This chapter considers H.D.’s translation of Euripides’s Ion (1937). H.D.’s Ion crystallizes her approach to Greek, redefining the practice of translation in the process; allows her to propose an alternative theory of psychic development contra Freud; and, finally, in its specific (mis)reading of the Euripidean play, foreshadows Pound’s treatment of Sophocles in Women of Trachis by making a strong case for the poetic and cultural relevance of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century. Pushing beyond accounts of the play available to her in the 1930s, H.D.’s interpretation of Euripides’ poetic strategies aligns with more recent scholarly accounts of his plays. Deploying differently the elements of commentary and translation in her multigeneric work, H.D. dramatizes both her own desire to believe in a triumphant narrative that would bind ancient and modern culture and would make poetry the cure or compensation for trauma, and the contingency or constructedness of such a position. The analysis of Ion is bookended by examinations of “Murex” (1926), and Trilogy (1944–46) that show the germination and evolution of the questions, ideas, and techniques that went into the translation of the play.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

Chapter 6 follows Ilf as he photographed New York City and analyzes the “New York” installment of the writers’ photo essay. It argues their photo essay resembled the work of the many Western and Soviet writers and photographers, who in the 1930s were experimenting with the hybrid documentary genre of the photo essay or photobook. Tracing the transnational networks that connected authors and photographers across the ideological divide, the chapter interprets Ilf and Petrov’s photo essay as a modernist documentary.

Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.

This epilogue offers a concluding excursus, and looks back at a few key themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity. Its aim is to tease out some further points for discussion concerning what could be described as a Janus-faced tendency within Victorian self-identity – a looking back to the religious and classical past, in the very process of charging forward. This excursus will introduce the conceptual vocabulary of simultaneity and of cultural forgetting, used respectively by Benedict Anderson and Paul Connerton, to facilitate some further reflection on Victorian experiences of time and temporality. It will contend that Victorian cultural engagements with the Bible and antiquity were always mediated via distinctly modern ways of knowing. If the book as a whole details a series of critical engagements with biblical and classical pasts through the long nineteenth century, then in this epilogue, an opportunity arises for analysing the very conditions – the material and epistemological frameworks – which shaped such engagements.

This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.

This contribution traces the singular significance of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy for Sebald’s literary as well as literary critical writings. It offers a discussion of Sebald’s adaptation of Benjaminian theorems and reflections, focussing in particular on the philosophy of history, conceptions of natural history, the epistemological functionalization of melancholia, and a materialist understanding of memory.

Sebald virtually identified with Kafka. He published two substantial essays on The Castle, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Foregrounding the theme of death, he draws on Freud’s ambivalent concept of the death-drive, and associates Kafka also with Schubert’s Winterreise. Drawing implicitly on Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he interprets the protagonist of The Castle as a messianic figure seeking to confront the Castle’s power. Another essay uses Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, with its Darwinian implications, as pretext for a meditation on cultural and evolutionary decline. In Sebald’s fictional works, Kafka is present throughout much of Vertigo, which in part follows Kafka’s own journey through Northern Italy from Venice to Lake Garda and alludes to Kafka’s ‘The Huntsman Gracchus’, set in the lakeside town of Riva. Sebald explores Kafka’s state of mind, as attested in letters and diaries, returning to the theme of death and also hinting at Kafka’s possible homosexuality. In Austerlitz, a significant quotation from The Trial is worked into the text. Altogether, much of Sebald’s work represents a homage to Kafka.

The sixth chapter examines German intellectual understandings of chemical warfare technologies. Several of the most influential interwar intellectuals were veterans of World War I, having experienced gas attacks and used gas masks during their wartime service. Revealing the salience of poison gas in the interwar imagination, this chapter explores the numerous literary, artistic, and cinematic works that attempted to grapple with the individual soldier’s relationship to chemical weapons. Indeed, the continued contact with relentlessly changing and often dangerous technology such as poison gas and the gas mask exemplified the mental uncertainty and political instability of early twentieth-century Germany. As part of a larger debate surrounding militarized technology, arguments over the controllability of poison gas and the viability of gas discipline most clearly played out in the writings of Ernst Jünger and joint projects of Walter Benjamin and Dora Sophie Kellner. These three thinkers constructed highly theoretical visions of aerial warfare technologies that neatly represented two of the major political commitments in the continuing debate over Germany’s potential rearmament and the use of poison gas.

At the end ofthis book I place my prose of historicality somewhere between Suhrawardi’s and Walter Benjamin’s respective angelology. What do we get when we do that; a transhistorical theology of their respective Islam and Judaism, where history is seen as the interface either between the left and the right wing of Gabriel or between the front and back of Angelus Novus. That is where memory and history come together. Suhrawardi’s Gabriel has one wing turned toward Divine Truth as its Necessary Being and one wing tilted toward the shaded history of humanity as his Contingent Being, while Benjamin’s Angelus Novus has his face facing the troubled past as the storm from paradise is propelling him toward a frightful future. Benjamin’s angel goes backward; Suhrawardi’s sideways. One is teleological, the other contemporaneous. There is no teleology in Suhrawardi and there is no spontaneity in Benjamin’s respective historical theologies. But read together, Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s become a prophetic vision of history in which reality becomes unreal in face of a Divinity neither of them could ignore. Like the rest of you, I stand in between Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s angelology, with all our history and all our humanity fragmented, just like these stories I have shared, between a necessary past we cannot ignore, and a contingent future we cannot see.

The surrealist imagination is an imagination at war. Born out of the horrors of the European trenches and catapulted into the nightmares of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust, surrealism has always responded to the historical violence that has shaped and energized it. At the same time, however, surrealist responses to war are all too aware of their struggle to articulate their political nature. How can surrealism write war? What is the political import of surrealism’s indirect aesthetics? How might surrealist writing advance our understanding of the complexities of wartime subjectivity? This chapter explores these questions by turning its attention to two dark allegorical novels: Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). To date, discussions of British surrealist writing have confined themselves to the aesthetic and political contexts of interwar and wartime poetry. But there is a need to complicate this literary history if we are to better understand the diversity of British surrealist writing before, during, and after the Second World War. Whilst the novel was very much a marginal practice in 1930s and 1940s surrealist circles, it nevertheless emerged in the wartime period as a dark form of literary political enquiry; one that, coming through from the counter-Enlightenment impulses of the Gothic, poses disquieting questions about wartime human appetites for violence, corruption, and absolute power.

This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”

Slote’s chapter addresses the issue of the multitude of new editions of Joyce’s works using an intersection of translation studies and editorial theory, understanding various translations as new textual entities. Slote draws on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in which the mission of the translator is presented as a mimetic one in that it requires both creation and imitation. Translation, according to Benjamin, aims not at fidelity but at strangeness, not at singularity but as the mapping of a maximum of possibilities. Likewise, editing is a mimetic activity in that – as with translation – it involves transposition from one textual instantiation into a different and new textual instantiation in order to further propagate the text in a new manner, to a new audience. The chapter then looks at various translations of Joyce’s works as new textual entities that also happen to be in different languages. The burgeoning library of Joyce editions will be thus examined not as a continuum of more-or-less precise versions but as an exploration and multiplication of possibilities.