This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This chapter examines how and when British government officials considered the nation’s reputation and international standing in decisions about whether to censor literature or theatrical performances. In the early twentieth century, officials in the Home and Lord Chamberlain’s Offices, among others, were eager to appear rational to their Parisian counterparts in the hope that French officials would increase efforts to suppress obscene publications. Simultaneously, British administrators expressed disapproval of American censors, whom they viewed as unduly prudish. As the century wore on, the Americans would outpace British censors in their toleration of obscene materials, and an increasing number of British citizens came to view their government’s response to texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover as benighted and paternalistic. The chapter argues that British censorship was not a strictly national activity but rather took place within the larger framework of international relations and a pursuit of global prestige.

From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.

Olga Tabachnikova examines Chekhov as a mirror for the transformation of British culture over the twentieth century, from the Bloomsbury Circle’s natural affinity for Chekhov’s prose, to the uphill, against-the-grain climb of the plays onto the British stage, delineating the gradual emergence of Chekhov in the cultural consciousness as a kind of honorary Englishman, whose understated manner, modesty, reserve, and reticence made him the least un-foreign of the Russian literary titans.

Chapter 2 looks at the major cross-sex collaborations of D. H. Lawrence, who, along with W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore, serves as one of three “serial collaborators” at the heart of this study who worked with multiple partners of the opposite sex throughout their careers. It argues that collaboration with women was central to Lawrence’s creative process. His preservation of competing authorial voices in the first published version of his early short story “Goose Fair,” which he wrote with his one-time fiancée Louie Burrows, offers new insight into how he incorporated Jessie Chambers’s editorial suggestions and textual contributions in shaping key parts of his final manuscript for Sons and Lovers. The dynamic of these collaborations, in turn, informs my reading at the end of the chapter of his little-known 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, coauthored with the Australian writer Mollie Skinner. Lawrence’s commitment to utilizing his real-life creative disagreements with women to enhance the narrative dialogism of his works exemplifies how the discord aesthetic served to animate modernist texts.

Chapter 1 provides historical context for the advent of cross-sex collaboration as a widespread modernist practice by examining the efforts of several writers and intellectuals between 1885 and 1908 to theorize the gendered nature of creativity or imagine mutually satisfying, socially transformative ways in which men and women might work together outside of traditional marriage. Three recurring subjects of concern emerge that shape the discourse regarding relations between the sexes at the time: marriage, androgyny, and genius. All three of these ideas, I argue, promise to fulfill the age-old fantasy of allowing individuals to recapture a lost state of primordial wholeness by uniting two opposite natures as one. The historical analysis in this chapter also provides a frame for examining two co-signed, late-nineteenth-century works that exemplify how some writers began to view cross-sex collaboration as ideally suited for exploring one or more of the subjects of marriage, androgyny, and genius: Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling’s 1886 pamphlet The Woman Question, and Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker’s 1894 short story “The Spectre of the Real.”

Chapter 4, “Lawrence’s Storm of Fecundity,” examines the stubborn ambivalence toward procreation throughout the novels of D. H. Lawrence. On the one hand Lawrence called the novel “the one bright book of life,” and was more eloquent than any other novelist in defending the form on the basis of its vitality. On the other hand the novels – from Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow to The Lost Girl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover – rarely admit procreation into their pages without a protracted struggle. Reproduction poses a number of problems for Lawrence: it is an outcome of sex that prioritizes procreative ends over erotic means; it is complicit in the spread of population and by extension the decimation of the English countryside; it threatens the autonomy of the individual, especially Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow and Women in Love. This chapter offers a large-scale interpretation of Lawrence’s contradictions. It argues that in these opposite forces of life and not-life, perpetuation of vitality and suspension of it, we can discover the essential tension of his work. The novel is the theater of action in which this tension is allowed to reverberate.

In this first of paired chapters bearing down on the evolutionary history and philosophy of literary language, Victorian narratives differently concerned with the term “medium” – George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – undergo an intensive reading that opens directly onto Giorgio Agamben’s investigations into the always mysterious ontological conjuncture of idea and its sayability, object and its name, in human discourse – and since then onto conceptual poet John Cayley’s theory of “grammalepsy.” Literary examples of prose under duress, from Herman Melville to D. H. Lawrence, return reading to a more close-grained application of Agamben’s poetics (rather than ontology), where the “give” – and take back – of a medium’s oscillatory potential can only be played out before us, tacitly at least, in a foundational contrast to the logic (following Agamben) of the non-extensive point in calculus, the signifying unit that has, unlike syllabic language, no subsidiary elements.

Founded in 1912 by Charles Rothschild, of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves took a modern approach to preservation through the science of ecology, enlisting “Botanical Bolsheviks” such as Arthur George Tansley in order to protect entire ecosystems. What started as a promising venture quickly ran into impediments with the outbreak of World War I and the requisitioning of land for military purposes under the Defense of the Realm Act. I consider these early environmental activities in light of shifting aesthetic uses of nature occurring concurrently in literature. I contrast Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies to T. E. Hulme’s refutation of Romantic “limitlessness” and turn towards a classical verse that remains “mixed up with earth.” D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow registers of changes to a rural English marsh community during industrialization through a new rhythmic form that foregrounds bodily experience during rapid environmental transformation. I explore Lawrence’s ideas of “positive inertia” that he develops in his Study of Thomas Hardy as a generative form of rest arising from the individual’s connection to material surroundings.

The works of Joseph Conrad (b. 1857) and D. H. Lawrence (b. 1885) came from deeper sources than Boldrewood’s (see Chapter 7) and are far more ambitious in scope and thematic concern. In such cases the biographical sources and initiating phases of the work’s existence generally repay intent study.

The tortured genesis and revision of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) is clarified by reference to MSS materials. The work–version relationship is put under productive stress, the implications for editing are pursued, and a book-historically informed avenue for literary study is demonstrated.

The marvellous new world of widespread literacy and the ready availability of print, complemented by the effects of the US Chace Act of 1891, the rise of literary agents and upmarket literary publishers such as Seltzer and Secker mediated the forms of Lawrence’s idiosyncratic writings. Since every act of writing presupposes a reading, even in Lawrence’s case, literary study needs to be informed by this conditioning context. The versionality of his writings uncovered by the Cambridge Works editors argues the need for a digital critical archive of his writings organised on a temporal principle.