely on Thomas Hardy, featured several articles on his poetry. Catherine Lanone’s ‘Desire and Impaired Eyesight: Thomas Hardy’s Clinal Metaphors of Affect’ (Fath 5[2018] 40 paras.) notes how Hardy’s use of medical conditions to convey emotional blindness has been under-studied. Focusing on the poems devoted to Emma’s absence, she suggests convincingly that Hardy draws on the language of cataract removal to convey the paradigm shift that the speaker experienced after his wife’s death. Staying with the theme of eyes, Annie Ramel’s ‘The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy’ (Fath 5[2018] 22 paras.) adds to recent studies of face-to-face encounters in Hardy which tend to view such meetings as positive, using Lacanian notions of the ‘object-gaze’ to locate ‘Medusean’, death-dealing gazes in his work. Jane Thomas’s ‘The Abyss, the Image and the Turn: Writing Desire in Three Poems by Thomas Hardy’ (Fath 5[2018] 14 paras.) looks at ‘Where the Picnic Was’, ‘The Voice’, and ‘The Shadow on the Stone’ to draw connections between the desiring subject, the power of the gaze, and the act of writing in Hardy’s poetry. Emilie Loriaux’s ‘Unconscious Desires in “The Collector Cleans His Picture”’ (Fath 5[2018] 31 paras.) positions the titular picture as an artistic mirror, which allows the parson-collector to face his inner bad self and his own fears. As the centenary of the First World War draws to a close, poetry of both the First and Second World Wars continues to attract study. Two chapters in The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity, edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin, are relevant to this section. The first, ‘Scaling War: Poetic Calibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones’s In Parenthesis’ by Hope Wolf (pp. 56–73), investigates how David Jones stages ‘the failure of measuring instruments’ in In Parenthesis (p. 57). She suggests that, in doing so, he may be countering historiographies that depend on scientific data and performing a loss of confidence in quantitative evidence. The essay focuses in particular on how the verbal tools that communities use to manage emotionally fraught moments, such as proverbs, clichés, and idioms, which teach proportionality and weigh experiences up against each other, cease to function in such times. Wolf is fascinating on cliché: ‘The experience of cliché is often accompanied by a sense that it has failed to meet the needs of the moment it responds to’ (p. 64). As a substitute, Jones offers the local, and its alternative measures to those imposed by the nominal centre. At the end of In Parenthesis Jones turns to myth, which ‘offers a way of thinking about the significance and scale of what cannot be measured’ (p. 69). The Queen of the Woods is given the task of deciding what is owed to the soldiers, but her ‘systems are unknown to both reader and writer’ (p. 70). The second essay is Vincent Sherry’s ‘Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of “Sacrifice” in the Great War’ (pp. 74–96), on how understandings of (religious and secular) sacrifice have been disabled by the First World War. Sherry is interested in how Jones undertakes ‘intense invention’ to convey the difficulty of comprehending supreme types of ancient sacrifice (p. 92). He examines Jones’s frontispiece for In Parenthesis, finding that the left hand of the depicted figure seems to be pushing away the instruments of suffering: a detail which undermines the traditional idea that Christ was a willing sacrificial victim. Jones calls the seventh chapter ‘The Five Unmistakable Marks’: this refers to Christ’s five mystic wounds, but, startlingly, the phrase comes from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. This means that ‘the enigma is more like the mystery it participates in, hiding the numinous token of efficacious sacrifice behind the nonsensical miscellany of the words recasting it, as of the world awaiting its redemption’ (p. 92). The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War by Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer is a powerful and important contribution. It positions its centre of gravity in the memorial poems of the Great War, finding across a diverse range of poets an internal conflict between the forces of cultural memory and their personal understanding. Poets of this era, they suggest, continually seek different forms and voices, sometimes stumbling or erring towards bathos as they strive to express the inexpressible. The second chapter makes a superbly compelling argument: it locates the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘rupture’ of modernist writing in their literal meanings, in the disembodied bodies at the Front (p. 53). In this way, the poems of this period, argue the authors, ‘remind us forcibly of the realist dimension of modernism’ (p. 55). When war writers retreat into disengagement, they do so both in response to the death that surrounds them and as a defining element of their modernism. Ellipses in Wilfrid Gibson’s ‘Between the Lines’, for instance, signal vacancies in language as well as different levels of time and space, and the wandering consciousness of an injured man. The authors suggest that these dislocations of time, geography, and consciousness in First World War poetry have been critically overlooked, as they have been viewed as responses to battle stress rather than in relation to contemporary modernist preoccupations. The third chapter traces how David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg incorporate mythic elements into their poetry, resisting the illusory reassurance of mythic analogies while positing ways of thinking and feeling which move beyond simple horror. The authors draw subtle and valuable distinctions between Jones’s use of myth and those of Joyce and Eliot. While the latter two draw on myth as a source to support a thesis, Jones uses myth because it is intrinsic to the identities of the soldiers who are his subjects. As a result, he achieves not a ‘programmatic parallel’, but a series of connections and failed connections between the war as experienced by its fighters and the myths which underpin their cultural understanding of themselves (p. 90). Chapter 4 turns to poems about memorials, finding that such texts tend to critique the values which the monuments embody, and the fifth chapter illuminates the striking fact that poetic descriptions of corpses in the Great War are used to support a public argument against the war rather than engaging with personal horror. They express anger rather than trauma. The book closes with a fresh reading of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, highlighting how innovative Owen was in portraying a gas attack in poetry in a text which accommodated ‘a new kind of dying’ (p. 211). Throughout, the readings are close, skilled, and convincing, with an analysis of Arthur Graeme West’s ‘The Night Patrol’ a particular highlight. Its breadth of analysis across a range of male and female poets, well known and less well known, is refreshing. Helen McPhail’s Wilfred Owen’s Shrewsbury focuses, as the title suggests, on the poet’s teenage experiences in Shrewsbury. It is primarily a brief history of Shrewsbury in the early twentieth century, with suggestions about how members of the Owen family might have related to one aspect or another of the town. In ‘The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”’ (JML 41:iii[2018] 1–17), Stephen Benz offers a reading of Owen’s famous poem in the terms of classical rhetoric, identifying its pathos, ethos, and logos. Michael Sarnowski’s ‘Enemy Encounters in the War Poetry of Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas, and Randall Jarrell’ (Humanities 89[2018] 1–8) examines how these three poets grapple with the question of the wartime enemy’s humanity. Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s exceedingly detailed Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That 1895–1929 builds on a growing critical interest in Graves as a war poet, as evidenced, for instance, by Charles Mundye’s recent edition of the war poetry. Moorcroft Wilson contends that Graves’s poetry is some of the best and most technically innovative of the Great War; nevertheless, his decision to adopt a child’s perspective and convey war through dreams and myths rather than ‘realistic’ details means that he has remained relatively obscure as a war poet (p. 4). The book focuses on the first half of his life to emphasize the profound effect of the war on Graves’s life and work; Moorcroft Wilson’s discovery of Sassoon’s personal annotated copy of Good-bye to All That offers new and significant detail, she contends, to reframe Graves’s earlier life. The book highlights, among other things, Graves’s influence on the practice of ‘close reading’ (p. 276) and Moorcroft Wilson uses Sassoon’s annotations to highlight the difference between the two poets’ relationships to factual accuracy in accounts of the war: Sassoon pursued it diligently, while Graves did not view it as the main aim of the personal memoir. ‘Ivor Gurney’s Imperfection’ by Alex Wylie (EiC 68:i[2018] 54–73) finds a ‘mode of imperfection’ in Gurney’s work which is deliberated ‘as a whole cultural politics and a way of writing and being’ (p. 55). Gurney, Wylie suggests, is absorbed by the project of defining and exploring the potentialities and realities of the imperfect as a paradigm of both political and literary ideals; this is manifested in poetic form, in the ‘harmonious stammer’ of Gurney’s lines (p. 69). In Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture, Michael Shallcross includes a chapter on the relationship between G.K. Chesterton and E.C. Bentley (pp. 18–54), hinging his analysis on the nonsense poetry that the pair wrote to and towards each other. Through detailed work on drafts of poems, Shallcross finds that they based their friendship on an oscillation between intimacy and difference; praise and criticism of Bentley mingle in earlier drafts of Chesterton’s poetic preface to his collection of nonsense verse Greybeards at Play. Though Bentley relished academic nonsense of the university in-joke kind, Chesterton advocated a more popular strain of nonsense, and in the poetry of Greybeards at Play he introduces elements of moral satire into Bentley’s preferred nonsense mode. Arguing for a phenomenological approach to fragmentary writing, Rebecca Varley-Winter’s skilfully written Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature close-reads poetry by Mina Loy and Hope Mirrlees, among other writers, to test the idea that ‘fragmentation is, at heart, about conflicted textual embodiment’ (p. 8). Following a suggestive introduction, Varley-Winter highlights how part of Loy’s complexity resides in the apparent reliance of her texts, like fragments, on absent contexts. She explores Loy’s fascination with collage, arguing that collage’s refusal of smoothness prevents the viewer or reader from immersing themselves fully and offering interesting remarks on the analogue between Loy’s humour and her empathy. This is followed by analysis of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem, with its interest in the ‘difficulty of connection’ (p. 156) and fascination with kitsch. Highlighting the increasing critical recognition that modernism is multifaceted, Laura Wainwright’s New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930–1949 identifies a ‘distinctively Welsh Modernist use of language’ in a range of Welsh writers (p. 3), including Gwyn Thomas, Glyn Jones, and Idris Davies. Since these poets often came from a background where the English language had only fairly recently been introduced, Wainwright argues, their work manifests both a delight in linguistic novelty, and a sense of alienation. Wainwright locates analogues and similarities to surrealism in their work, and suggests convincingly that the linguistic collage of Davies’s Gwalia Deserta [1938] responds to Wales’s linguistic crisis, simultaneously deterritorializing and reterritorializing language into a new picture or discourse. The second chapter focuses on the anglophone writer Lynette Roberts, revealing how an anglophone Welsh writer occupies a distinctive deterritorialized position. By incorporating rural writers such as Roberts into modernism, Wainwright participates in the broader critical shift away from viewing modernism as an urban or metropolitan movement. A chapter on Vernon Watkins emphasizes his internationalism and aestheticism to contrast him with his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries, and a fourth chapter compares Dylan Thomas to European surrealism. Like Salvador Dalí, Wainwright suggests, Thomas repeatedly invokes particular regional sites, and reimagines those sites as places where social and cultural norms could be transgressed and contested. The final chapter examines the role of the grotesque in Gwyn Thomas and Rhys Davies. (b) T.S. Eliot Although 2018 was a relatively quiet year in comparison with the busy work in recent years on the letters of T.S. Eliot and the ongoing edition of his critical prose, those projects continue to yield results. T.S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker offers an overview of his poetic career by a scholar who has been closely involved in the Johns Hopkins University Press’s edition of the critical prose. Making ample use of his early university work on philosophy and anthropology at Harvard and Oxford, Brooker argues that Eliot’s poetry was shaped by the rhythmic movement from binary opposition to synthesis that characterizes philosophical dialectics. Eliot’s study of F.H. Bradley, she argues at the outset, led to the revelation that ‘contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them’ (p. 1); and, Brooker suggests, Eliot understood that truth was never ‘self-sufficient, that all truths exist in relation to other truths’ (p. 2). This sets the pattern for the arguments across the rest of the book. The first chapters then adumbrate Eliot’s early poetry in terms of his response to the split between mind and body and between subject and object as Eliot found it in work by Henri Bergson and F.H. Bradley. Subsequent chapters explore the ‘dialectic between internal and external interpretations’ (p. 65), exploring The Waste Land in relation to J.G. Frazer’s presentation of myth and theories of primitivism. Later chapters explore Eliot’s turn to religion in terms of a dialectic tension between intellect and emotion, and a final chapter reads Four Quartets in terms of a dialectic split between the reproachful theodicy of St Augustine and a more, self-forgiving theodicy associated with Julian of Norwich. Eliot’s insistence on division and the dilemma of being caught ‘between’ forces or impulses is familiar, but, crucially, T.S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination insists on moving beyond simple binary divisions towards the reconciliation of opposites that characterizes dialectical thinking. This does not always convince, but as a whole Brooker offers a complex and nuanced overview of his work that is deeply informed by an understanding of the intellectual, historical, and biographical contexts. A second monograph from a major university press also addresses the contours of Eliot’s ‘imagination’. Published by Cambridge University Press, Sarah Kennedy’s T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination is, however, more various than Brooker’s emphasis upon dialectic oppositions and syntheses. Kennedy starts by invoking George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation [2001], and Metaphors We Live By [1980] by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, in order to set out her interest in ‘Eliot’s metaphoric practice in his understanding of poetic creation’ (p. 8). What follows is a set of thematically organized chapters, each of which traces out a particular recurring metaphor, figure, or trope in Eliot’s poetry and critical prose. The Dynamic Imagination starts with Shakespeare and the importance of The Tempest to Eliot, outlining his interest in metaphors of depth and transformation exemplified by the sea. A chapter on ‘sea voices’ shifts into reflections on Eliot’s attitude towards divided subjectivity. Elsewhere, Shakespeare seems to represent ‘pattern’ for Eliot: the possibility that a coherent system of thought might lie beneath a surface of words and sounds. Part II of Kennedy’s monograph explores contemporary science as a source of metaphorical thinking in Eliot. There are chapters here on space, the gaps between atoms, and the gaps between stars; on sight and the science of vision; and on the relation between psychology and physiology. These draw on Eliot’s engagement with recent writings by Arthur Eddington and Alfred North Whitehead, amongst others. The final part of The Dynamic Imagination explores figures for selfhood. Picking up on previous