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Although the rise of the bureaucratic state was one of the most startling transformations of early twentieth-century British society, novelists raised on a diet of laissez-faire liberalism tended to shy away from direct representations of bureaucracy (with some prominent exceptions, such as the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit or Anthony Trollope's Three Clerks). Although squarely set within the "governing-class spirit" of Westminster and populated with a bevy of civil servants, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway tends to be read as maintaining a strict public-private division with a marked preference for the richness and beauty of private life. This article argues that Woolf, no stranger to the civil service through her family and personal networks, had a more strained and ambivalent response to bureaucracy as an idea and government form. A close reading of the structural importance of Hugh Whitbread's character, a minor figure who is often read as an empty, flat Dickensian caricature of the gentleman, shows a more ambivalent response to how bureaucracy and its forms impacted the wider concerns raised about governmentality in Woolf's novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Ezra Pound's behind-the-scenes control of the little review Four Pages, which ran for fifteen issues from 1948 to 1951. After his return to the United States in 1945 to face charges of treason, Pound was declared mentally incompetent and institutionalized in amental hospital in the nation's capital. With his publishers attempting to rehabilitate Pound's public standing by spotlighting his purely "literary" efforts, Pound had to resort to anonymous publication to continue to have a say on contemporary matters. This essay shows how Pound essentially created and edited a little review to have a venue that pushed his social and political ideas at a time when doing so openly was problematic for legal and political reasons. The use of anonymity as a writer and editor was part of the wider "literary camouflage" that Four Pages engaged in to advance Pound's wider cultural and political agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristocratic patronage of the historical avant-garde remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, if only because the aristocracy seemed the avant-garde's natural enemy and what the avant-garde sought to supplant. This article examines the 1924 'Les Soirées de Paris,' a five-week-long series of commissioned ballets, plays, and performances financed by Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont. Paying close attention to the social divide in Tzara's Mouchoir de Nuages, this article seeks to show the fraught relationship between the aristocracy and the Parisian avant-garde. Beaumont's intervention into the Parisian cultural field was an attempt to derail the growing influence of the market but also had a more positive motivation in attempting to showcase the 'best' of 'new' French art. If Beaumont was bitingly satirized in Raymond Radiguet's Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, this 'last Maecenas of the arts' was a more complex figure who deserves closer examination for the role that he played in bringing together a series of artists-Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Tzara-in a lavishly produced series of original works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the ill-fated 1922 Congress of Paris, an international conference organized by Andre Breton, was to diagnose the sources of the "modern spirit." Although the congress had ambitious international goals, it was brought down by a remark with xenophobic connotations. Largely remembered today as the death knell of Paris Dada--the public fight between Tristan Tzara and Breton meant not only that the congress never took place but also that Paris Dada was dissolved--the congress's failure stemmed from the tensions involved in self-consciously defining modernism. Arguing that ambivalence over the concept shaped the main participants' understanding of the congress, I read the congress as a concrete manifestation of the impulse to federate the arts in post-World War I France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses meanings of "generation" in context with world literatures which is affected by World War II, terrorist attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and military involvement of U.S. in Afghanistan. He mentions that the generational language has been well exploited by French, Spanish, and Hispano-American literary scholars but has not found its place in American or British scholarship. He mentions the contributions of authors Robert Wohl and Samuel Hynes.

An essay on a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara is presented. It mentions that the poet was born April 16, 1896 in Romania. It informs that he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti establishment Dada movement in the country.

The article discusses the monocle as a social symbol of modernity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The role that the monocle played in social identity, including of aristocrats, military officers, dandies, women and avant-gardists, is discussed. The relationship between modernist fashion and the wearing of the monocle, including as depicted in the main character of the short story "The Monocle," within the book "Two or Three Graces and Other Stories," by Aldous Huxley, is discussed.

The article critiques the diary section of the book "Blindness," by Henry Green, interpreting it as a reflection on the author's own life. It addresses the common reading of the diary section as a means of establishing the protagonist's artistic abilities, and refutes this interpretation based on the amount of personal information contained in the diary section. It comments on errors in the book's chronology, speculations into Green's life, and reading the novel as an autobiography.

The essay discusses the professionalization of novel-writing in Great Britain throughout the 1920s. Emphasis is given to the publishing of young British writers largely affected by the destruction of World War I. The author explains that young authors were published because post-war youth culture became largely synonymous with British national identity in this era. The importance of Alec Waugh's "The Loom of Youth," which dealt with Great Britain's public school system, to the increased popularity of young authors and literature dealing with youth is assessed.

This essay argues that Henry Green's autobiographical Pack My Bag is not only a significant achievement in its own right, but also of great interest to readers intrigued by the varieties of modernism and theories of autobiography. Green, the most consciously experimental novelist of his time, wrote an autobiography that, in many ways, confounds expectations of the genre. While establishing himself as a victim of the impending Second World War, Green's text moves quickly to shame remembered, an obsessive rumination on guilt. This interplay between innocence and guilt is the structuring principle of Pack My Bag. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Living," by Henry Green is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of the characters. It examines the fiction as anti-mimetic, abstracted from society, and intimately linked to times and economic depression of industrial areas in the mid-1920s. An overview of the story is also given with casts of workers, neighbors, and families connected to Dupret factory.

Henry Green’s 1946 novel Back is effectively cut in two because at the arithmetic middle of the book, there is a translated (and quite long) passage from the purportedly eighteenth century Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créquy. While most critics have agreed upon the importance of this passage to the novel, not only structurally but thematically, none have actually looked into the original source and considered the most crucial thing about it: the original source was a forgery. When considering the forged status of this passage and its vital importance to Back, our reading of Green’s novel must change drastically: no longer does the novel read as a quest for authenticity on the part of its protagonist, the disabled war veteran Charley Summers. Rather, one must consider the possibility of a true self in a world of forgery and duplicity. This also implicates our understandings of modernist intertextual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the book "A House for Mr. Biswas," by V.S. Naipaul is presented. It mentions that the first chapter of the book is named "Pastoral". The book views pastoral as a literary form and also explores the institution and tradition of British literary. It examines the various aspects of a colonial society.