In this final chapter, I analyze Furūgh Farrukhzād’s innovative development of Nīmā’s earlier prosodic experiments and link Farrukhzād’s late modernist poetic project with Western modernist poetry. My purpose in avoiding lengthy comparisons with Western poetry up to this point in the book is to provincialize European poetic modernism and consider instead the significant links in poetic forms, themes, and politics that were more important for the elaboration of modernism in the Arab and Iranian contexts. However, I also readily admit that Western poetic influence plays a significant role in the Arab and Iranian modernists’ approaches to poetry. I thus take the opportunity in this last chapter to address Farrukhzād’s work not only in the context of local poetic connections, but also in light of the bonds she forged with Western modernist poetry. In so doing, I argue that Farrukhzād’s poetic persona is best understood as a flâneuse, the female Iranian counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian poetic persona. I furthermore undertake a lengthy analysis of the close associations between Farrukhzād’s late poetry and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” from 1925.

The Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s political positions underwent a monumental shift after he witnessed Mossadegh’s ouster first-hand while on the run from the Iraqi police in Iran. Chapter 4 traces the effects this political shift had on Sayyāb’s view of his own poetry and the worlds he imagined within it. Sayyāb was a card-carrying Communist prior to the coup against Mossadegh, but afterwards he began to support a nationalist politics informed by Western Liberalism. The changes his poetry underwent thus offer an indispensable point of comparison with Shāmlū’s committed project. After experiencing the events of 1953 in Iran, Sayyāb returned to a volatile period in Iraq’s history as a bloody 1958 revolution overthrew the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and instituted a radical military dictatorship in its stead. During the ensuing years, Sayyāb published several modernist poems, which have been hailed by critics as crucial contributions to the development of modernist forms and themes in Arabic. In this chapter, I explore Sayyāb’s development of modernist themes alongside his retention of premodern Arabic prosodic form in his 1954 long poem “Weapons and Children.”

This chapter reads the canonical novel Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, and lesser-known novel The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill, in conversation with each other and with the fiction of German-Jewish author Paul Heyse, to which a single episode of Eliot’s may be indebted, while Fothergill draws on Heyse’s 1873 Kinder der Welt throughout in plot, structure, and gendered characters. Both British novels feature dual narrators and plots and exemplify Anglo–German exchange, especially in relation to opera and German music. But whereas Gwendolyn Harleth fails at a music career and marriage, Fothergill’s first five of six books comprise a New Woman plot of a single woman refusing mercenary marriage to pursue a career: protagonist and English narrator May Wedderburn studies music abroad, with the talent and drive to succeed, and lives alone. The sixth book, however, modulates from a New Woman story to heterosexual romance and marriage. Complicating this outcome are Fothergill’s dual plot and her second, male German narrator, the romantic friend of the novel’s protagonist, the German concertmaster whom May loves. The novel thus mixes heterosexual romance, queer masculinity, and queer romance, giving male love the last word and qualifying conventional Victorian happy endings.

An iconoclast in religion and marriage in 1854–5, Marian Evans, later George Eliot, was a more conventional female traveller than her precursors in Chapters 2 and 3 due to her limited listening and speaking skills and her reliance on her partner George Henry Lewes for travel arrangements and social contacts. Her potential for cultural exchange was also limited by her desire to avoid encountering scandalous gossip that had followed her from England. Evans’s discernibly greater interest in German intellectual men than women additionally meant that she neither had nor took the opportunity to form a female friendship network in the mid-1850s. Thus, unlike Jameson or Howitt, she never met Goethe or Goethe’s friends (aside from Fanny Lewald). Eliot’s limited ethnoexocentrism also manifested itself in her public and private writing about German Jews, most notably Heinrich Heine. The chapter analyses in detail one of Evans/Eliot’s best-known essays, ‘German Wit’, in which Evans erases Heine’s Jewish identity to posit him as a German writer qualified to succeed Johann von Goethe in greatness. Though she would later have known about Heine’s Jewish origins, they remained erased when she revised her 1855 anonymous essay into George Eliot’s posthumously published essay of 1884.

This chapter places Elizabeth Bishop’s work within the cross currents of the aesthetic and poetic movements that constituted modernism. While it might be expected that Bishop and her contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell would form part of the generation that would inherit the sensibilities of modernism, what quickly becomes clear, particularly in relation to Bishop, is both her reticence at being identified with any one particular school or movement and her agility in moving between the definitions produced by, and for, modernism. In part her singular position on the peripheries of modernism was a self-selected one, Bishop is happier to stand apart from the categorizing and theorizing impulses of her time. In addition, the fact that she was a gay woman

In 1852, Wagner described his text for the Ring cycle as “the greatest poem that has ever been written.” This chapter asks to what extent the musical innovations – responding to historical linguistics – were formative for a generation of writers as well as composers. To what extent did innovation in one medium engender innovative techniques in another? After contextualizing Wagner’s operatic reforms within his early writings and related moments within the history of the genre, it explores a cornucopia of modernist writers working in the shadow of the Ring cycle: from Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Aubrey Beardsley, to Yeats, Mann, and Beckett; from Mallarmé and Dujardin to Zola and Proust, to name but a few. It traces the profound influence on literature of leifmotivic techniques, as “carriers of feeling,” amid the shift to words as a dereferentialized system of signs. The role of alliteration, direct parody, interior monologue, and involuntary memory all contribute to the overall view that appropriation and influence of “reformist” techniques in literature and linguistics remained in the hands of authors, regardless of Wagner’s predictions for his own literary greatness.

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.