1) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Published in 1936, Nightwood is a haze of alcohol, glamour, sex, and love in all its desperate, unconventional, and painful forms. It tells the story of the mesmerising Robin Vote, who leaves a trail of cigarette ends and
Originally published in Postgraduate English, vol. 32 (March, 2016) ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary study investigates the tensions inherent within the ‘anti-modern’ element of early modernism and its relationship to Victorian and fin de siècle narratives of modernity. Using Sigmund Freud’s Totem and
Charlotte Salomon was a German-born Jewish artist of significant achievement and greater promise but aged just 26, and pregnant with her first child, she died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. The crowning achievement of Charlotte’s tragically short life, Leben?
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often used as an example of a work astride two movements: modernism and postmodernism. It was written in 1955 when modernism was experiencing something of a revival in the wake of the Second World
In this book, Robert Colls sets out to chart George Orwell’s changing attitudes towards “Englishness”, and the various positions he holds, and tries to hold, in relation to it. He achieves this through a mixture of biography, political history, and
Yukio Mishima was a twentieth century Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model and film director. He was also an ardent nationalist, with extreme right wing views. His death in 1970, aged just 45, came as a result of a failed
A version of this post appeared on READ, the blog from Durham University’s English department on 1st July 2016. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropological and ethnographic studies of so-called “primitive cultures” were hugely popular, and there was a