Edwardians and modernists

Shari Benstock “In accounting for this ‘unsettling’ of self- unity, one must also consider the political and social effects of World War I, the advent of industrial mechanisation, the loss of belief in God, the loss of colonial empires, the changing status of women and minorities, all of which altered the cultural landscape against which literature was produced in the early years of the twentieth century. We live today in a world that has been constructed out of these changes; nearly all the changes that discomposed the complacent world of 1910 have been culturally assimilated.”

Periodisation Historical periods 1901-1910: Edward VII 1910-1936: George V Corresponding cultural historical periods Edwardians Georgians/modernists

Boer War: 1899-1902 Ireland Women’s situation Cape-Cairo plan Transvaal Ireland 1873: Irish Home Rule League Charles Stewart Parnell 1916: Easter Rising 1921: Anglo-Irish Treaty 1922: Irish Free State Women’s situation WSPU: 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst Cessation of activities during WWI Suffrage: 1918/1928

Suffragette colours

The Cat and Mouse Act

A suffragette forcibly fed in Holloway Gaol, 1912

The Flapper of the 1920 and 1930s

Matthew arnold: dover beach (1867) [...] the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

William Butler Yeats: Second coming (1919) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Modernity/modernism Ambiguity of modernity (Jürgen Habermas) Modernism Bureaucratic and capitalist domination Emergence of a potentially emancipatory, self- critical ethics of communicative reason Modernism 1880-1940 high modernism: 1910-1930 Late modernism: the 1940s Even within high modernism: coexistence of several tendencies (high/middlebrow/low)

Englishness “The deterioration of the English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people” (George Gissing) No “honest chap” at an English inn

Materialist Edwardians spiritual georgians "They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. And so they have developed a technique of novel writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.” (V. Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown)

John Galsworthy: a man of property „Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft- petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.”