discussion of divisions and splits, three chapters set out Eliot’s fascination with doppelgängers, ghosts, and the concept of the embryonic self. Kennedy describes her project as a study of ‘the ways Eliot imagined the process of poetic composition’ (p. 161), but the results are more complex and rich than mere reflexive self-preoccupation. The Dynamic Imagination offers a fascinating digest of the characteristic figures and locutions that shaped Eliot’s thought about selfhood and literature—it outlines the habitual linguistic tools for which he reached when he sought to express himself. At the same time, it is tantalizing and elusive: each chapter ranges back and forth across Eliot’s career without a strong guiding sense of argument running through the book as a whole. The material is so well chosen and the intelligence of this project so striking that it is hard not to wish that Kennedy had pushed her findings into a stronger thesis of some kind. As Kennedy’s monograph demonstrates, some words or phrases acquire meaning or emphasis through repetition; others acquire a kind of salience from the relative infrequency with which they occur. A.J. Nickerson commences ‘T.S. Eliot and the Point of Intersection’ (CQ 47:iv[2018] 343–59) by observing that the phrase the ‘point of intersection’ occurs only three times in Eliot’s poetry and prose, but argues that this formulation offers ‘one of the primary ways in which he interrogates his own poetics, thinking both about what poetic language is and the experiences of consciousness or meaning that it uniquely affords’ (p. 343). For Nickerson the conceptual nub of ‘intersection’ lies in ‘crossing’ (a more frequent term in Eliot’s vocabulary): the frontiers broached by such crossings include theological questions about the relation between human and divine, the knowable and the unknowable; but they also encompass formal concerns with the relationship between words and music through pattern. The fundamental question for Eliot, then, would seem to be whether these different preoccupations coincide or intersect, whether the patterning of poetry has something to offer in Eliot’s striving to make sense of his spiritual experience. Another significant study of Eliot in monograph form, Jeremy Diaper’s T.S. Eliot and Organicism, draws together recent materials from articles and essays to present a coherent case for Eliot’s ‘agricultural sensibility’ (p. 31). Diaper positions Eliot’s critical thought and poetic output within an ‘environmental literary modernism’ (p. 6). The book begins with a chapter exploring Eliot’s commitment to that ‘agricultural sensibility’ in the poetry he wrote during the 1920s. Diaper finds it telling that Eliot’s conception of social crisis in The Waste Land is expressed in terms of a land that has suffered environmental catastrophe, one that produces no nourishment for body or soul. In this chapter (as throughout), the book moves between figurative readings of Eliot’s most famous modernist works and more literal readings of contemporary writers, such as Viscount Lymington and H.J. Manningham, who address questions of diet, the industrial production of food, and the impoverishment of Britain’s agriculture. The rest of Eliot and Organicism shifts to his more direct and explicit dealings with agricultural thought from the 1930s until after the Second World War. A second chapter engages with Eliot’s role as editor of the Criterion, examining ways in which he fostered writing and debate about agricultural policy and the environment. For Diaper this not only signals the poet’s interests, but also constitutes a formative contribution to the organic husbandry movement in the 1930s. Chapter 3 explores Eliot’s involvement with the New English Weekly, connecting the publication of part of Four Quartets there to discussion of the new organic movement and agricultural issues. Diaper probes drafts of ‘Little Gidding’ to uncover allusions to soil erosion, and claims that scenes frequently taken to represent the dust falling after an air raid can ‘arguably’ (p. 72) be understood instead as allusions to recent dust storms in Kansas. Chapter 4 moves on to the Christian Newsletter and tempers previous arguments about Eliot’s agricultural concerns by contrasting his ‘agrarian standpoint’ (p. 100) with that of contemporaries John Middleton Murray and Ronald Duncan. In contrast with their enthusiasm for idealized rural communities, Eliot’s vision of agricultural bliss was more qualified, and Diaper reads this into the presentation of country life in ‘East Coker’. Chapter 5 reads the version of Notes Towards a Definition of Culture that Eliot published in book form during 1948 (as opposed to the articles and essays from which it was drawn). Concentrating on his friendship with Philip Mairet, Diaper argues that ‘Eliot’s engagement with organic issues continues to permeate’ his concern with questions of culture and social organization from a Christian perspective (p. 143). Well informed throughout and full of interesting contemporary material on the organic movement, there is a strong historicist bent throughout Eliot and Organicism which seeks to deepen and focus existing work on the poet’s interest in agricultural matters; but Diaper is also keen to demonstrate the influence of these social and theoretical concerns upon the substance of his poetry. It is unfortunate that Diaper over-indulges his own fondness for agricultural metaphor in places: ‘in ploughing a new scholarly furrow for Eliot and organicism, I aim to provide a fertile soil in which ecomodernism can produce further yields’ (p. 6). At the risk of falling into the same trap, the joke seems a bit laboured. Diaper’s monograph is just one work that considers Eliot in the light of recent theories of ecocriticism and the ongoing environmental crisis threatened by climate change. Elizabeth Black devotes a chapter to Eliot in The Nature of Modernism (pp. 87–139) as part of her broader exploration of ‘modernist poetry’s environmental thinking’ (p. 2). Black’s chapter covers similar ground to the early parts of Diaper’s study. Her chapter focuses upon The Waste Land [1922] as a new way of writing about place that departs from ‘inherited forms of nature writing’ (p. 88). Developing from previous writing about Eliot and nature, Black aims to present ‘the whole poem as an expression of environmental concern regarding the broadening gulf between humans and nature’ (p. 94). Where the poem’s urban landscape and breadth of allusive reference seem to place it within a ‘human sphere’ of interest (p. 87), Black discerns a series of figures for mediating Eliot’s preoccupation with the environment. She connects the criticism of materialism in The Waste Land to a broader ‘ecocritical’ concern with mankind’s responsibility for preserving the natural world. Elsewhere, ‘T.S. Eliot, Ecofeminist’ by Etienne Terblanche (in Vakoch and Mickey, eds., Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices, pp. 54–67) sets about the unlikely task of casting Eliot as ‘an early ecofeminist’ (p. 54). Terblanche’s approach consists first of ‘lingering in the moment of the text’ (p. 62), delicately probing rhymes and line endings in The Waste Land to suggest more sympathetic affinities with female characters. Terblanche then argues that Eliot’s poem aligns the act of rape with natural catastrophe and the despoliation of landscape, before launching into a blustering attack on ‘feminist warmongering’ (p. 63) by critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for interpreting the poetry through his biography (specifically, Eliot’s treatment of his first wife). There are plausible arguments in the essay, but the style and structure mean that the broad claim that the ‘greatness’ of The Waste Land lies in ‘Eliot’s egalitarian handling of the opposite realms of male and female experience’ (p. 58) is unconvincing as presented. The most coherent sequence of work on Eliot this year within scholarly journals can be found in the Wallace Stevens Journal, which devoted a special issue to Stevens’s relationship with his contemporaries Eliot and Yeats. After Edward Ragg’s prefatory piece, ‘Pages from Tales: Narrating Modernism’s Aftermaths’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 1–5), the issue commences with an interview between Ragg and Marjorie Perloff on the ‘Eras and Legacies’ of the three poets (WSJour 42:i[2018] 6–16). This ranges widely but knowledgeably across the fortunes of all three poets in the academy (and beyond) on either side of the Atlantic; the status of modernism; the influence of nineteenth-century French poetry on Stevens, Eliot, and Yeats; and their political views. Skipping those articles in the journal which focus exclusively on Stevens and Yeats, the special issue continues with Lee M. Jenkins’s ‘Atlantic Triangle: Stevens, Yeats, Eliot in Time of War’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 17–30). This suggests that a ‘three-way comparison’ of his chosen poets ‘collapses binaries that too often obtain between these major figures of poetic modernism’ (p. 17). The comparisons that follow explore connections through representations of war and bloodshed by Stevens, Yeats, and Eliot, but also through intricacies of form, such as Eliot’s deployment of Dante’s terza rima. In concluding, Jenkins turns to Derek Mahon’s poems about the Troubles in Northern Ireland as ‘the late product’ of this ‘circumAtlantic matrix’ (p. 27). Tony Sharpe’s ‘“Dead Opposites” or “Reconciled among the Stars”? Stevens and Eliot’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 62–76) starts from the unpromising observation that Stevens ‘had a certain investment in asserting his difference from Eliot, and Eliot seems not to have bothered greatly about Stevens’ (p. 62), but goes on to trace points in their work where a ‘momentary confluence of feeling’ (p. 64) can be discerned or their interests coincide, despite the seemingly knotty intransigence which would otherwise characterize their relationship. They were not, Sharpe concludes, ‘dead opposites’, but they were nevertheless ‘very different’ (p. 75). ‘“We Reason of These Things with Later Reason”: Plain Sense and the Poetics of Relief in Eliot and Stevens’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 99–116) by Sarah Kennedy considers the later works of both Stevens and Eliot, exploring ‘the struggle to sustain creativity across a lifetime’ (p. 101). The two poets, she argues, ‘share a commitment to an anti-creative plainness as a vital and liberating element of the continuous turning of the imagination’ (p. 99). Kennedy sets the apparent prosaism of Four Quartets against poems such as ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, discerning ‘a principle of complementarity’ between them and concluding that ‘it is precisely the turn toward plainness, the pursuit of poetry in spite of loss rather than as consolation for it, and the writing through the painful equinoctial awareness of infirmity, that humanizes the late poetic work, granting it power and poignancy’ (p. 114). Densely argued, this article is alert to the tone and dynamics of both Stevens and Eliot. Looking further afield, Benjamin Madden’s ‘The Idea of a Colony: Eliot and Stevens in Australia’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 77–98) explores the anti-modernist Nietzschean poetics of the writers associated with the journal Vision as a means of accounting for the reception of Eliot and Stevens in Australia. As well as tracing the poetic influence of Eliot and Stevens on Australian authors, this article is alert to the material conditions informing their reception. It raises important questions about which texts were available and in what form, as part of canon formation. ‘Australian writers’, Madden concludes, ‘have always sought … a means and an idiom through which to invert the colony/metropole dyad’ (p. 96). Other articles and essays in 2018 explored Eliot’s literary relations with fellow writers too. Alan Blackstock’s ‘Chesterton, Eliot and Modernist Heresy’ (Renascence 70:iii[2018] 199–216) probes Eliot’s discussion of heresy in After Strange Gods [1933], using the writing of G.K. Chesterton on Heretics [1905] and Orthodoxy [1908]. Blackstone concedes their differences, characterizing Eliot’s interest in tradition as ‘elitist’ in comparison with Chesterton’s ‘populist’ view (p. 208). But he seeks to reconcile this contrast through their shared concern with ‘religious orthodoxy’ in relation to apparently literary matters. Both men, he concludes, acknowledged the importance of ‘openness to rival traditions’, but urged the necessity of ‘maintaining a shared tradition within a community, in order to allow its members to evaluate competing claims to truth’ (p. 212). Felix Schmelzer’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder in Modern Lyrical Poetry’ (symplokē 26:i[2018] 293–306) incorporates a reading of ‘Burnt Norton’, alongside Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht and Baudelaire’s ‘Élévation’ as part of an attempt to gauge the nature and impact of thinking spatially about the relation between good and evil, above and below. Eliot’s poetry, Schmelzer argues, manifests a ‘particularly modern linguistic sensibility’ (p. 304) when it comes to mapping such structures onto reality. William Davies explores the disposition of Samuel Beckett towards Eliot in ‘“A New Occasion, a New Term of Relation”: Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot’ (in Beloborodova et al., eds., Beckett and Modernism, pp. 111–27). Beckett’s disdain for Eliot, Davies suggests, has been exaggerated, and this essay traces elements from ‘Eliot’s style, methods, and attitudes towards writing and art’ (p. 113) across the Irish writer’s career. Providing some useful nuance for recent critical accounts which identify Beckett as a late modernist, Davies argues that even where he evinces disdain towards Eliot, Beckett’s stance is better understood as something akin to Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. ‘Traces, echoes and challenges to Eliot’s form of modernist composition’ in Beckett’s early works, Davies claims, constitute ‘a part of the creative impulse’ of his writing (p. 114). Several articles this year address questions of biography in relation to Eliot’s work. Stephen D. Thompson’s ‘Eliot’s End and Beginning: Scholarship, Poetry, Forms of Life’ (TCL 64:iv[2018] 413–48) explores Eliot’s decision to publish his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley in 1964 to argue that the ‘belated’ publication ‘reimagines the forms of scholarship as fundamentally personal’ (p. 414). For Thompson this return to scholarly forms at the end of his career stands for Eliot’s sustained engagement with the tension between ‘objective externality’ (p. 424) and the personal nature of experience and utterance, from the notes to The Waste Land to the meditations and observations of Four Quartets. Reviewing the ‘fraught’ relation of Eliot’s poetry to ‘life-writing’ (p. 118), Jamie Wood’s ‘“Here I Am”: Eliot, “Gerontion,” and the Great War’ (Biography 41:i[2018] 116–42) seeks to read ‘Gerontion’ as a kind of ‘confessional poetry’ that seeks to come to terms with his status in 1919 as a non-combatant. Wood’s reading starts with a biographical enquiry into the sources of the poem and its composition, connecting this to a strong sense of the historical moment at which Eliot worked on the poem and the ways in which this might have shaped its form and content. The article concludes by reviewing different ways of reading the poem’s sardonic depictions of inaction and impotence in the face of conflict in relation to Eliot’s own position. And Marjorie Perloff’s ‘Eliot the Young Reviewer: The Formation of Aesthetic Judgement’ (LitI 19:ii[2017] 135–42) draws upon the ongoing edition of Eliot’s critical prose to reassess Eliot’s ‘early bread-and-butter pieces’ (p. 136): reviews written for the Egoist in the first decades of the twentieth century, before he had acquired much fame. Noting Eliot’s hostility towards the ‘Georgian poetry’ of Rupert Brooke, Alec Waugh, and others, Perloff is impressed by the precision of his critical censure and the occasionally wicked turn of Eliot’s wit. Frank Capogna’s ‘Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry’ (JML 41:iii[2018] 147–65) re-examines the unpublished poems from Inventions of the March Hare to argue that Eliot ‘experimented with ekphrastic poetics early in his career through ambivalent appropriations, parodies, and formal innovation’ (p. 149). Readings follow of ‘Embarquement pour Cythère’ and ‘The Love song of St Sebastian’ in particular. For Capogna, who is strongly indebted to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this engagement with ekphrasis and the seeming refusal that followed in Eliot’s later, published, work are ‘inscribed in a cultural dialectic’ with various ‘forms of cultural authority’ (p. 162). ‘Modernism