Modernism, Satire, and the Fictions of Literary History

Abstract

Modernism, Satire and the Fictions of Literary History examines the satirical practices of an array of writers both central and peripheral to the canon of British modernism. Whereas previous studies on the relationship between modernism and satire tend to focus on the late modernisms of the 1930s, this dissertation primarily draws its case studies from the Victorian, Edwardian, and early interwar periods. It features extensive chapter-length studies of Samuel Butler, Max Beerbohm, and Virginia Woolf, alongside close readings of select works by E. M. Forster, Rose Macaulay, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Mulk Raj Anand. While the archetypal modernist work has several conspicuous affinities with satire (irony, parody, subversion), this influence has been underacknowledged by critics; in some cases, the modernists themselves resisted having their work labelled as satire. This dissertation begins by examining the historical discourses, inherited from the Victorians and still ascendent in early 20th century Britain, which led to these satiric influences being downplayed or neglected. Various methodologies are then used to uncover the extent of satire’s influence on early British modernism. This work is informed by the formalist insights of recent theoretical work on satire, as well as the New Modernist Studies. Some chapters draw heavily on biography, diary entries and personal letters, occasional essays and reviews; others chart reception histories and reader responses. The writers profiled all expressed varying levels of commitment to the practice of satire: some were lifelong specialists in satire, while others tried to repress or domesticate their satiric influences. Furthermore, they employed satire in service of a wide range of political ideologies: some hewed to the orthodoxies of the Liberal and Conservative parties; others propounded Fabian socialism and Marxism. This dissertation will demonstrate how these heterogeneous writers nonetheless exhibit a shared sense of satire as a medium for exploring and thinking through epochal cultural change. While present-day scholarship places considerable importance on High Modernism’s revolutionary ‘new temporalities,’ this study finds that prior to the 1920s many modernists still operated within dominant eighteenth-and nineteenth-century contrastive models of historical periodization. Since classical antiquity, satire has employed sharp historical contrasts, most notably when juxtaposing a mythic golden age to a morally corrupt present. As such, satire provided moderns with a language and rhetoric for thinking through large-scale cultural change, including paradigm shifts in literature. This dominant trope of contrastive ‘ages’ and ‘periods’ was employed with various degrees of critical distance and nuance. By shedding light on some neglected satiric texts, this dissertation reintroduces one key way in which authors of literary fiction theorized the famous ‘rupture’ of modernity. Furthermore, in cases where these authors satirized each other, this dissertation builds on Michael H. Levenson’s assertion that “[t]he agon of modernism was not a collision between novelty and tradition but a contest of novelties, a struggle to define the trajectory of the new.”