Rural Ritual, Gardened Faith: Ford Madox Ford's Memorial Plots

This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor and their surrounding landscape from The Heart of the Country (1906) to The Fifth Queen saga (1906–08). Moving to Post-War Sussex and Kent, it examines Ford's continuing interest in the country garden and rural community, reading his gardening practices as attempted personal reconstruction through faith in landscape production. As Ford moves from small-holding to small-holding, and eventually away for good, it discusses how the narratives of his part-fictive biographies, including Thus to Revisit (1921) and It was the Nightingale (1934), repeatedly return to rural England to resituate the developments of Literary Impressionism – and Ford's most formative literary friendships – in and about the garden. The repetitions of garden work; of sowing, weeding, and digging over plots, proved essential to Ford's in-text ritualisations of rural life and literary innovation alike.

Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West

This article argues that Rebecca West’s sustained scrutiny of imperialism tends to coincide with her theoretical and formalist approaches to fantasy, and from this arises literary innovation significant both to modernist and late modernist contexts. It demonstrates that West’s creative achievement in Harriet Hume (1929), which partially adapts the conventions of other middlebrow and modernist fantasy literature of her day, is usefully read in conjunction with her assessment of interwar geopolitics, and especially her interest in the collective, sociopolitical fantasies that gather around contested national spaces. Furthermore, in Harriet Hume West elaborates a rhetoric of fantasy—stylistically whimsical, and ideologically what might be called a fantasia on national themes—that was elevated to new importance a decade later in her archetypal attack on imperialism, the Balkans travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).

Against haute littérature? André Gide's Contribution to the World Literature Debate

In 1909 André Gide published three short articles in the journal La Nouvelle Revue française, subsequently grouped under the title ‘Nationalisme et littérature’ (Nationalism and literature). They were written as his response to a survey by the young French journalist Henri Clouard, ‘Enquête sur la littérature nationale’ (Survey on National Literature), in which contemporary writers and critics answered questions regarding possible definitions of French literature. Gide questions the value of the term ‘national literature’ and objects to the view that haute littérature (good literature) is synonymous with neo-Classical values, arguing instead for a conception of literature that embraces curiosity and innovation. For Gide the term haute littérature is problematic because it implies a hierarchical, regimented and limited view of both literature and culture tout court. The first part of this article argues that Gide's critique of both national literature and haute littérature can be read as a preference for a literariness that is liberated from the constraints of balance and imitation. The second part reads Gide's agronomic metaphor for literary innovation through the lens of Alexander Beecroft's theory of overlapping literary ecologies. Beecroft's model of different ecologies of world literature helps us to locate what I propose to be Gide's own contribution to the world literature debate: an emphasis on literariness that transcends the national-literature ecology and reclaims the notion of haute littérature for a different aesthetic.

Sebald or Gevalt?

W. G. Sebald is one of the most original and significant authors of the twentieth century, but these credentials only make The Rings of Saturn that much more disappointing. In his other novels, Sebald’s drift between landscapes and encyclopedic fragments emerged out of a deep necessity and constituted an ingenious literary innovation. But here this style exists in a void. When an author becomes enslaved to his own style, when form is empty of content, the result is not merely boring. In his previous books, Sebald was a great writer of the German trauma, but in The Rings of Saturn he makes that national trauma banal.

Becoming Canadian: Folk Literary Innovation in the Memoirs of Yiddish-Speaking Immigrants to Canada

This article considers the ways Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Canada creatively adapted folklore that they learned in “the old home” in order to make it fit their new Canadian contexts, and in doing so created new hybrid folklore and identities. To do this, I discuss the autobiographical texts of three people who migrated between 1900 and 1930, J.J. Goodman’s Gezamelte Shriften (Collected Writings) (Winnipeg: 1919), Michael Usiskin’s Oksn un Motorn (Oxen and Tractors) (Toronto: 1945), and Falek Zolf ’s Oyf Fremder Erd (On Foreign Soil) (Winnipeg: 1945). I argue that these personal narratives offer important insights into how the first major wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Canada formed and expressed Canadian-Eastern European Jewish culture.

Modern Sentimentalism

Modern Sentimentalism examines how American female novelists reinvented sentimentalism in the modernist period. Just as the birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling, modernist literary innovation has been understood to reject sentimental aesthetics. Modern Sentimentalism reframes these perceptions of cultural evolution. Taking up icons such as the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcée, this book argues that these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with ideals of modern selfhood. These double binds equally beleaguer the protagonists and shape the styles of writers like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, and Jessie Fauset. ‘Modern sentimentalism’ thus translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production. Reading canonical and underexamined novels in concert with legal briefs, scientific treatises, and other transatlantic period discourse, and combining traditional and quantitative methods of archival research, Modern Sentimentalism demonstrates that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, animates its central principles and preoccupations.

Conceptual Blending and Genre Invention from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes and Shakespeare

This chapter explores the value of the theory of conceptual blending, originating in cognitive science and linguistics, for understanding the kind of literary creativity involved in major generic inventions, as exemplified by the work of Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. Conceptual blending describes how, when humans draw upon metaphors, analogues, and paradigms from two or more experiential or cultural domains, they “blend” together aspects of each source domain. They thereby create a newly imagined conceptual space in which new scenarios and mini-narratives test the cogency and elasticity of particular blends and determine whether they may be “run.” Because literary art invites readers to engage not just in simulations of represented content, but also in emulations of the processes by which authors and characters transform content, such art clearly depicts and encourages blending creativity. The chapter suggests that Chrétien draws on Abelard’s theology as well as Latin and Celtic sources as input domains, that Wolfram von Eschenbach’s c. 1210 Parzival does likewise, and that elements of Abelard’s theology congenial to literary innovation are rearticulated by Erasmus, thereby helping to prime the literary creativity of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Cultural memories of diverse established forms and ideas offer possibilities for associative combinations and predictive representations. In the writers most consequential for literary history, these move from “everyday” creativity to daring and innovative blending of genres, styles, and thoughts.