and T.S. Eliot’, by David Ellis (CQ 47:i[2018] 53–64) takes the publication of Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s edition of Eliot’s poetical works in 2015 as the point of departure for a general survey of Eliot in relation to modernism. Competent, cogent, clear, this essay covers familiar ground and offers an account of his work up to and including The Waste Land; but there is little that is new here and no sense that Ellis profited from any of the copious annotation material provided by Eliot’s editors to refresh or alter our understanding of the poet. In ‘Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot, and the Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads’ (JVC 24:iv[2018] 542–55), Michael Craske rejects Eliot’s claim in The Sacred Wood [1919] that the poetry of A.C. Swinburne is divorced from music. As well as setting Eliot’s criticisms of Swinburne in context with contemporary musicological theory, Craske shows that he was empirically wrong to claim that Swinburne’s work was not of a kind that could be ‘set to music’ (p. 543). On the contrary, Craske cites 125 compositions inspired by Swinburne’s poetry by a range of composers, from Charles Villiers Stanford to less well-known figures such as Felix Corbett. Craske then traces complex synergies between the influence of Wagner on Swinburne and the influence of Swinburne upon Wagnerianism at the end of the nineteenth century. Swinburne’s poetry, he shows, was ‘more versatile, sophisticated and open to possibility than Eliot believed’ (p. 555). Craske reveals that musical settings of Swinburne’s poems were popular in music halls. Eliot’s apparent ignorance of this may be mystifying given the enthusiasm he expressed for the music-hall performances of Marie Lloyd in his critical writing and the saturation of allusion to music hall in his poetry. A note from Brian Vickers, ‘Prufrock and Mary of Argyle’ (N&Q 65[2018] 411–12), suggests that the mermaids at the close of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ may recall an otherwise forgotten source, ‘Mary of Argyle’, a Victorian music-hall ballad by Charles Jefferys. Nancy Hargrove’s ‘T.S. Eliot and Popular Music: Ragtime, Music-Hall Songs, Bawdy Ballads, and All That Jazz’ (SoAR 83:ii[2018] 16–28) draws on work by David Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard, as well as her own previous research into Eliot’s time in Paris, to review the influence of various popular cultural forms upon his work. Jazz and the music hall she observes, ‘informed the rhythm and shape of his works’ as well as prompting him to experiment with form (p. 16). There is little new here, but this essay is well illustrated with striking images from the archive, and Hargrove links to a touching video of her late husband performing some of the works under discussion. Matthew Sperling’s ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ (Apollo [2 February 2018] 60–5) is, if anything, even more lavishly illustrated than Hargrove’s article, reproducing works by Wyndham Lewis, Patrick Heron, David Jones, and others in a breezy summary of Eliot’s interest in the visual arts and the subsequent influence of his poetry upon visual artists. Brian Clifton’s ‘Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”’ (JML 42:i[2018] 65–76) seeks to reconcile readings of Eliot’s poem in terms of gender politics with accounts of its form. Prufrock, Clifton suggests, understands the sonnet as predominantly English and masculine (presumably Eliot’s persona is imagined never to have read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), so that the constant approximation and then retreat from something like the sonnet within the poem enacts Prufrock’s self-conscious failure to live up to an over-demanding standard of masculinity. This is an ingenious reading, but one that struggles in places (like Prufrock) to reconcile itself to exceptions and approximations. Matthew Scully’s ‘Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form’ (JML 41:iii[2018] 166–82) argues against readings of The Waste Land that seek to restore a sense of ‘order’ by placing the character of Tiresias at its centre. For Scully, this figure exemplifies instead Catherine Malabou’s theory of ‘plasticity’, a ‘reading’, he explains, ‘that seeks to reveal the form left in the text through the withdrawing of presence, that is, through its own deconstruction’ (p. 168). Accordingly, the metamorphosis of Tiresias ‘displaces or defers any ontological containment of form-essence-presence’ (p. 178). The ‘plastic form’ of The Waste Land, Scully concludes, ‘resists all ordering impositions’ (p. 179). The additional hyphen in the title of Tony Sharpe’s ‘“Always Present”: T.S. Eliot and Re-cantation’ (Mo/Mo 25:ii[2018] 369–87) is intended to connect the way that Eliot’s later work revisits earlier utterances in such a manner as to incant or sing again, rather than merely recanting an earlier position. Against Eliot’s broad disposition to avoid repeating himself, Sharpe points to the workings of repetition within the poems, articulating a ‘poetics of resonance’ (p. 384). In this way, he links the disquisition on remorse in Four Quartets with the deep allusive power of poetry that alludes to some present but not fully articulated source of emotional energy. David Ben-Merre also offers an account of Four Quartets in the final chapter of Figures of Time: Disjunctions in Modernist Poetry (pp. 169–89). As part of a broader argument about the ‘temporalities’ of modernism (p. ix), Ben-Merre engages in a lucid and good-natured close reading of Eliot that understands his achievement as ‘a lyric failure, but not in a pejorative sense’ (p. 169). There is a complex argument here about Eliot’s representation of a lyrical voice struggling to place itself in time. Finally, Jed Perl draws on Eliot to reflect on the relative differences between an ‘impasse’ and an interlude when it comes to thinking about historical progress, in his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Common Knowledge, ‘Impasse or Interlude: Reflections on an Imminent Anniversary’ (CK 24:iii[2018] 474–82). Perl’s article is not really about Eliot, but his reflections on historical events (the collapse of the Cold War), cultural change, and the way in which writers and critics respond to those changes draw heavily upon Eliot, probing and questioning the kind of example he offers to present writers. 7. British Poetry Post-1950 Fresh work on Ted Hughes has proliferated in the last decade, and 2018 gave no sign of bucking this trend. Hughes was the subject of two substantial edited collections. The first, Ted Hughes: Nature and Culture, is edited by Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald and Terry Gifford, and comes on the heels of Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected [2013], edited by the same trio. It brings together longstanding Hughes scholars with a number of authoritative new voices in the field. Roberts’s introduction turns on Hughes’s ‘allegiance to “nature” and suspicion of, if not hostility to, “culture”’, but also challenges the basis of that nature/culture dichotomy in the ecocritical fashion: ‘The stronger the evidence that humankind is inescapably a part of the natural world (a position Hughes undoubtedly espoused) the more difficult it is to position “culture” outside nature’ (p. xiii). Recent years have seen a burgeoning of ecocritical readings of Hughes, including Yvonne Reddick’s Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene, and environmental themes, while far from dominating the book, are again brought to the fore in several chapters in this collection. Most of the essays here, though, will be of interest to Hughes scholars of all stripes. The chapters in the first part of the book approach his work through a mix of ecological concerns, animal studies, and questions of form or poetic technique. The book’s second half is loosely grouped around new readings on the writers and texts that most influenced Hughes, as well as those influenced by him. In ‘Ted Hughes’s “Greening” and the Environmental Humanities’ (pp. 3–20), Terry Gifford shows that Hughes’s interest in contemporary environmental science, beginning with the ecological writings of Rachel Carson, was ‘essential research for his poetry’ (p. 7). Gifford, though, focuses less on Hughes’s poetry than on the essays, letters, and archive materials through which the poet revealed over the years his shifting (and at times contradictory) preoccupations with conservation, hunting, and environmental protection. His concern about global ecological crisis only intensified in later life, as did his polemic on the subject. In a letter Hughes wrote to Gifford himself in 1993, the poet tendered a warning as pressing now as it was then: ‘If the human race fails to survive all this it will be because it can’t get interested in its own annihilation’ (p. 14). Mark Wormald’s elegantly conceived essay, ‘The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly’ (pp. 21–38), explores the poet’s fascination with entomology and fly fishing, tracing the significance of the generative, transformational, ephemeral dance of the mayfly through a series of close readings of Hughes’s poems and diaries. Hughes discovered in the mayfly an image for metamorphosis, and in ‘its abundance and its fragility’ Wormald makes a case for the insect’s centrality to the poet’s ecological imagination (p. 24). Invoking the lives of mayflies in what Wormald calls a ‘language of the spiritual, the moral and the metaphysical’ (p. 30), the charge of the mayfly is, in Hughes’s own words, akin to that of ‘Poetic electrons’ (p. 34). Neil Roberts’s essay, ‘Ted Hughes’s Paradise’ (pp. 39–52), looks to untangle Hughes’s idea that shooting and fishing were, paradoxically, ways in which he felt most connected to the natural world, pursuits that represented for him ‘an extension of your whole organism into the whole environment that’s created you’ (p. 41). Hughes was an avid hunter from his teenage years, and, as he suggested in Poetry in the Making, came to see writing poems as an extension of his earlier hunting pursuits. Focusing mainly on ‘A Solstice’, a poem about the killing of a fox, Roberts examines how Hughes’s writing reconstructs and returns to the animal encounters of his childhood and adolescence. The fox was a totemic creature of deep, reflexive significance for Hughes, particularly at the beginning and end of his career, and its recurrence in his writing becomes, as Roberts deduces, ‘a kind of test of his personal and poetic integrity’ (p. 51). The theme of human–animal encounters continues in Danny O’Connor’s excellent essay, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (pp. 53–68). Borrowing his title from John Berger’s essay of that name in About Looking, O’Connor scrutinizes Hughes’s obsession with animal observation and asks why his poems so often look to ‘capture’ their gaze. Since ‘the most potent connections with animals in Hughes’s poetry are often silent, and ocular’, O’Connor writes, there is something in looking at animals, and in animals looking back, that ‘offer[s] Hughes a glimpse into a way of being human that culture seems to have left behind’ (p. 56). Claire Heaney’s ‘Coetzee’s Hughesian Animals’ (pp. 69–86) considers Hughes’s influence on the writings of J.M. Coetzee. The South African novelist included Hughes’s ‘November’ in a personal anthology of poems, each of which was handpicked by Coetzee on the basis that they ‘mean and meant a lot to me’ and played a part ‘in my own formation as a writer’ (p. 70). Using ‘November’ as a springboard, Heaney examines Coetzee’s animal ethics and his use of Hughes’s animal poems in his novel Elizabeth Costello [2003]. The eponymous Costello is an ageing Australian novelist who delivers a series of talks on poetry, through which she reveals her careful engagement with Hughes’s work. These and other instances across Coetzee’s writing reveal not only his affection for Hughes’s poetry, but also, Heaney argues, their shared appreciation of ‘the interrelationship of humans and other animals’ (p. 72). James Castell’s ‘The Nature of Ted Hughes’s Similes’ (pp. 87–106) changes tack, moving on to a specific technical aspect of the poet’s craft: the simile. He argues that Hughes’s similes ‘defamiliarise as often as they create connections’ and ‘dehumanise as much as they anthropomorphise the nonhuman’ (p. 88). Similes, Castell writes, ‘suggest resemblance, rather than the complete identification that is sometimes associated with metaphor’ (p. 90). For this reason the simile introduces a tension with its subject that metaphor does not, namely the implied dissimilitude that comes when we say something is ‘like’ (rather than ‘is’) something else. So when Hughes asks in Poetry in the Making, ‘How can a poem … be like an animal?’, his poetry is, as Castell argues, ‘particularly attracted to similes’ (and indeed animals) ‘because of their independence, their capacity for uncontrollable and approximate meaning in a form that draws attention to itself with a comparative marker’ (p. 102). Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of Ted Hughes’ (pp. 107–24) traces the mongrelized forms and hints of multicultural thinking which first emerge in Hughes’s early poem ‘Strawberry Hill’ from Lupercal [1960], and which can be seen again in later texts such as ‘Shibboleth’ from Capriccio [1990]. In these cases, Hughes undermines popular myths of cultural uniformity concerning ‘England’ and ‘the English’, suggesting, as Ravinthiran proposes, that ‘Englishness is not a fixed essence, at risk of pollution’, but is rather ‘created and recreated by and within the mutations of culture’ (p. 109). These notions seem to classify Hughes as a rather different writer of nationhood, and certainly a more complex one, than has been typically assumed. Addressing the idea of England through Hughes’s poetic imagining of landscape, Janne Stigen Drangsholt’s ‘Imagination Alters Everything: Ted Hughes and Place’ (pp. 125–42) is informed by Heideggerian ideas of dwelling. Drangsholt riffs on a range of responses to Hughes’s notions of place and identity, particularly those of Seamus Heaney and Sean O’Brien, and draws from them the sense that Hughes creates in his poetry ‘a landscape that comprises both a mythical or spiritual hinterland and an actual scape’ (p. 126). In other words, Hughes’s poetic landscape manages to be both a place with real homespun physicality to it, and an almost metaphysical ‘England of the mind’. Turning now to the book’s second half, which concentrates more on the ‘cultural’ than the ‘natural’, James Robinson’s ‘“Our Chaucer”: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Medieval Reading’ (pp. 143–60) is a compelling piece on the ways in which Hughes considered Chaucer not only a major poetic example, but a key figure in his creative relationship with Sylvia Plath. As Robinson shows, Chaucer was, alongside Shakespeare, ‘the most lastingly influential literary and personal relationship of their lives’ (p. 156). For Hughes in later years, attempting to preserve his distinctiveness as a poet in his civic role as Laureate, Chaucer presented ‘the perfect model of a public poet’, Robinson suggests, ‘[as] a writer who could speak to and for Royal power and yet maintain sovereignty over his own poetic voice’ (pp. 145–6). Katherine Robertson’s enlightening essay, ‘“The Remains of Something”: Ted Hughes and The Mabinogion’ (pp. 161–76), examines another of Hughes’s medieval intertexts. Through a mix of close readings and archival research, Robertson makes a persuasive case that Hughes was drawing on and retelling the medieval Welsh tales collected in the Mabinogion, building some of those stories into his mythological and folkloric frameworks for Crow and several poems in Cave Birds. In ‘Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins’ (pp. 177–94), John Goodby charts Hughes’s influence by Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets of the 1940s, a school much under the influence of Blake and Yeats, which has long been marginalized by critics. Their mode of ‘visionary modernism’, as outlined in the New Apocalypse anthology [1939], grappled with ideas of ‘(im)mortality’ and other such ‘“grander themes”’ (p. 181). Goodby sees in Hughes ‘a continual trading in the currency of apocalyptic vision’, and finds echoes of the poetic movement, often via Thomas, ‘traceable everywhere’ in his work (p. 182). The essay concludes with a delicate reconsideration of Hughes’s position within the English tradition and the Apocalyptic poetics he took with him, in which Goodby labels Hughes ‘the maverick the establishment adopted out of fear of a more countercultural alternative’ (p. 190). The next essay, Carrie Smith’s ‘Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations Contextually in Ted Hughes’s Cave Birds’ (pp. 195–214), is a strikingly