Overview

New Readings of Elizabeth von Arnim: The Unexpected Modernist consolidates the growing field of Elizabeth von Arnim studies and points to new trajectories for further research. Bringing together recognised and emerging scholarly voices and featuring previously unseen archival materials, this volume introduces key contexts for reading von Arnim's work at an important point in her re-appraisal as a writer. Its eleven chapters highlight critical debates related to modernism, feminism and the middlebrow and explore new contexts such as fashion and material culture, medical humanities, ageing studies, music and the visual arts. By focusing on neglected novels from von Arnim's oeuvre and examining better-known work from new perspectives, the volume paves the way for the next decade of von Arnim studies and beyond.

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9781399557269

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Reviews

This astounding collection woke me up from my dogmatic slumber and clichés about the secular nature of modernism. Essay after essay, one gets a clear sense of the richness, multiplicity and centrifugal potential of the varieties of modernist religious experience. This comprehensive Companion redefines modernism as spiritual, haunted by transcendence, hesitating between personal illumination and collective ritual, caught between esoteric mysticism and masochistic devotion, hence more dynamic and exciting than we thought. It will be an indispensable reference for all scholars of modernism.--Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Author Information

Suzanne Hobson is Reader in 20th Century Literature in the English Department at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on modernism and literary theory and she is especially interested in questions of religion and secularism in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford University Press 2022) and Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-60 (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and co-editor of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (2010). She is past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and co-organizer of the London Modernism Seminar. Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. His books include The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (co-edited with Suzanne Hobson, 2023), British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945–1975 (co-edited with Hannah Van Hove, 2021), The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875–1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, 2018), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism (2014) and Mapping the Wessex Novel (2010). He has recently published a critical edition of George Borrow’s autobiographical novel Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest with Edinburgh University Press (2023).

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