Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad
"This is an incisive study showing the instrumental role of travelling and travel writing in the late phase of modernism. Whether it is Wyndham Lewis in Morocco. Rebecca West In the Balkans, E.E. Cummings in [Soviet] Russia, or Ezra Pound in France - in each case, travelling was productive of an awareness and a formal repertoire germane to the writer's respective literary project. David Farley's book is part of an ongoing reassessment of modernism's vital historical, cultural, and political contexts." - Bernard Schweizer, author of Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s. As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writing argues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genre - one in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra Pound's Cantos. From there, it goes on to examine E. E. Cumming's frustrated attempts to navigate the "unworld" of Soviet Russia in his book Eimi, Wyndham Lewis's satiric journey through colonial Morocco in Filibusters in Barbary, and Rebecca West's urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers travelled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War I and World War II. Farley's study focuses on the question of what constitutes "evidence" for Pound, Lewis, Cummings, and West as they establish their authority as eyewitnesses, translate what they see for an audience back home, and attempt to make sense of a transformed and transforming modern world. Modernist Travel Writing makes an original contribution to the study of literary modernism while taking a distinctive look at a unique subset within the growing field of travel writing studies. David Farley's work will be of interest to students and teachers in both of these fields as well as to early-twentieth-century literary historians and general enthusiasts of modernist studies.
Female Sacrifice: Gender and Nostalgic Nationalism in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Near the end of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her sprawling, compelling, encyclopedic account of traveling through Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, Rebecca West describes a spectacle she and her husband witnessed. As they sat at a hotel cafe in Prishtina, with elbows ‘on a tablecloth stained brown and puce’ eating ‘chicken drumsticks … meagre as sparrow bones’, a Serbian couple walked towards them, clearly having traveled a great distance. The woman had ‘the better part of a plough’ tied to her back while the man ‘went free’. As the man conversed with the hotel-keeper, the woman stood nearby, unable to sit down, with ‘a blue shadow of fatigue’ on her face. Although West did not converse with the couple, she felt able to sum up their situation and explain the condition of the cafe’s repast by drawing on Balkan history (894–5). West reads this incident as emblematic of the effects of imperial oppression by the Turks, the Austrians, the Italians, the Russians, and the Hungarians over centuries in the Balkans. Imperialism, she argues, had created the material and spiritual squalor, and what she interpreted as the distorted gender roles, of some communities in Yugoslavia. West describes finding these mean conditions in her travels interspersed with remnants of the admirable peasant cultures of the Balkan peoples.
The Woman Question' in the Age of Perestroika
THE COLLAPSE OF 'really existing socialism',l and its eclipse as an economic and political altenative to liberal capitalism, has many implications for the populations of the affected countries, not all of them positive.* For the half that is female, there will be both losses and gains. As the state retreats from its self-designated role as 'emancipator of women', to be replaced by market forces, civil society and new ideological configurations, vulnerable social groups such as women are threatened by the abandoning of old commitments, and by a deepening of existing social divisions and political tensions. At the same time, such groups are now able to form their own organisations and challenge the limited conceptions of citizenship that prevailed under the old state structures. Although it is too early to predict the outcome of these epochal changes in some Communist countries it is still possible to talk of 'reforms' under Party rule, while elsewhere it appears that a wholesale move to the free market is in train the implications for women are momentous. Feminists might view these changes with a degree of ambivalence: on the one hand, welcoming fresh opportunities for debate as state control is relaxed and civil society emerges as a new political terrain; but on the other, fearing that the 'transition from socialism' will lead to a worsening of women's social and economic position, at least in the short to medium term. Although at this stage any analysis must necessarily be provisional, it is nevertheless possible to discern some changes in the definition of women's social position within this new context. This article will examine the three most pertinent issues: how those Communist parties that remain in power, or remain competitors for power, have redefined their policies with respect to women; how the socio-economic and political situa tion of women is likely tobe affected by the aban doning of part or all of the orthodox Communist policy package; and how far these new conditions favour the emergence of feministand women's movements. Whilst the main focus of the discussion will be the Soviet Union where the Communist Party has remained in power, some of the problems and possibilities that can be identified there