original take on Hughes’s relationship with Plath. It begins with a draft of ‘Something Was Happening’ from Cave Birds [1975], from which Hughes crossed out two lines about Hamlet looking at Ophelia’s corpse. The erasure, Smith argues, ‘resonates with a much larger structure of omission and silence connecting Plath and Ophelia in his writing and compositional process’ (p. 196). Hughes’s anxiety about his work being interpreted through his relationship with Plath leads to what Smith identifies as a heightened ‘sensitivity about particularly charged cultural references, like Ophelia’, and to other deletions, rejections, and omissions from his manuscripts and published work, such as his decision not to translate the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in his Tales of Ovid [1997]. The essay broadens from here into a consideration of the poetry’s spectral character and ‘Hughes’s careful excision of biography from his authorial persona’ (p. 214). In ‘The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald’ (pp. 215–30), Laura Blomvall reads Hughes’s influence as ‘a source of acute discomfort’ for Oswald (p. 218), who only belatedly conceded his influence on her writing. As Blomvall neatly argues, this is less an issue of Bloomian anxiety than of Oswald, in the aftermath of her debut volume The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile [1996], wishing not to be narrowly defined as pastoral poet in the Hughesian vein. Later in her career, in ‘Poetry for Beginners’ and her introduction to A Ted Hughes Bestiary [2014] as well as in various interviews, Oswald has openly celebrated Hughes’s importance, and Blomvall traces the compositional and stylistic symmetries that have emerged across their work. Lastly, Seamus Perry’s free-form essay on ‘Hughes and Urbanity’ (pp. 231–44) sifts through various anecdotes, letters, poems, and telling observations to explore Hughes’s decidedly non-‘urbane’ reputation as a writer, and to reflect on the ‘double life’ he led as both a poet and a man in the wider society (p. 236). Hughes’s prose and poetry writing not only has an urbane side, but in places is prone to the jarringly (and deliberately) mundane or quotidian; for Perry, these awkward moments suggest that ‘a kind of prosaic [is breaking] through the aspiration to sublimity’ (p. 243). Such dualities in his verse are, Perry argues, ‘a stylistic expression of Hughes’s intuition about life involving one reality underlying another, which is also lived and certainly real but sits precariously above the first’ (p. 241). Ted Hughes in Context is the second major title of Hughes criticism in 2018 and has Terry Gifford reprising the role of editor-contributor. The thirty-six essays collected here cast a wide net, and together provide the most comprehensive survey to date of Hughes’s work and its contexts. The chapters themselves are fairly short, inviting the reader to sample an array of critical approaches in the style of a Cambridge Companion or Oxford Handbook. The collection opens with little preamble, launching almost immediately into the first of its ten sections, Hughes’s literary contexts. Jonathan Locke Hart’s outline of ‘Hughes and His Contemporaries’ (pp. 3–12) focuses on three Faber poets in Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. Larkin came to regard himself as a rival, Gunn was a professional admirer and advocate, and Heaney was a close friend. From Hart’s overview of their personal and professional relationships Hughes emerges as a generous figure, supportive of his contemporaries, and above all an early, formative influence on Heaney. In ‘Hughes and Plath’ (pp. 13–22), Heather Clark sketches out the couple’s turbulent relationship, from an impassioned first encounter to the prodigious literary talents which, before the end, they cultivated in one another. Clark’s essay sidesteps the personal controversies and focuses purely on their literary legacy, noting how, ‘even after [their] union dissolved, neither poet would abandon the aesthetic vision that had first brought them together’ (p. 20). Ronald Schuchard’s ‘Hughes and Eliot’ (pp. 23–32) elaborates on the two poets’ personal acquaintance from 1957 until Eliot’s death in 1965, and reflects intriguingly on Hughes’s early and formative absorption of ‘Eliot’s creative and critical theories into his own’ (p. 23). His reinterpretation of Eliot’s work, based on his vision of Eliot as ‘a romantic, shamanic poet, as a seer and prophetic of his age’, was a model Hughes returned to frequently in his criticism, and one he sought to emulate in the shamanic quests of his own verse (p. 28). In ‘Hughes’s Literary Legacy’ (pp. 33–42) Fiona Sampson considers the various ways in which a literary legacy can disseminate itself. She singles out for praise all Hughes did ‘to make poetry a lively force and accessible medium for children’, and suggests that ‘the diversity of contemporary British poet[s]’, many of whom grew up in Hughes’s heyday, is part of his lasting legacy (pp. 40–1). Next come five essays appraising Hughes’s work in other literary genres. Following Fiona Sampson’s take on Hughes as a champion of children’s imaginative lives, Lissa Paul expands on the subject in ‘Hughes’s Writing for Children’ (pp. 45–53). Paul finds that his works for children ‘run like a river through the body of his work—a mainstream not a tributary’ (p. 46), and notes that having a child of his own ‘opened up a space in [Hughes’s] early work for invoking a child’s way of seeing’ (p. 51). In Jonathan Locke Hart’s second contribution to the book, ‘Hughes and Drama’ (pp. 54–62), Hughes is framed as ‘a poet of drama’ as well as ‘a dramatic poet’ (p. 54). Indeed, Hart argues that what Hughes did for the stage was an extension of what he sought to do as a poet, ‘writing ancient tragedy and myth as intervention in the concerns of our times’ (p. 61). In the next chapter, Alex Davis approaches ‘Hughes as Literary Critic’ (pp. 63–71), exploring the ‘enthusing didacticism’ of critical works like Poetry in the Making, in which Hughes sought to nurture the creative impetus in young writers and his adolescent audience (p. 64). Davis remarks on the way Hughes’s criticism stressed the extempore and unrefined, prized improvisation in other writers, and defended a creative practice of sense-for-sense translation against those who would have it word-for-word. Picking up this interlingual thread, Tara Bergin’s essay, ‘Hughes as Translator’ (pp. 72–81), marvels at Hughes’s success as a translator despite not being fluent in any language other than his own. All of his translations are in fact co-translations, worked up from English cribs. Hughes was committed nonetheless to introducing English-speaking readers to foreign poetry. In 1965 he co-founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which remains today a thriving centre for new translated poetry. His own translations in verse and drama embraced the idea of remaking the original, and chimed with his broader ambition ‘to revitalise, but at the same time exist outside … a British literary tradition that he himself felt no part of’ (p. 79). In ‘Hughes as Correspondent’ (pp. 82–90), Joanny Moulin reads Hughes at his most unguarded, in his letters, which were never meant to be published. In more rigidly descriptive or formal modes Hughes’s letter-writing is tedious, but the essay springs to life when discussing ‘Ted Hughes the humourist, who can relish in tag-names and word-plays, in a fantastic, almost surrealistic nonsensical style’ (p. 86). While everybody writes differently to different correspondents, Moulin calls Hughes ‘a chameleon letter writer’ (p. 86), capable of great ‘spontaneity of expression’ (p. 89) and composing in a variety of tones that find echoes in his poetry. The five essays that follow are loosely grouped around considerations of style. In ‘Hughes and Voice’ (pp. 93–102) Carrie Smith listens to the distinctive tones of the poet’s West Yorkshire voice, a voice described by Plath as ‘angry, gritty, macho’ (p. 93), which is now preserved in the studio recordings and radio programmes he made throughout his career. These considerations take Smith to the importance of sound in his poetry, and the way vocal performance might relate to the process of composition. For Hughes, reading aloud and written composition were intimately intertwined (pp. 97–8). Sam Perry’s ‘Hughes and Surrealism’ (pp. 103–12) attunes itself to the poet’s affinity with surrealism and his delight in the absurd. ‘The most conspicuous sign of Hughes’s surrealist sensibility’, Perry claims, ‘is his fascination with the world of the unconscious and the associated realms of sleep and dreams’ (p. 104), on which the poet expands illuminatingly in Poetry in the Making. Perry explores Hughes’s surrealist iconography as it reaches its apotheosis in Crow, and highlights telling crossovers between his writing and the poems and manifestoes of the father of surrealism, André Breton, whom Hughes read. Tara Bergin’s ‘Hughes and Eastern Europeans’ (pp. 113–22) also centres on Crow, looking at the text through the prism of Hughes’s appreciation of Herbert, Popa, and Pilinszky, whom the poet read in their first English translations. Bergin deftly illumines how, in their approach to apocalyptic experience, these and other post-war eastern and central European writers shaped Hughes’s own poetic development. In ‘Hughes and the Classics’ (pp. 123–32), Roger Rees outlines the vast network of classical reference in Hughes’s work. These references are not only central to poetry collections such as Prometheus on his Crag, but form the basis of much of Hughes’s translation-cum-adaptation work, as in his Tales from Ovid or his versions of the plays of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Seneca. The essay further explicates the point that Hughes’s translations of works, in this case those in Latin and Greek, did not treat the source texts with particular reverence; though it should be noted, as Rees does, that Hughes himself ‘is reported to have said that his best-ever work was his version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia’ (p. 130). In ‘Hughes’s Collaboration with Artists’ (pp. 133–42), Lorraine Kerslake takes in the extraordinary range of Hughes’s work for both adults and children that appeared in collaboration with visual artists. Of these artists, Leonard Baskin was his most productive and influential working partner, with their collaborations in the end encompassing some thirty books (p. 134). Kerslake’s essay paints a fascinating picture of Hughes as ‘a writer whose appreciation for the artefact of the book led him to repeatedly explore the risky business of offering his readers more than his texts by working closely with visual arts that inspired him in their turn’ (p. 141). Steve Ely’s chapter, ‘Hughes’s Yorkshire’ (pp. 145–54), is the first of three essays on Hughes’s geocultural contexts, all of which take a broadly biographical approach. The distinctive West Yorkshire dialect with which Hughes was raised is inextricable from his poetic voice. As a result, Ely argues, ‘a kind of Yorkshire essentialism at the most basic linguistic level is fundamental to Hughes’s poetic self-conception’ (p. 145). After leaving Yorkshire in his twenties, Hughes maintained ties with his original home place, particularly through correspondence with his friend Jack Brown. In Brown, according to Ely, ‘Hughes saw a living link to his Mexborough childhood and adolescence that met his atavistic need to remain connected to that now distant … yet profoundly formative place’ (p. 153). In the next chapter, Gillian Groszewski turns our attention further afield to ‘Hughes and America’ (pp. 155–64). ‘From adolescence’, Groszewski claims, ‘Hughes had been developing an interest in American poetry that affected his writing’, though his American education greatly intensified after meeting Sylvia Plath (p. 155). While his engagement with American writing has since been considered as a by-product of his relationship with Plath, Groszewski counters with the suggestion that ‘reading American books and living in America allowed Hughes to develop his writing as he chose, away from what he saw as the claustrophobic proscriptions of the British literary establishment’ (p. 163). Mark Wormald’s illuminating chapter, ‘Hughes and Ireland’ (pp. 165–74), draws on Hughes’s letters to explore the poet’s romanticized relationship with Ireland, where he often contemplated moving. Wormald describes his ‘preoccupation with the richness of Irish myth and folklore’ (p. 166). Turning now to anthropological contexts, David Troupes, in ‘Hughes and Religion’ (pp. 177–86), discusses Hughes’s often polemical views on various denominations of Christianity. The word ‘religion’ derives, as Troupes notes, from the Latin ligare, ‘to tie, fasten’. Whether or not Hughes is an anti-Christian poet continues to be debated, but Troupes affirms that he is certainly a religious poet. The essential re-connective purpose of religion, Troupes argues, is related to his work’s deep engagement with the natural world. In ‘Hughes and Shamanism’ (pp. 187–96) Gregory Leadbetter examines the link between poetry and shamanism, which Hughes first encountered through Mircea Eliade’s study, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy [1964]. This work, Leadbitter writes, ‘spoke directly to Hughes’s own psychological experience of “a personal, poetic, profound engagement with the miraculous forces of the universe”’, and ‘activated the entire network of Hughes’s prior reading of esoterica, folklore and myth’ (p. 189). Leadbitter’s chapter offers a fascinating account of the ways in which these patterns chimed with and nourished Hughes’s verse and prose. Ann Henning Jocelyn continues the examination of Hughes’s more esoteric interests in ‘Hughes and the Occult’ (pp. 197–206). The symbology of astrology held a particular appeal for Hughes, who drew many horoscopes of his own, as Jocelyn has found, and who once suggested to Plath that he might consider practising astrology for a living. James Robinson documents Hughes’s wider interest in medieval culture in ‘Hughes and the Middle Ages’ (pp. 209–18), paying keenest attention to the influence of his reading and incomplete translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Daniel O’Connor’s chapter, ‘Hughes and History’ (pp. 219–27), examines Hughes’s understanding of England’s history, or as it is told in Shakespeare and the Goddess. Hughes sought (impossibly) to make this ‘mythic history’ of England compatible with the modern age in which he lived. In ‘Hughes and War’ (pp. 228–37), Helen Melody explores the legacy in Hughes’s work of the two world wars. He felt that the First World War ‘overshadowed his [early] childhood’ (p. 228) and experienced the Second World War at first hand. While Hughes struggled, as Melody writes, ‘to escape war as a theme’, he held a deep appreciation for the war poetry of Owen, Douglas, and others (p. 235). Neil Roberts begins ‘Hughes and the Laureateship’ (pp. 238–48) with a history of the ignominy and satire heaped on previous holders of the Laureateship, and the post’s enduring status as something of a poisoned chalice. The essay also briefly compares Hughes’s work as Laureate with that of his predecessors and successors in the role. In the next two chapters Laura Blomvall and Janne Stigen Drangsholt take up the gender contexts of Hughes’s life and writing. Blomvall’s ‘Hughes and Feminism’ (pp. 251–60) complicates earlier accounts of gender representation in his work, and provides a nuanced reconsideration of Hughes’s depictions of Assia Wevill and Sylvia Plath in Capriccio [1990] and Birthday Letters [1998] respectively. In ‘Hughes, Masculinity and Gender Identity’ (pp. 261–70), Janne Stigen Drangsholt brings a range of theorists (Jung most prominent among them) to bear on representations of masculinity, and the gendering of animals or particular attitudes, across Hughes’s work. Terry Gifford’s essay, ‘Hughes and Nature’ (pp. 273–82), is the first of four chapters that turn on environmental matters. Gifford outlines what he sees as ‘the six stages of greening’ in Hughes’s work (p. 273), beginning with the close observation of animals in early poems that deprecate hunting, and ending with a sense of cusping environmental crisis that Hughes feared was largely being ignored. In ‘Hughes and Agriculture’ (pp. 283–91), Jack Thacker provides an elegant account of Hughes’s rural roots and the persona he cultivated as a farmer, which Thacker connects to ‘his self-fashioned roles as educator and environmentalist, especially when it came to countryside matters’ (p. 289). Mark Wormald’s ‘Hughes and Fishing’ (pp. 292–301) reflects richly on the poet’s lifelong obsession with fishing and the effect it had on his poetic imagination. In ‘Hughes’s Environmental Campaigns’ (pp. 302–12), Yvonne Reddick condenses the archival discoveries and