The Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s political positions underwent a monumental shift after he witnessed Mossadegh’s ouster first-hand while on the run from the Iraqi police in Iran. Chapter 4 traces the effects this political shift had on Sayyāb’s view of his own poetry and the worlds he imagined within it. Sayyāb was a card-carrying Communist prior to the coup against Mossadegh, but afterwards he began to support a nationalist politics informed by Western Liberalism. The changes his poetry underwent thus offer an indispensable point of comparison with Shāmlū’s committed project. After experiencing the events of 1953 in Iran, Sayyāb returned to a volatile period in Iraq’s history as a bloody 1958 revolution overthrew the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and instituted a radical military dictatorship in its stead. During the ensuing years, Sayyāb published several modernist poems, which have been hailed by critics as crucial contributions to the development of modernist forms and themes in Arabic. In this chapter, I explore Sayyāb’s development of modernist themes alongside his retention of premodern Arabic prosodic form in his 1954 long poem “Weapons and Children.”

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the articulation of new approaches to literature in Iran and the Arab world as Arabic and Persian literary modernisms developed out of the Arab nahḍah “renaissance” and the neoclassical Persian bāzgasht movement of “literary return. Modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian, which emerges in many ways on its own and draws on this other, local history, thus stands outside and against a singular understanding of modernism as a European phenomenon and calls us to consider what it might look like if we situate the center of our modernist map in the Middle East. The introduction deploys a range of recent literary theory on modernism, transnationalism, and modernity in the Arab world and Iran to argue for a re-orientation of our perspective and to treat Middle Eastern modernism on its own terms. By relocating our modernist center to an “Eastern” geography, the chapter argues for a new way of looking at modernist poetic developments within the region and across the border between the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Considering modernism from this relativist perspective shows how Arabic and Persian poetries form a significant modernist geography within the broader movement of modernism.

The introduction considers the appeal Decadence and the work of Oscar Wilde held for queer, cosmopolitan subjects in the early-twentieth century who wished to reimagine structures of kinship. Decadence’s association with sexual dissidence and curiosity along with Wilde’s reputation as a sexual martyr informed the thinking of authors and artists in the twentieth century who worked to generate alternatives to heteronormative practices of affiliation. These figures operated alongside but saw themselves as distinct from high modernist networks, turning to the fin de siècle past to express their sense of distinction from the aesthetic modes in fashion at the time. While Wilde’s capacity for reimagining new modes of kinship informed more liberatory strains of twentieth-century Decadence, his interest in age-differentiated eroticism and the more general tendency to Orientalism within the Decadent Movement also inflected the practices marked by his influence during this period. The introduction thus stresses that the kinship experiments of twentieth-century Decadents carried forward the many political valences of their source material and that their work should be approached through the framework of what Kadji Amin has called “deidealization,” a mode of queer historical practice that acknowledges that queer alternatives are not always just alternatives.

Chapter 3 proceeds to investigate the concept of enigmatical poetry in the wider context of autonomous art. In ‘Commitment’, an essay written seven years before Aesthetic Theory, Adorno contrasts ‘committed’ literature that perceives art in an ‘extra-aesthetic’ fashion, with ‘drossless works’ that resist the ’spell’ of empirical reality. I therefore engage first with two ‘committed’ works, Tony Harrison’s verse plays THE KAISERS OF CARNUNTUM (1996) and THE LABOURERS OF HERAKLES (1996), in order to focalise Hill’s ruminations over elusive moments of awe and grace in his collection THE ORCHARDS OF SYON (2002). As Hill’s workbooks held in the Brotherton Library indicate, his enigmatical poetry partly responds to Paul Celan’s Atemwende(1967), transforming the Holocaust poet’s later minimalism into Hill’s loquacious assimilation of, and departure from, the modernist antecedent.

This chapter provides a fresh, detailed and historicised account of ‘high’ Modernism and its relationship to the Gothic, c.1910–1936. It explores the various ways in which Modernist theories of the aesthetic – the novel, the short story, Imagist poetry – shaped Gothic Modernist representations. Many Modernists overtly despised dark Romanticism – Wyndham Lewis derided the ‘beastly and ridiculous spirit of Keats’ lines’ and Virginia Woolf was quick to dismiss ‘the skull-headed lady’ of the Gothic Romance. Instead, their work privileges an aesthetics of finitude and inference over any use of overtly supernatural machinery. ‘Modern’ accounts of psychology shape these representations of anxiety and entrapment but so, too, do authorial theories of the aesthetic. By reading the work of a range of important Modernist contributors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster and May Sinclair, this chapter suggests that the most enduring examples of Modernist Gothic are found in the mode’s representations of haunting, the unconscious and the dead.

This chapter focuses on New Speakers of minority languages and their alignment with traditionalist and modernist ideals of standardization, authority and legitimacy. First, the relevance of the New Speaker paradigm for minority languages is outlined and associated standardization processes are analysed, particularly in the cases of Breton and Irish. It is argued that while standardization initiatives in both languages were carried out with a view to modernization, the processes nonetheless took place within value-laden, traditionalist contexts. The subsequent discussion focuses on the manner in which the language practices of New Speakers of Breton and Irish have come to be associated with the standard written varieties of the languages and perceived, at times, as oralizations of written standards. This association is a fundamental feature of the language ideological landscapes of Breton and Irish and is at the heart of debates pertaining to target language varieties. In order to illustrate these tensions, the chapter shows how New Speakers of Breton and Irish can align their linguistic practices with traditionalist and modernist discourses by identifying either with a conservative dialect of either language or by not focusing on any particular established target variety in their practices or ideologies.

This chapter explores how twentieth-century feminist and LGBTQ+ literature deconstructs and reimagines gender in formal experimentation and genre-bending. It proposes that this literary tradition contributes to a larger cultural conversation that tends to think in binaries: trans vs. queer, gay vs. straight, male vs. female. The work of a diverse group of writers-- Djuna Barnes, June Arnold, Bertha Harris, Armistead Maupin, and Leslie Feinberg—reinvents conventional understandings of gender in forms that range from avant garde experimentation to popular and autobiographical novels. Genderqueer American writers remind us that the complexities of gender and sexuality always exceed our attempts to describe them. When we incorporate genderqueer texts by queer American writers into the larger conversationwe can access another theoretical language, one written within contingency and resistance.Only radical reimagination and continual (re)creation can ever hope to approximate the complex play and multiplicity of genders.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

The Introduction establishes the subject of this book, Irish Protestant nationalists, and argues that they constituted an important counterculture in the period. It links the historiography of Protestant nationalists with the competing ‘modernist’ and ‘perennialist’ perspectives on the origins of nationalism, and will argue that Ireland constitutes an important outlier, where both classically modernist and perennialist features co-existed, by reference to Irish history since the Tudor conquest. It argues that although parallels with the central European experience can be discerned, it is difficult to meaningfully place Protestant nationalists within frameworks put forward by scholars of continental Europe. The literature on Protestant nationalists is reviewed, and it is suggested that the way forward for historiography is to follow up the implications of the circles that have been reconstructed by biographers, and produce a collective biography that seeks to reconstruct the entire Protestant nationalist experience. The sources used in this book are discussed, and prosopography, the primary methodology which will be employed, is described and justified. The Introduction closes with a brief statistical summary of the Irish Protestant community in 1901.