lively ideas that formed the basis of her 2016 monograph on Hughes’s ecopoetry and his work in environmental activism, which she focuses upon here. The following two chapters pay sustained attention to Hughes the educator. Hugh Dunkerley’s ‘Hughes and Creative Writing’ (pp. 315–24) addresses the poet’s brief spells as a creative writing teacher and reveals how those roles prompted him to reflect on his own process of composition. Hughes articulated his ideas most succinctly in Poetry in the Making [1967], a text which was ‘little less than revolutionary for many teachers’, Dunkerley argues, and one that made a sizeable impact on creative writing in schools and higher education (p. 323). In ‘Hughes, Anthologising and Education’ (pp. 325–34), David Whitley offers a compelling account of Hughes’s work as an anthologist and the stance it revealed towards the cultural values of his age. Focusing on three anthologies, The Rattle Bag [1982], The School Bag [1997], and By Heart [1997], Whitley takes the measure of the poet’s influence on younger readers particularly, and how Hughes shifted the course of poetry education in the British Isles. The study’s final section concentrates on biographical contexts, beginning with Mark Hinchcliffe in ‘Hughes’s Publication History’ (pp. 337–46). Not a conventional publication history, this chapter opens up the poet’s less well-known, often overlooked creative outlets, and explores Hughes’s making of books with visual artists, his involvement with craft presses, and his own skills as an artist. In ‘Hughes’s Archives’ (pp. 347–58), Amanda Golden presents an overview of the Ted Hughes papers held at Emory University, the British Library, and Smith College, bringing her own experience as an archivist to bear on the collections’ rich potential for future study. Claire Heaney’s ‘Hughes and the Biographers’ (pp. 359–69) chronicles the controversies that surround Hughes, his feminist detractors, and the difficulties of approaching a life story that has already been so widely sensationalized or demonized. The collection ends, appropriately, with ‘The Ted Hughes Myth’ (pp. 370–8). Daniel O’Connor reflects here, as Claire Heaney does, on the difficulty of separating Hughes’s biography from his poetry. Certain events in Hughes’s life cast long shadows across his work, and by the same token, O’Connor writes, ‘the mythical Hughes that surfaces in the poems has overtaken the man behind them’ (pp. 370–1). O’Connor’s appraisal of the enormous, enduring myth of ‘Ted Huge’ is a fitting finale to this all-encompassing collection of essays, which does justice not only to the scale of Hughes’s achievements, but also to the range of scholarly approaches his work continues to inspire. The final addition to Hughes scholarship in 2018 was Daniel Weston’s ‘Two Contemporary Poets and the Ted Hughes Bestiary’ (TedHSJ 7:i[2018] 89–101). Weston considers Alice Oswald’s and John Burnside’s debts to Hughes’s animal poetry, which he roughly categorizes between two poles: ‘creatures recorded in lyric, observational mode (The Hawk in the Rain, Remains of Elmet, Moortown Diary) and sometimes-mythical beasts carrying the heavy metaphorical burden of the spirit world and creation myth (Wodwo, Crow, Adam and the Sacred Nine)’ (p. 90). The essay illustrates how Hughes’s reputation for anthropomorphosis was cultivated in the first instance by Al Alvarez, whose influential introduction to The New Poetry [1962] and earlier review of Hawk in the Rain [1957] emphasized the metaphorical and allegorical dimensions of Hughes’s animals at the expense of the creatures that were, ostensibly, the poems’ chief subject. Rightly or wrongly, Alvarez’s interpretation has coloured much of the subsequent criticism about Hughes’s animal poetry. Against this, Weston proposes that ‘detailed observation is always the anchor of metaphor’ in Hughes’s bestiary, and that his writing about animals places a premium on ‘retaining creaturely experience in poetic language’ (p. 7). In addressing the influence of Hughes’s animals on more recent poetry, Weston uses the introduction to Oswald’s edition of A Ted Hughes Bestiary [2014] as an entryway into the Hughesian inflections of her poem ‘Fox’ in Falling Awake [2016]. The essay ends with discussion of John Burnside’s poem ‘Animals’, from The Light Trap [2002], which, like Oswald’s ‘Fox’, bears significant resemblances to Hughes’s ‘The Thought-Fox’. As in the edited collections discussed above, Weston finds that both poems, following Hughes, look to embody their animal subjects rather than simply describe or metaphorize them. Tony Harrison, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in April 2017, was the focus of a seven-essay special issue of English Studies, edited by Rachel Bower and Jacob Blakesley. Harrison’s work has long cultivated a distinctive regional character; but despite his personal affiliations with the city of Leeds, where he was born and raised, Harrison has spent much of his career travelling, collaborating, and translating works from other places and periods. In this special issue, the editors look to resituate his work in the international contexts to which much of it belongs. Bower and Blakesley’s introduction, ‘Tony Harrison: International Man of Letters’ (ES 99:i[2018] 1–5), outlines their aim to ‘highlight the significance of transnational literary relations’ in Harrison’s writing, as well as take stock of ‘the startling range of mediums, languages and cultures across which Harrison has worked’ (p. 1). Part of this brief reflects the editors’ conviction that literary criticism ought to be moving away from the study of writers within the framework of single national traditions. As a poet who persistently entwines the local and the international and so often crosses disciplinary lines, Harrison all but demands such a transcultural approach. John Whale’s article, ‘Tony Harrison: The Making of a Post-War English Poet’ (ES 99:i[2018] 6–18), focuses on Harrison’s conception of ‘the identity of a poet’, and on the peculiar ‘labours’ and ‘obsessions’ that were, for him, central to the poet’s vocation. Opening Harrison’s archived notebooks, journals, and correspondence from the 1950s, Whale examines these ‘self-authenticating and self-fabricating fictions’ from his early years and emphasizes their lasting influence on Harrison’s creative process (p. 17). Hannah Copley’s ‘From Baghdad to Sarajevo to Beeston: The War Poetry of Tony Harrison’ (ES 99:i[2018] 19–33) repositions Harrison as an international, contemporary war poet, drawing on his personal notebooks and photo albums as a news correspondent during the Bosnian and Gulf Wars. The article argues that Harrison’s engagements with international military conflict set their store by poetry’s public role ‘on the front line of history’ (p. 26). Developing what Copley calls ‘a civilian front-line poetics’, Harrison’s war poems combine the ‘immediacy of journalism’ and the ‘irreverence … of music hall’ with a form of ‘tortured humanism that simultaneously despairs of poetry in the face of atrocity and celebrates its enduring role’ (p. 23). In ‘Tony Harrison in Nigeria: Teacher, Translator and Dramatist’ (ES 99:i[2018] 34–50), Rachel Bower examines the notebooks composed at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, where Harrison was a lecturer from 1962 to 1966. Bower also examines the manuscripts and rehearsal scripts of his first play, Aikin Mata, which was an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, produced in collaboration with the Northern Irish poet James Simmons. Jacob Blakesley’s ‘Tony Harrison the Translator: “Life’s a performance. Either join in / Lightheartedly, or thole the pain”’ (ES 99:i[2018] 51–66) continues the emphasis on translation, foregrounding the formative role it has played across Harrison’s poetic career. In the four monographs written on Harrison, writes Blakesley, ‘there exists no comprehensive overview of his translation practice and ideology’ (p. 51). Focusing on the poet’s interlingual translations of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Martial, Palladas, and Racine, Blakesley argues that ‘Harrison’s approach to translating drama is different to the majority of poet-translators’, insofar as ‘he works collaboratively with directors … readily and willingly incorporates suggestions from actors, translates directly from the source languages, and brings a forceful ideological poetics and language of his own to bear upon the text’ (p. 63). In ‘Finding Patria and Pietas in Leeds: Tony Harrison and Virgil’s Aeneid’ (ES 99:i[2018] 67–76), Hallie Marshall exposes and questions why so little has been written about Harrison’s debt to Latin poetry. Since his 1981 translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, critics of Harrison’s classicism have understandably focused on his close association with ancient Greek drama, but this, claims Marshall, has obscured a debt to Latin poetry of equal significance to his work. ‘There may be no explicit allusions to Virgil’s poetry’, Marshall writes, ‘but its influence is everywhere’ (p. 76). Reading Harrison’s work through a Virgilian lens (with particular reference to Book VI of the Aeneid), Marshall focuses on silences, absences, and the poet’s implicit turn away from Virgil. These manifest in his work as ‘a refutation of Virgilian values, and those of the ruling elite, and an articulation of an opposing set of values … that sets Harrison’s agenda for the entirety of his poetic output from the late 1970s onward’ (p. 76). The final article in the issue, Edith Hall’s ‘Statuary and Classicism in Harrison’s The Loiners and Beyond’ (ES 99:i[2018] 77–91), examines Harrison’s creative experiments with statues in The Loiners [1970]. Hall suggests that the central image of the statue may be ‘a helpful route into Harrison’s complex experiential world’, and argues that his use of statuary in The Loiners anticipates ‘the more ambitious and sustained uses of visual artefacts in his later works’ (p. 78). Exploring the analogy between poetry and artefact in his writing, Hall also reflects on Harrison’s later use of the Greek epigram as a form deeply associated with statues and sculptural inscription. Two of Harrison’s older contemporaries, Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson, are the subject of Magdalena Kay’s fascinating study, Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain. The pair have been regularly counterposed by critics and journalists, and not only for the ‘mutual antipathy’ that characterized their personal and professional relationship (p. 6). Larkin earned his reputation as a writer of ‘accessible, traditionally crafted, “human” poetry with a discernible lyric speaker who expresses clear emotions’, Kay writes, whereas Tomlinson was best known as ‘an unusual, vaguely experimental poet of “inhuman” material, with a strikingly impersonal voice whose emotions were either submerged, muted, or, simply, not accessible’ (p. 7). Kay sets up a series of such dichotomies and polarized preconceptions, such as the pro-modernist, internationalist Tomlinson versus the anti-modernist, ‘provincial nativist’ Larkin (p. 175). Her study then gradually unpicks these across five chapters. Beyond this ongoing comparative exercise, the book has a broader aim in mind. Addressing these two divisive, deeply divided poets in tandem enables Kay to consider ‘what is at stake in their far-reaching quarrel over the social place of poetry’ (p. 13). It also allows her to explore the different kinds of Englishness represented by two writers who were, in many ways, united in opposition to the state of contemporary poetry and the consumerist values of post-war Britain. Each, in his own way, was ‘writing against [this] world’ (p. 106). The first chapter frames these mid-century debates over the direction of post-war British poetry and establishes Larkin’s and Tomlinson’s positions in relation to the Movement in the 1950s. During this period, both writers began to forge their own poetic identities and to establish very separate circles of literary allies. The Movement’s dedication to clarity, honesty, and plain speech resonated with Larkin, who was effectively co-opted by the group and widely touted as its figurehead. A close friend and former teacher of Tomlinson’s, Donald Davie, was a founding member of the Movement, though Tomlinson himself styled his work in direct opposition to the principles of the Movement and against Larkin, whom he saw as its chief representative. But, as Kay shows, both poets were in fact similarly disdainful of the key tenets of the Movement, which they saw as being ‘compromised by its dependence on a culture of opportunism, publicity, and noise’ (p. 37). Looking at their letters and essays as well as the poems, Kay’s book fleshes out this literary history and the interpersonal relationships that helped shape it. She also provides a thorough examination of Tomlinson’s own ‘objective’ aesthetic, heavily influenced as it was by his American contemporaries Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams (p. 55). After the modernist-inspired volume The Necklace [1955] set the tone for much of Tomlinson’s subsequent work, Kay observes a dramatic shift, most starkly evident in Annunciations [1989] and The Door in the Wall [1992], at which point his verse turns from an empiricist world-view rooted in the physical world towards a more meditative poetry of religious metaphor and ‘visionary radiance’ (p. 71). This shift speaks to a central theme in the book, namely, its challenge to the veracity of a secularist world-view that both Larkin and Tomlinson claimed independently as their own. Kay does not go so far as to say that Larkin and Tomlinson are religious poets, but argues that their secularism is complicated in the poetry by a shared recognition of ‘a numinous realm above the world as we know it’ (p. 19). That sense of a numinous realm is, she claims, fundamental to the way their poetry frequently travels ‘back in time, off in space, or away into a realm of essences and mysteries’ (p. 179). Tomlinson died in August 2015. The obituaries and critical retrospectives on his career that followed seem ‘to necessitate mention of Larkin’, Kay reflects, as commentators and journalists made hay from the assumption that ‘these two poets function as each other’s antitheses’, one providing an antidote to the other (p. 175). But, as Kay’s study so effectively demonstrates, their reciprocal animosity was in fact ‘often fuelled by … a concealed similitude’ (p. 22). Offering a sensitive, balanced, extremely well researched account of Larkin’s and Tomlinson’s careers in the round, Poetry Against the World shows up many spats and contradictions, but also numerous striking parallels, which together cast the legacies of both writers in new and mutually illuminating light. Andrew Duncan’s surefooted monograph, Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside and Outside in Modern British Poetry, 1960–1997, is an ambitious attempt to map prevailing trends and trace the presiding ‘shape’ of modern British poetry. It aims to offer a sense of ‘the range of good poetry’, from which Duncan finds himself omitting a number of significant poets, as well as ‘a glimpse of the whole cultural field’ (p. 7). The scale of the task necessarily involves large data sets, a fair amount of number-crunching, and any number of informed estimations based on those results. Naturally, as Duncan readily concedes, this leads to a fair amount of guesswork, and to suggestions such as the following: between 1960 and 1997 there were ‘roughly 7,000 poets’ writing in Britain, though that number could just as easily be ‘more than 4,000 and less than 16,000’ (p. 13). Early parts of the study involve exhaustive cataloguing and evaluation of the kinds of poetry produced in different anthologies, usefully divided into various aesthetic, racial, national, and ideological bands. Duncan also explores the overlaps that extend, or, tellingly, do not extend between them. These case studies provide insight into the agendas, power relations, and quarrelling factions that prevail across poetry anthologies in the period. They also tell us much about the politics of taste-formation, Insiders and Outsiders, and the Silent Rules informing the anthologist-gatekeepers, whose selection process often stands between poets and the public. The same charges might be levelled at the selectivity of critical overviews such as this one, as Duncan is right to acknowledge. One of the binds that this book strives to overcome is the issue of specialization in poetry criticism and anthologies, which itself stems, in no small part, from the sheer volume of poetry being published and sold. ‘Poetic theorising is not quite distinct from poetry marketing’, he notes, and the poetry itself no less answerable to the demands of the market. If ‘the pressure of being accountable for sales returns drives impresarios to creative flights’, Duncan fears that ‘the noise of the marketplace forces them to cry out simple concepts’ (p. 107). What follows in the second part of the book is a series of short close readings or descriptions of around seventy major poetry collections. These are broken into various categories: Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! [2000] is filed (rather reductively) under ‘Christian Poets’, while David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation [1969] comes under ‘Noble Relics’, a subtitle that refers to those poets whose work survived from eras pre-dating the 1950s. Each is scrutinized through Duncan’s own, admittedly personal, view of their poetic achievement, influence, and significance. The range is remarkably extensive. Duncan resists the urge to conclude the study with any sweeping evaluation or by locating ‘a shared pattern’ across the volumes he addresses (p. 308). Instead he elects to foreground the diversity of these poets and their work, and to make clear the folly of making generalizations about this incorrigibly plural period in British poetic history. Lee Spinks returns to the question of poetic value in his article, ‘Geoffrey Hill and Intrinsic Value’ (EiC 68:iii[2018] 369–89). This traces Hill’s enduring preoccupation with the metaphysics of value, asking whether Hill’s understanding of value exists in relation to other things or if it can inhere, intrinsically, in the thing itself. It is a question that recurs in Hill’s critical prose and poetry, and Spinks pursues it through Triumph of Love, Mercian Hymns, and Hill’s Tanner Lectures on ‘Poetry and Value’ and ‘Intrinsic Value: Marginal Observations on a Central Question’. The disappearance of intrinsic value is linked, for Hill, to his grim diagnosis of cultural memory and historical reflection in the post-war age, which has degraded to the stage that, as Hill mournfully observes in Speech! Speech!, we now need ‘Footnotes / to explain BIRKENAU’ (p. 381). While Spinks concedes this waning of historical sense, he challenges Hill’s ‘style of dogmatic assertion’ and his ‘self-approving contempt for contemporary modes that constitutes orthodox conservative opinion’ (p. 387). Hill’s accounts of the need to resist tyrannical simplification and the coercive consensus of established opinion are no doubt persuasive, as Spinks readily admits; but ultimately, it is hard to resist the essay’s conclusion that Hill is conflating ‘the loss of historical memory with the loss of a particular English spiritual tradition’ (p. 387). Karl O’Hanlon’s ‘“A Final Clarifying”: Form, Error, and Alchemy in Geoffrey Hill’s Ludo and The Daybooks’ (EA 21:ii[2018] 207–21) is a nuanced account of the burden of error and failure in the poet’s late work. Hill’s poetics of error are read in relation to the outlandish formal experiments of The Daybooks [2007–12] and their playful prelude, Ludo. O’Hanlon pinpoints an apparent tension or ambivalence in the poet’s attitude to mistakes which stems from Hill’s longstanding adherence to the Christian doctrine of original sin: namely, that error and failure are to be avoided at all costs, even if some forms of error are unavoidable, ‘inescapable textures of poetry as an ethical craft’ (p. 214). The essay riffs brilliantly on Hill’s revisions, marked as they are in these final few volumes, which indicate to O’Hanlon ‘an attitude to error and “amends” in the late work [that is] strikingly resistant to an idea of the poem as a final, fixed perfection’ (p. 217). There are also moments in these poems of flagrant self-sabotage, brought upon himself by the severity of his poetic forms: ‘I checkmate my own moves’, he writes in Ludo, before requesting a ‘medal for my rhymed sabotage’ in Expostulations on the Volcano (see p. 218). These mordant, playful, self-satirizing episodes contribute to a vibrant picture of Hill’s late work, which ‘courts esoteric processes of open-ended and botched experimentation’, as O’Hanlon shows, and enlists ‘ludicrously complex forms to probe the nature of error’ with a refreshing air of fallibility (p. 220). Elsewhere, Alice Oswald and Don Paterson round off this year’s entries. In ‘“A Word from Another World”: Mourning and Similes in Homeric Epic and Alice Oswald’s Memorial’ (CRJ 10:ii[2018] 170–90), Corinne Pache brings a classicist’s eye to Memorial, a book-length poem Oswald herself describes as ‘a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story’ (p. 171). Pache’s focus is on the use of lament which Oswald makes the presiding motif of her text, dispensing with the Homeric narrative centred on the figure of Achilles, and instead remembering in turn all the warriors who die in the battle at Troy. Her descriptions of these deaths are registered in pointedly passive registers (Phegas, for instance, ‘met a flying spear’). Importantly, their killers’ names and actions are elided from the text (p. 176). In the urge to elegize the dead, and to reverse the Homeric trope of memorializing the triumphant warrior at the expense of the fallen, Oswald not only ‘privileges dying over killing’ (p. 183) but ‘leaves out the notion of epic glory that is so important in the Iliad’ (p. 186). And finally, Ben Wilkinson’s essay ‘“Something Axiomatic on the Nature of Articulacy”: Don Paterson’s “An Elliptical Stylus” as Ars poetica’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 597–609) delves back into Don Paterson’s debut collection, Nil [1993] to address his embryonic ars poetica poem, ‘An Elliptical Stylus’. Wilkinson focuses first on the under-appreciated class dynamics and identity politics at work in this poem and in the collection as a whole, before reading ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ in relation to Paterson’s later writing, for which, he argues, it lays the groundwork. The stylistic reverberations of this poem across his body of work are clear to see: Paterson’s tone, then and now, is neatly captured in Wilkinson’s description as ‘punchy and jokey and to-the-point while also striving to be lyrical, meditative, fiercely intelligent’ (p. 607). And the deep self-consciousness and reflexivity of his writing, a trait that once led Peter Haworth to comment, ‘You are never allowed just to overhear a Paterson lyric; nods must be exchanged and glances returned’, is as on display in this earliest collection as in all Paterson’s subsequent offerings. Moreover, as Wilkinson observes, the poet’s eschewing a fixed or stable voice in ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ anticipates not only the multiple personae constructed in his second collection, God’s Gift to Women [1997], but ‘the increasingly autonomous and anonymously voiced poems of The Eyes [1999] onwards’ (p. 606). The relatively small body of critical work devoted to Paterson is, at present, failing to measure up to the scale of his artistic achievement, and Wilkinson’s essay makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of his poetic development. James Booth’s edition of Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936–1977 is reviewed elsewhere in this year’s YWES by William Baker. 8. Modern Irish Poetry While 2018 lacked some of the diversity of recent years in the field of modern Irish poetry, happily the scholarship on offer was rigorous and illuminating. Unsurprisingly, Yeats once again received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. While there was no Yeats Annual published in 2018, International Yeats Studies appeared twice, including a special issue edited by David Dwan and Emilie Morin on ‘Yeats and Mass Communications’. This issue examines Yeats’s mastery of literary and media cultural fields, including journalism, radio, and cinema. The editors have a fine feel for that great bundle of contradictions that Yeats was, his simultaneous disdain for a popular audience and mastery of the literary marketplace, his ‘anti-journalistic journalism’ a form of inoculation (IYS 3:i[2018] 1–13). Dwan and Morin pass a keen eye over the terrain, observing for instance the fact, blatant as it is under-appreciated, that Yeats was ‘an adept logroller’ (p. 3). In ‘Broadcasting the Rising: Yeats and Radio Commemoration’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 15–32), Emily Bloom demonstrates that the radio for Yeats was not merely a mode of artistic expression but a valuable tool for emphasizing ‘the contingency of historical meaning and of shaping history’ (p. 10). The medium’s ephemerality is seen as particularly suited to the ‘changing meaning’ of the Rising over time; for instance, Yeats’s framing of his Rising poems endorsed the revolutionary period from a vantage point of relative security within the Irish Free State, even as his preamble seeks to cast any anti-revolutionary affect as opposition to socialism (p. 21). Clare Hutton’s ‘Yeats, Pound, and The Little Review, 1914–1918’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 33–48) shows how Yeats’s involvement with the modernist magazine The Little Review recasts his poetry as intertexts in dialogue with other contributors to the magazine. Hutton draws on Sean Latham’s conception of ‘emergence … a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction’ (p. 42). ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ is read in tension with the anarchist and anti-conscription sentiments of the magazine and its editors, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson. In ‘“Some Ovid of the Films”: W.B. Yeats, Mass Media, and the Future of Poetry in the 1930s’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 49–63), Charles Armstrong analyses an unpublished fragment of A Vision, ‘Michael Robartes Foretells’, to elicit ‘the spiritual and metamorphic possibilities’ Yeats envisaged in a future literature, effected by contemporary mass media and technology (p. 49). Armstrong uncovers the potential link in a casual phrase by Yeats in the fragment, ‘some Ovid of the films’, to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for cinema as a radically new art form. Nonetheless, the article doesn’t overlook Yeats’s ambivalence regarding poetry’s place in this new media nexus. Melissa Dinsman’s ‘Politics, Eugenics, and Yeats’s Radio Broadcasts’ (IYS 3:i[2018] 65–80) decodes the structural allusions that govern Yeats’s thinking in broadcasts from the 1930s, pointing to ideas of degeneration and regeneration in his political thinking and involvement with the para-fascist Blueshirts in the same period. Yeats’s careful framing of his broadcasts in intimate imaginary settings with the trappings of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and Fine Gael bourgeois stability ‘attune listeners to a cultural hierarchy’ (p. 73). The spring issue opens with Seán Hewitt’s ‘Yeats’s Re-Enchanted Nature’ (IYS 2:ii[2018] 1–19), which tackles the ‘secularisation thesis’ that modernity spells a hard border between the mental and physical worlds (p. 1). Hewitt instead examines the ways in which a ‘porous self’, to use the terminology of the philosopher Charles Taylor, persists in Yeats’s immanent Celtic vision, an animistic rejection of disenchantment. Hewitt’s work on early drafts of The Shadowy Waters is particularly persuasive in conjuring this natural ‘arcana’ (p. 12). Ashim Dutta’s ‘India in Yeats’s Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee and Kālidāsa’ (IYS 2:ii[2018] 20–39) asserts that Yeats’s early interest in Indian lore remained ‘fundamental to the syncretic spirituality of his thought’, against the thesis that these enthusiasms were merely ‘amateurish poetic experimentation’ (p. 20). Dutta’s work is a vital corrective to the relative neglect of Yeats’s interaction with India, joining a rich new body of scholarship emerging in the past five years. This article argues that Chatterjee’s theosophy blends and blurs in Yeats’s thought with the fifth-century poet Kālidāsa, and sets up an unstable synthesis in which the former’s asceticism is infused with the sensual spiritualism of the latter, and brims with sharp insights: the elitism of Chatterjee apparent in an epigraph to Yeats’s essay on him from Villiers d l’Isle-Adam: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’. Symbolism is here presented as in lockstep with high Brahmin disdain (p. 36). Wayne K. Chapman’s article ‘Yeats’s White Vellum Notebook, 1930–1933’ (IYS 2:ii[2018] 40–68) is an invaluable piece of bibliographical scholarship, that is meticulous and methodologically thoughtful, particularly in its attention to a rather convoluted issue when it comes to Yeats’s papers, that of provenance. An appendix serves as an inventory-cum-guide to the contents of the famous talismanic notebook. In ‘W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and the Cinema, 1909–1939’ (ISR 26:iv[2018] 455–71), Megan Girdwood establishes that Yeats played a prominent role in an early, indigenous Irish cinema. Girdwood’s archival recovery is deft, larded with sharp insights into Yeats’s involvement with British Authors Productions and other cinematic outfits, including diplomat Josephine McNeill’s mordant appraisal of the involvement of the Abbey ‘clique’ (p. 463). What is uncovered is ultimately ‘a narrative of tantalising potential turned repeatedly to financial failure’ (p. 467). As with Dutta’s article, Javier Padilla’s ‘Yeats’s Meditative Spaces’ (JML 41:iv[2018] 107–24) seeks to move beyond the accepted terms of the postcolonial versus modernist Yeats debate. Padilla argues that Yeats anticipates a world of postcolonial promise that is nevertheless embedded in and attached to colonialism, reading Yeats through Said, Jameson, and Benjamin. The article pays Edna Longley a backhanded compliment regarding how ‘her polemics elucidate some of the blind spots and aporias of postcolonial theory’ (p. 122), particularly the elision of colonial, as opposed to colonized, identity in Yeats. It is in the gap between ‘progressive meditation and regressive ambivalence’ where Padilla sees the real work of interpretation taking place (p. 122). Lauren Arrington’s ‘The Blindness of Hindsight: Irish and British Poets Look Back on Early Fascist Italy’ (IrishPolSt 33:ii[2018] 246–58) is similarly excellent in harnessing a methodology that combines archival finesse with intellectual history. The article situates Yeats and the young Irish modernist Thomas MacGreevy within a milieu centred on Ezra Pound’s home in Rapallo in the 1920s. McGreevy’s exculpations for Yeats’s ‘strident support for constructive authoritarianism’ are found to be based on the grounds of eccentricity and ineffectiveness (p. 253). Nevertheless, Arrington reads traces of fascist thinking in both Yeats’s and McGreevy’s ideas of productive government and the folk-family orientation of their politics. She connects this to the Rapallo network, which has been obscured by a scholarly tendency to hive Pound off as a political pariah without seeing the latent spread of his influence among contemporaries. In ‘Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus: Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetry of Yeats and Stevens’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 31–45), Margaret Mills Harper considers the music of dissolution in the late work of these modernist masters as a drive beyond the disintegration of the ageing human body into the ‘fol de rol’ of the occult, gender, and the ‘“almost” comic’ (p. 44). This constitutes an exquisite recognition on Mills Harper’s part and a trinity of inflections that give the work of Yeats and Stevens that antic energy in their later years. By contrast, order, rather than anarchy informs Hannah Simpson’s ‘“Where / Do I begin and end?”: Circular Imagery in the Revolutionary Poetics of Stevens and Yeats’ (WSJour 42:i[2018] 46–61). This examines their turn to ‘the circle as an ordering structure when faced with the political crises of modernity’ (p. 46), contrasting a ‘localised scope’ in Stevens to Yeats’s cosmic gyres (p. 60). Chen Li’s ‘Irish Literature in China’ (Éire 53:i–ii[2018] 268–91) bracingly corrects any notion of cross-cultural interest in Ireland from China as a product of the ‘Irish studies’ phenomenon, excavating the early interest in Yeats from the left-wing writer and intellectual Mao Dun, and the sustained restaging and reconceptualization of Wilde’s Salome throughout the 1920s. Aoife Lynch’s ‘Yeats, Wittgenstein and the Ladder of Linguistic Inversion’ (ISR 26:ii[2018] 237–51) reveals ‘the strangeness of the language we use’ by tracing a logic of internal contradiction at play in the ‘masterful images’ of Yeats’s ragged final refrains viewed through Wittgensteinian language analysis (p. 237). Lynch makes an impassioned case for recognizing the power of words ‘in the post-truth age of overtly constructed realities and alternative facts’ (p. 249). Although Wayne K. Chapman’s edition of W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings is concerned with Yeats’s prose writings, there is plenty here in terms of annotation and contextualization to help unpick Yeats’s poetry, including the figure of Leda in one of his most celebrated poems. Alison Garden’s superb article, ‘Queering the Poetics of Race and Nationalism: Yeats, Casement, and Paul Muldoon’s “A Clear Signal” (1992)’ (NewHibR 22:iv[2018] 78–96) takes its departure from Muldoon’s poem, widely available in the New York Times, which Garden first encountered in Lucy McDiarmid’s The Irish Art of Controversy [2005] (as she points out in a footnote). The poem invokes a Yeatsian nod to the ‘ghost of Roger Casement’ to abash the homophobia of the Ancient Order of Hibernians New York branch, who refused Irish gay and lesbian representation at the 1991 St Patrick’s Day parade (p. 79). As Garden notes, both controversies, the original fallout of Casement’s ‘Black Diaries’ and the 1991 furore, were propelled by an idea of homosexuality and Irishness as antithetical. Muldoon’s poem responds to the ‘ongoing “intertextual hysteria”’ of that idea (p. 96). Intertextuality is the focus in Shane Alcobia-Murphy’s ‘Forging Intertextual Encounters with Death: Medbh McGuckian’s The High Caul Cap’ (NewHibR 22:iii[2018] 124–43), which puns on ‘craft’ and ‘graft’ to explore how McGuckian’s appropriative methodology in her elegiac collection The High Caul Cap, written for her late mother, cleaves to an idea of ‘anti-elegy’ (p. 143). The intertextual effects of McGuckian’s ekphrastic encounters produce ‘memorable puzzling’ (p. 143) and the transmutation of grief into an exploration of mother–daughter power relationships. Matthew Campbell’s chapter, ‘“A Bit of Shrapnel”: The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats, and the Easter Rising’ (in Houen and Schramm, eds., Sacrifice and Modern War Literature, pp. 124–44), delves into unpublished poems by Dora Sigerson to reveal a complex network of pastiche and allusive jibe between Sigerson, Thomas Hardy, and Yeats in terms of the aftermath of Easter 1916. Campbell writes with characteristic persuasive aplomb in his soundings of the argument implicit in rhymes between ‘Wolfe Tone’ and ‘bone’ in Yeats and ‘breath’ and ‘death’ in Sigerson, suggesting a connection between these two forms of ‘violent reanimation’ (p. 134). The third issue of Irish Studies Review in 2018 was dedicated to Irish modernism, a topic that has not lacked interest in recent years. Deaglán Ó’Donghaile and Gerry Smyth stake out the terrain in their introduction ‘Remapping Irish Modernism’ (ISR 26:iii[2018] 297–303), identifying the ‘three cardinal points’ of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (p. 299). Taking this triangulation as a given, Ó’Donghaile and Smith wish to open up the cultural field to photography, music, and other less well-trodden turf, to reassert ‘the lived experience’ of modernism, from Doolin to Dublin, Portlaoise to Paris (p. 300). Tom Walker’s ‘The Culture of Art in 1880s Ireland: The Genealogy of Irish Modernism’ (ISR 26:iii[2018] 304–17) appraises the culture wars in Irish studies surrounding the vexed category of Irish modernism, locating one dominant genealogy that fixes its emergence out of the rupture and dispossession of the Famine and attendant questions of language and/or the mythologized watershed of Parnell’s death. Keen to divest the issue of its political and historical freight, Walker raises Terry Eagleton’s articulation of ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’, with art offering its own epistemological and ontological horizons, and aesthetic ideology driving artistic change rather than mere push-pin for political and social causes. Walker draws attention to ‘a veritable body of late nineteenth century art writing’, now forgotten, and the formation of writers like Yeats within art institutions (p. 309). The outpouring of scholarly special issues, articles, conversations, and symposia in the wake of Seamus Heaney’s death showed some sign of abating in 2018, although the scholarship that was published is by no means negligible. Arthur A. Brown’s ‘A Look and a Nod: Merleau-Ponty, Shakespeare, Heaney, and the Mediation of Form’ (P&L 42:ii[2018] 311–22) examines Sonnet 73 and Heaney’s poem ‘The Nod’ through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ‘chasm’: ‘mediation through reversal’, and Heaney’s style emerge from givenness, ‘his contact with the world’ (p. 320). Adam Hanna’s brief note, ‘Seamus Heaney’s “Settings, xiii” and the Troubles’ (N&Q 65[2018] 440–3) suggests that the poem is an oblique response to the killing of three provisional IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988, evidenced by correspondence in Emory. Eugene O’Brien examines the symbolic use of food and of the kitchen as a site of transformation in the writing of Seamus Heaney in ‘“Sunk Past Its Gleam in the Meal-Bin”: The Kitchen as Locus amoenus in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney’ (CJIS 41[2018] 270–90). O’Brien recovers in his poetry a Heideggerian ‘dwelling’ in the ‘nuances and unspoken realities of life’ (p. 286). This turn to the domestic complements a recent trend, including Adam Hanna’s recent work on Irish poetry. In ‘“It Was Still All Me”: Self-Forgetful Autobiography in Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist’ (TPr 32:iv[2018] 649–67), Mark Bauer challenges autobiographical readings of Heaney’s work by underlining a tension between the ‘primacy of self’ and ‘lyric self-forgetfulness’, a phrase from an interview describing the ‘requirement—definition even’ of lyric writing’s capacity to move out of terms of reference in which the self is the pivot and arbiter (p. 650). In ‘Heaneywulf alla turca: The Composite Nature of Nazmi Ağil’s Beowulf’ (CLS 55:iii[2018] 701–20), Denis Ferhatovic examines the first translation of the Old English epic into Turkish. Ferhatovic celebrates ‘the power of triangulation’ amongst the original, the new translation, and Heaney’s modern intermediate version, and identifies Heaney’s enabling ‘polyphony’ in layering cultural and historical registers (p. 703). Florian Gargaillo’s ‘Seamus Heaney and the Clichés of Public Talk’ (PQ 97:i[2018] 97–119) plays with Christopher Ricks’s notion of ‘rinsed cliché’, first coined in reference to Geoffrey Hill. This is the idea that poets ‘use’ clichés rather than being ‘used by them’ (p. 97). The platitudes of mourning and consolation in ‘Mid-Term Break’ are explored for the resistant energies with which Heaney invests them. Gargaillo examines syntactical play created by the introduction of a comma, pronoun, and two clauses in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ between the prescriptive title and the descriptive final line: ‘whatever you say, you say nothing’ (p. 107). This is a truly illuminating essay which gets at the heart of some real thorny issues in terms of Heaney’s ‘public’ stature and the pressures on language such a status exerts. Several articles in the November issue of Irish University Review focused on the bilingual poet Celia de Fréine. A conversation with Lia Mills, ‘In Full Voice’ (IUR 48:ii[2018] 169–82), is illuminating on a number of fronts . It sets out her use of translation as an editing tool, the prurience of audiences regarding ‘women’s poetry’, and the status of language not just as a medium, but as a battleground. Mills weaves a skilful and illuminating essay around de Fréine’s avant-garde anticipation of progressive legislation and wider cultural shifts in twenty-first-century Ireland. Luz Mar González-Arias examines the Odyssean figure of the returning soldier in ‘Impossible Returns: The Trope of the Soldier in Celia de Fréine’s Poetry’ (IUR 48:ii[2018] 188–201). González-Arias focuses on the ‘trials of militarized masculinity’ in the poems, concluding that homecoming is an impossibility for these brutalized and brutal modern Ithacans (p. 189). Both articles represent welcome scholarship on an important poet. Éire-Ireland dedicated its spring special issue to ‘that strange and complex man’ Douglas Hyde. Liam MacMathúna briefly mentions An Craoibhín Aoibhinn’s poetry, and the ‘code-mixing’ of his Irish poem to O’Donovan Rossa leaving artillery terms untranslated, in his article, ‘Great War Strains and Easter Rising Breaking Point: Douglas Hyde’s Ideological Ambivalences’ (Éire 53:i–ii[2018] 7–28). In ‘Reading Between the Lines: Hyde’s Writings, 1916’ (Éire 53:i–ii[2018] 48–63), Máire Nic an Bhaird focuses mainly on Hyde’s prose, but there’s a wealth of contextual information on Hyde’s attitudes to the poets of the Rising, with a sacramental mention of Pearse’s poem written on the eve of his death. A prism of (gendered) labour and poetry engaging with ‘work’ more broadly conceived has been one of the notable trends of 2018 scholarship on Irish poetry. A special issue of RISE on ‘Irish Text(ile)s’ is one notable foray. Charles Armstrong’s article, ‘Poetic Industry: The Modernity of the Rhyming Weavers’ (RISE 2:i[2018] 139–48), takes its cue from John Hewitt’s Rhyming Weavers and Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down [1974] and the agrarian Marxist vision wedded to a plea for regionalism within, but concentrates mainly on the nineteenth-century weaver-poets and not the influences they may have exerted on a later body of poets (Tom Paulin is tantalizingly mentioned). Adrian Paterson’s ‘Stitching and Unstitching: Yeats Material and Immaterial’ (RISE 2:i[2018] 149–81) thinks through the textile-making analogies of poetic craft used by Yeats throughout his career as an allegory for collaboration with women, his sisters at Dun Emer, and with May Morris, noting Bedford Park’s ‘sibling handicrafts’ of Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ alongside Lily’s sewing and Lolly’s painting. Paterson offers a rich unspooling of the various threads of material allusion in Yeats’s oeuvre. Catriona Clutterbuck’s ‘“A Thread to the Afterlife”—Textiles and the Otherworld in Irish Poetry: Yeats, Boland, Heaney, and Meehan’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 182–207) explores how textile imagery and fabric motifs in Irish poetry ‘constitute and manifest a bond of continuity between the living and the dead’ (p. 182). As with Paterson’s article, Clutterbuck reveals an écriture féminine concealed beneath the masculine agricultural imagery of male poets such as Heaney. Clutterbuck’s focus on Meehan’s elegy for her aunt Cora situates the latter’s sequins as ‘traces of otherworldly possibility’ in the ‘torn and pieced fragment of one’s given’ (p. 183). In comparison, her reading of Eavan Boland’s ‘The Women’ posits the virtue of reading ‘cloth as text’ rather than vice versa, a liminal talisman between a ‘domestic female twilight world’ and otherworldliness (p. 189). Anne Karhio’s ‘“These Shirts I Borrow from the Finnish”: The Kanteletar and the Fabric of Loss in Peter Sirr’s “A Journal”’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 208–24) examines Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence and its cultural and linguistic exchanges with the nineteenth-century Finnish folk classic, The Kanteletar. Kahio focuses on textile metaphors in this crossover, particularly the figure of the ‘spinster’ and the paronomastic play on that word (which doesn’t exist in Finnish). These provide metaphors that suggest for Kahio ‘a process of working through … memory and pain in the active present’ (p. 217). Patricia Coughlan’s ‘“So am I detached / from the fabric which claims me”: Women, Fabric, and Poetry’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 241–61) examines the metaphorical and metonymic connection between women and cloth in the work of Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, and Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin. Boland’s well-judged plain punning on dressmaking language (‘crewel’) is celebrated, while McGuckian’s ‘determined troubling of limpid lyric style’ is seen, in contrast to Boland, as an evocation of ‘a pre-linguistic space of meaning’ in ‘The Cloth Mother’, registered in the ‘oneiric’ concreteness of domestic details, such as a ‘many-pocketed beaded dress’ (p. 250). Finally, the musician protagonist of Ní Chuillenáin’s recent long poem ‘The Skirt’ is seen to ‘brook no gender constraints’ (p. 256). Dexterously handling the differences between these poets, Couglan nevertheless pulls the loose ends together: all three poets broach a subjectivity that Coughlan, quoting the psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger, describes as refuting ‘opposition and fusion because it is woven—a textile and a texture’ (p. 258). Shirin Jandani’s ‘For “Text” Read “Textile”: Paul Muldoon’s Poetic Weaving’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 262–78) cartwheels joyously around Muldoon’s verbal displays (‘an almost-naked stripper takes issue with Yeats’) and meditates on the ‘politics and poetics of flax and linen’ (p. 262). Jandani considers the juxtaposition and tension of labour in the linen industry and sectarian violence in ‘Glad Rags’ as subjected to Derridean deconstruction. Wit Pietrzack also tackled Irish poetry’s jongleur in ‘Retracing Mischief: “Fol-de-Rol” and (Irish) Modernist Pastiche (Muldoon–Yeats–Trench–Farquhar)’ (ES 97:vii[2018] 766–74), which examines the intertextual basis of Muldoon’s pastiche in ‘At Least They Weren’t Speaking French’. Pietrzack offers convincing ideas on Muldoon’s notion of ‘style in writing as a “form of death”’ (p. 770) and free will as virtually negated in the writing process linked to pastiche and influence, with Yeats, Richepin, Herbert Trench, and George Farquhar shown to be operative in Muldoon’s 2006 poem. Justin Quinn’s essay, ‘Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language’ in Litteraria Pragensia was not accessible at the time of writing this review. A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, was published in 2017, but not reviewed last year. It straddles genres and methodologies to provide a timely consideration of working-class literature and the vexed question of ‘representation’ (p. 58). As Pierse points out, poetry has not received the attention that other genres have ‘in the (albeit embryonic) scholarship of Irish working-class writing’ (p. 29). Niall Carson’s chapter, ‘Irish Working-Class Poetry 1900–1960’ (pp. 243–56), examines the ‘ambiguity between the representation and appropriation of the working-class voice’ (p. 245). This ambiguity is played out with visceral energy in Alice Milligan’s punning on the word ‘rise’ in the last lines of ‘A Country Girl’: ‘A simple Southern country girl / Whose faith is that her dead will rise’. She knows more than her mockers. Carson’s nimble siftings and reclamations sort through poets in The Irish Worker, Flann O’Brien’s occasional verse, and the rural labourer celebrated by Patrick Kavanagh. Adam Hanna’s chapter, ‘Poetry and the Working Class in Northern Ireland’ (pp. 332–47), on class and the poets of the Troubles, charts the emergence of an ‘arriviste class’ (p. 33) of grammar school-educated poets, and explores the ways in which sectarianized identity and class-consciousness cohabit, as well as compete, in the poetics of Heaney and Longley. The denunciation of Northern Ireland’s middle class in the work of John Hewitt is particularly fascinating in charting alternatives to that dilemma, as is the work of a relatively unfamiliar poet, the trade unionist John Campbell. Neal Alexander’s ‘Remembering the Future: Poetry, Peace, and the Politics of Memory in Northern Ireland’ (TPr 32:i[2018] 59–79) provides a good round-up of key themes in Northern Irish poetry, with reference to a host of theorists including Ricoeur and Levinas. The article tackles the stultification of memory in commodification and memorialization, with reference to poems by the late Ciaran Carson, Sinéad Morrissey, and Michael Longley. Alexander also discusses Alan Gillis, a poet whose work has perhaps not yet received similar due attention, citing his excoriating verse on ‘the topsy-turvy logic’ of Northern Irish politics (p. 74). Gail McConnell’s ‘No “Replicas / Atone”: Northern Irish Poetry after the Peace Process’ (Boundary 45:i[2018] 201–29) also opens with a meditation on Gillis’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. McConnell explores the peace process as rebranding, ‘atonement comes only in the form of capital’ (p. 201), arguing that replication, in the form of a shared interest in and critique of historic repetition and neoliberal normalization, and Northern Irish poetry’s involvement in market ideology, are the defining features of poetry by Gillis, Miriam Gamble, Leontia Flynn, and Sinéad Morrissey. Classical influences on Irish poetry remained a fixture in scholarship produced in 2018. Florence Impens’s Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: The Answering Voice is a rich and rewarding study that focuses on how an engagement with classical literature in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland bypassed a more direct relationship to the ‘ideological conflict’ of the Troubles, allowing a poetic autonomy, the retention of ‘creative independence’ (p. 173). Curiously, this autonomy provides a route to ‘overcome the antagonisms dividing their societies’ (pp. 175–6), a form of political synthesis through disavowal of the political, which starts to sound like various aesthetic mythologies of a New Critical variety. (This is a tension at the heart of literary studies rather than Impens’s methodology as such.) One can sense, on an instinctive level, the quandary in sentences like: ‘Michael Longley’s well-known comments in 1971, on why writers could not and should not be asked to comment on politics in their creative work’ (p. 173). Within a blurring of public and private, the taking of a depoliticized stand, the so-sure demarcation of poetic and politic, Impens reveals the ‘textual precision’ of Longley’s reworkings which have established him as ‘the modern classicist in Ireland’ (p. 119). She investigates the impulses behind Heaney’s return to classical material in The Cure at Troy, seen as ‘didactic and overly simplistic’ (p. 55). Mahon’s sense of exile and abandonment governs his classical dérivements in poems such as ‘Ovid in Tomis’, layered with Pascalian and Wildean allusions that build up a community of the banished (p. 194). Impens reveals how Eavan Boland rewrites the classics as ‘a woman poet faced with a male-dominated tradition’ (p. 8), and her unpicking of ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’ is thrilling, inventive, and precise. In ‘Object Lessons: Derek Mahon’s Material Ekphrasis’ (ILStud 20:iii[2018] 371–84), Bridget Vincent notes that his poetry often incorporates artist studios and materiality, which sheds light on problems of ontology and representation: the physical urn of Keats’s ode, and the represented dimension in which it is imaged in the poem. Eoin Flannery’s ‘Scale, Deep Time, and the Politics of Representation in Derek Mahon’s Life on Earth’ (IUR 48:ii[2018] 281–98) situates that inveterate shapeshifter’s most recent work within ecocriticism, the ‘representational relationships between human and non-human ecologies’ and ‘the ethics of anthropocentric historical narration in terms of geological time and the “deep” past’ (p. 281). Flannery’s prosodic analysis enlists Mahon’s rhythmic effects to elicit the ecological music of his late work, ripe with instinct that ‘there is also an intimation that despite this removal from the sea and our mammalian past … some form of communicative exchange or registration is possible’ (p. 289); the unusual approach to this familiar poet does prompt a rethink of his cosmopolitan oeuvre. Cody D. Jarman brings two unlikely poets into dialogue in ‘“A Juggler’s Trick”: The Pastoralism of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice’ (NewHibR 22:iii[2018] 65–80), emphasizing the shared species of Emergency and Second World War pastoral in their poetry, the global entanglement of MacNeice’s Ireland and the contrasting rural neutrality of Kavanagh’s Ireland. Luz Mar González-Arias close-reads Dorothy Molloy’s poem in ‘Penelope in Three Movements: A Reading of Dorothy Molloy’s “Waiting for Julio”’ (RISE 2:ii[2018] 225–40), situating it within an international context of ‘revisionist mythmaking’ and play with Greek myth by contemporary Irish women poets. Particularly appealing is the way in which González-Arias draws this recurring figure of Penelope in contemporary Irish poetry into dialogue with other art forms, Kathy Prendergast’s similar focus on patience and futility in her 1980 installation Waiting (p. 241). The recent variety and excitement of new work on Irish women poets seem likely to remain fixtures of work in the field. Exceptional analysis such as Gender in Poetry Publishing in Ireland 2017 by Kenneth Keating and Ailbhe McDaid, for the ‘Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector’ initiative, found that male poets published 10 per cent more volumes of poetry than female poets in 2017, with the larger presses with public funding displaying a much more substantial bias (greater than 65 per cent) towards men; smaller presses account for the overall smaller percentage bias (p. 10). Clearly, there is work to be done, and scholarship on modern Irish poetry has a stake in helping bring about a sea-change. Regrettably, Donna Potts’s Contemporary Irish Writing and Environmentalism, Taylor-Collins and Van Der Ziel’s Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature, and Jaime de Pablos’s Giving Shape to the Moment: The Art of Mary O’Donnell: Poet, Novelist, and Short Story Writer were not received in time for this review. Books Reviewed Ali Farah. Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in Selected Works of Harold Pinter . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 280 . £115 ISBN 9 7811 3808 0195. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ambrose Darren , ed. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. Repeater . [ 2018 ] pp. 840 . £25 ISBN 9 7819 1224 8285. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Anderson Bradford A. , Kearney Jonathan , eds. Ireland and the Reception of the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives . Clark . [ 2018 ] pp. 416 . £95 ISBN 9 7805 6767 8874. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ayers David. Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 288 . £80 ISBN 9 7814 7446 2709. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Baker William. Pinter’s World: Relationships, Obsessions, and Artistic Endeavours . FDUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 265 . £70 ISBN 9 7816 1147 9317. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Balinisteanu Tudor. Modern Political Aesthetics from Romantic to Modernist Literature: Choreographies of Social Performance . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 210 . £120 ISBN 9 7811 3830 3928. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Barkaway Stephen. ‘This Sheet is a Pane of Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters . VWSGB . [ 2018 ] pp. 24 . £5 ISBN 9 7819 1142 6035. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Battershill Claire. Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 231 . £85 ISBN 9 7813 5004 3817. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Beeston Alix. In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 280 . £59 ISBN 9 7801 9069 0168. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Belluc Sylvain , Bénéjam Valérie , eds. Cognitive Joyce . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. 285 . £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 9931. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Beloborodova Olga , Van Hulle Dirk , Verhulst Pim , eds. Beckett and Modernism . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 295. £88 ISBN 9 7833 1970 3732. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Benford Gregory , Westfahl Gary , Hendrix Howard V. , Miller Joseph D. . eds. Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy: Outstanding Essays from the J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences. McFarland . [ 2018 ] pp. 263 . £37.90 ISBN 9 7814 7666 9281. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ben-Merre David. Figures of Time: Disjunctions in Modernist Poetry . SUNY . [ 2018 ] pp. xxv + 293 . $85 ISBN 9 7814 3846 8327. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Benziman Galia. Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. vii + 173 . £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 3750 7129. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Beville Maria , Flynn Deirdre , eds. Irish Urban Fictions . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. 245 . £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1998 3219. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bhattacharya Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. ix + 186 . £120 ISBN 9 7811 3855 9950. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Black Elizabeth. The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. viii + 222 . £110. ISBN 9 7811 3824 4092. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bluemel Kristin , McClusky Michael , eds. Rural Modernity in Britain . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 328 . £80 ISBN 9 7814 7442 0969. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bodley Lorraine Byrne , ed. Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White . Hollitzer . [ 2018 ] pp. 784 . €89 ISBN 9 7839 9012 4024. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Brackenbury Rosalind. Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship: How Virginia Stephen Became Virginia Woolf . UIowaP . [ 2018 ] pp. 103 . $19.95 ISBN 9 7816 0938 5514. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Brewster Dorothy. Virginia Woolf . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 190 . £82.99 ISBN 9 7808 1535 8435. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Brits Baylee. Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 224 . £88 ISBN 9 7815 0133 1466. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Brockman William , Mecsnóber Tekla , Alonso Sabrina , eds. Publishing in Joyce’s Ulysses: Newspapers, Advertising and Printing . Brill . [ 2018 ] pp. 235 . €79 ISBN 9 7890 0435 9048. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bronstein Michaela. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 288 . $78 ISBN 9 7801 9065 5396. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Brooker Jewel Spears. T.S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination . JHUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvii + 215 . £37 ISBN 9 7814 2142 6532. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bruns Gerald L. Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature . UAlaP . [ 2018 ] pp. 216 . $34.95 ISBN 9 7808 1735 9065. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Butler Stephen G. Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882–1964 . UMassP . [ 2018 ] pp. 232 . $90 ISBN 9 7816 2534 3666. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Caws Mary Ann. Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 218 . £93.99 ISBN 9 7808 1535 9739. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Chapman Wayne K , ed. W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings: Featuring the Making of his ‘Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends’ . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 424 . £117 ISBN 9 7814 7259 5157. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cheng Vincent J. Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joyce . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. 162 . £19.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 8170. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Clare David , Lally Des , Lonergan Patrick , eds. The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft . Lang . [ 2018 ] pp. 422 . £33 ISBN 9 7817 8874 6243. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Colesworthy Rebecca. Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xi + 288. £60 ISBN 9 7801 9877 8585. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Conolly Leonard W. , ed. Bernard Shaw’s Postmistress: The Memoir of Jisbella Georgina Lyth as Told to Romie Lambkin . Rock Mills . [ 2018 ] pp. x + 143 . £18.99 ISBN 9 7817 7506 3216. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cornier Michael Magali , ed. Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City. PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xi + 252 . £88 ISBN 9 7833 1989 7271. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Costello Bonnie. The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others . PrincetonUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 272 . £35 ISBN 9 7806 9117 2811. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Crossland Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 193 . £63 ISBN 9 7801 9881 5976. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cure Monica. Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century . UMinnP . [ 2018 ] pp. 261 . £75.93 ISBN 9 7815 1790 2780. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Danta Chris. Animal Fables After Darwin . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 224 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 8200. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Das Santanu , McLoughlin Kate , eds. The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 280 . £65 ISBN 9 7801 9726 6267. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC D’Cruz Glenn. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 90 . pb £6.57 ISBN 9 7811 3809 7476. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC De Gay Jane. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 245 . £75 ISBN 9 7814 7441 5637. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Demerjian Louisa MacKay , Stein Karen F. , eds. Future Humans in Fiction and Film . CambridgeSP . [ 2018 ] pp. 181 . £58.99 ISBN 9 7815 2751 3198. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Dhooge Ben , Pieters Jürgen , eds. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher . Brill . [ 2018 ] pp. 205 . €110 ISBN 9 7890 0435 2865. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Diaper Jeremy. T.S. Eliot and Organicism. ClemsonUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 218 . £85 ISBN 9 7819 4295 4606. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Dibble Jeremy , Horton Julian , eds. British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950 . B&B . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 374 . £65 ISBN 9 7817 8327 2877. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Dimitrova Miryana. Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. x + 237 . £85 ISBN 9 7813 5011 7303. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Dix Hywel , ed. Autofiction in English. PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 283 . £99.99 ISBN 9 7833 1989 9015. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Duncan Andrew. Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside and Outside in Modern British Poetry, 1960–1997 . Shearsman . [ 2018 ] pp. 328 . £16.95 ISBN 9 7818 4861 6097. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ebury Katherine , Fraser James Alexander , eds. Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: ‘Outside His Jurisfiction’. PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. 230 . £79 ISBN 9 7833 1972 2412. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Eckley Grace. The Encryption of Finnegans Wake Resolved: W.T. Stead . Hamilton Books . [ 2018 ] pp. 414 . $85 ISBN 9 7807 6186 9191. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Engelhardt Nina. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 200 . £75 ISBN 9 7801 4744 1623 3. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Falkenhayner Nicole. Media, Surveillence and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 174 . £120 ISBN 9 7811 3860 9433. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Ferrer Daniel. Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language , trans. Geoffrey Bennington , Bowlby Rachel . Routledge . [ 2018 ] £82.99 ISBN 0 415 0319 X. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Fielding Heather. Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 206 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 6046. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Flynn Deirdre , O’Brien Eugene , eds. Representations of Loss in Irish Literature . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 205 . £88 ISBN 9 7833 1978 5509. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Foltz Jonathan. The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 304 . £52 ISBN 9 7801 9067 6490. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Foss Roger. Till the Boys Come Home: How British Theatre Fought the Great War . HistoryP . [ 2018 ] pp. 224 . £14.99 ISBN 9 7807 5096 0663. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fraser Wilma. Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning: An Autoethnographic Inquiry . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. 223 . £89.99 ISBN 9 7811 3756 2951. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Frattarola Angela. Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel . UPFlorida . [ 2018 ] pp. 204 . $85 ISBN 9 7808 1305 6074. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Friedman Alan Warren. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - XIV Modern Literature
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maaa014
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/xiv-modern-literature-t8XfxSxmn0
SP - 865
EP - 1012
VL - 99
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -