Introduction

Summary

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

[I]n epochs of total metamorphosis such as ours, we may spend almost our entire lives trying to find our whereabouts in a strange country. It is my impression that most of us do so spend our lives, carrying with us fragments of a mythos.¹

David Jones, drafts of “Past and Present”

I.1 Epoch of Metamorphosis

In 1953, the poet David Jones wrote a letter to the editor of Granta. The periodical never published his remarks, but the surviving document, titled “Past and Present,” voices vividly the experience of alienation and longing that, for so many people, characterized twentieth-century life. This chapter’s epigraph, drawn from one discarded draft of that unpublished letter, embodies as much as it expresses the poet’s sense of displacement. Split across two uncollated pages in an archival folder at the National Library of Wales, and eliminated from the letter’s final version, these words have about them a ghostliness – an inescapable awareness of unbelonging.

Those artists we term modernist tend to have – ironically or aptly – an agonistic relationship to modernity. While critical and pedagogical commonplaces associate British and Irish modernism with a disdain for Victorian conventions – bourgeois respectability, patriotism, literary realism, sincerity, sentimentality – modernists long for the past as much as they scorn it.² Certainly, modernism includes Vorticist defiance and Futurist triumphalism. But the exuberance of Ezra Pound’s oft-cited imperative – “Make it new” (Cantos 265) – stands alongside W. B. Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem and T. S. Eliot’s observation of “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Prose II.478). Modernism encompasses both exuberance and unease in the face of historical change.

One expression of this unease is nostalgia – the longing for home, for a kinder past, for belonging. Given its association with sentimentality, nostalgia’s role in the modernist intellectual landscape is often marginalized.³ As David James points out in his analysis of consolation in Discrepant Solace, literary critics tend to privilege texts that discomfit readers: “[W]e don’t expect writing that we politically or ethically admire to alleviate the strenuousness of reading about history’s ravages” (7). To characterize a text as nostalgic is therefore likely to be perceived as a form of critique. In particular, as James notes, “modernism is valued for how it fosters disconsolation” (44) and modernist idealizations of vanished pasts tend to provoke suspicion – and understandably so, given the politics of certain modernist writers.

This discomfort with nostalgia can be felt within the modernist movement as well as in subsequent criticism. In The Struggle of the Modern (1963), the poet Stephen Spender voices a particularly forceful critique, declaring that “passionate nostalgia … colours so much modern writing,” emerging from the sense that “an irreparable break has taken place between the past and the present, in society and in man’s soul” (208–9). From Spender’s perspective, modernist nostalgia is not just some wistful remembrance of times past, but a bitter resentment of the diminished present: “Nostalgia and hatred are two sides of the same medal,” motivating modernist artists to enact “a burial of the contemporary world under the heaped-up memories of the past” (209). Spender goes so far as to associate this vehement rejection of the present with the violence of fascism.

Yet this sinister aspect is only one facet of modernist nostalgia, which need not always be symptomatic of reactionary impulses. A significant subset of the criticism acknowledges nostalgia’s productive dimensions, both as political impetus and as a source of insight. Fredric Jameson describes nostalgia’s political possibilities in Marxism and Form: “[I]f nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other” (82). Jameson here imagines nostalgia as motivating political action – as the longing for the weather of one’s childhood might motivate climate activism. But nostalgia’s revolutionary potential is as much a matter of self-understanding as it is of particular agendas for external cultural change.

Modernist writers frequently find themselves defining their national identities in the tension between a consciously cultivated alienation from society and a deep longing for home. In the draft of “Past and Present” quoted in the epigraph, David Jones vividly captures this conflict: the artist’s alienation from modern culture motivates the search for meaning and for a home. Likewise, T. S. Eliot surveys the modern wasteland while declaring, “These fragments have I shored against my ruins” (Poems I 71). And James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus realizes that he must leave his homeland in order to make art about it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Portrait of the Artist 185). In each of these instances, the artist stands apart, surveying the world around him with a sense of alienation and dissatisfaction. And, in each case, that alienation necessitates the construction of a sense of meaning and belonging through the artistic process. This generative estrangement, this literary quest for home, emerges from nostalgia. As Kathleen Riley contends, “At its most faithfully Odyssean, nostalgia is forward-looking, anticipatory. It is how the human imagination in exile sustains itself and draws inspiration from displacement” (30).

The present study, by exploring nostalgia’s integral role in the modernist epic, illuminates how this oft-reviled emotion can afford artists a flexible and creative means of relating to the past and to the nation. While the regressive hatred of the present described by Spender may play a role in modernist nostalgia, it is certainly not the whole story. Rather, the authors I analyze here – James Joyce, Mina Loy, Lynette Roberts, T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and Derek Walcott – use nostalgia to create new connections to the present, constructing complex national identities by longing for the homelands imagined in their writing.

Each of these figures boasts some form of multi-cultural identity. Joyce is the famous model of the self-exiled artist, leaving Ireland physically but not artistically. Mina Loy’s half-Jewish heritage and her father’s immigrant status rendered her an outsider in England even before she chose to emigrate. Her autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose reflects on this cultural alienation. T. S. Eliot, Missouri-born and Harvard-educated, infamously behaved more properly English than did the English themselves; Four Quartets negotiates his hybrid identity while contemplating World War II’s threat to the survival of his chosen nation. Lynette Roberts was born to Welsh parents in Argentina and educated in London but reclaimed her roots by moving back to a small Welsh village upon her marriage. Gods with Stainless Ears expresses a sense of allegiance with Wales’ national history while also acknowledging the author’s struggles as an outsider to her rural community, especially in wartime. David Jones likewise maintains a strong sense of connection with his Welsh roots, expressed in The Anathemata’s fixation on Britain’s linguistic and cultural history, even as he remains resident in London. The transnational range of cultural reference in Derek Walcott’s poetry explicitly reflects both his hybrid ethnicity and his cosmopolitan experience.

Nationality is, for each of these authors, a fraught concept – both because of their experiences of displacement and because the political upheavals of the twentieth century put great pressure on the very concept of the nation – and nostalgia gives them the tools to cultivate a sense of national identity. The critical conversation surrounding nostalgia first coalesced around the idea of migrant experience. Svetlana Boym’s foundational study The Future of Nostalgia (2001) centers much of its analysis on the stories of immigrants and exiles. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi’s Yesterday’s Self (2002) argues that nostalgia gives migrants a way “to maintain a stable identity by providing continuity among various stages in a person’s life” (9). In particular, she contends, “[N]ostalgia is a genuine pharmakos, both medicine and poison: It can express alienation, or it can replenish and rebuttress our sense of identity by consolidating the ties with our history” (39).

As for the individual, so for the nation. Modernist writers lived through a realignment in the understanding and manifestations of nationhood, due to the decline of the British empire and the political fallout of World War I. As Eric Hobsbawm argues in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, during the late nineteenth century, “ethnicity and language became the central … criteria of potential nationhood” (102), but, after the Treaty of Versailles, “the reconstruction of the map on national lines deprived nationalism of its liberating and unifying content” (138). The threat of World War II and the dwindling of Britain’s imperial power likewise put great pressure on British national self-understanding, as I will discuss in Chapters 3 and 4. Simultaneously, emerging postcolonial nations strove to create a sense of cultural history and unity in the wake of centuries of oppression and trauma, and their efforts give rise to what, in describing migrant experience, Salman Rushdie calls “imaginary homelands” (10). In such contexts, nostalgia proves a fraught intellectual resource, but one still full of possibility, as the Conclusion’s analysis of Derek Walcott will explore.

Nostalgia is a particularly powerful tool for national self-definition because, as Benedict Anderson famously argues, nationalism’s “imagined political community” (6) emerges alongside a changed apprehension of time, from the Medieval “simultaneity-along-time” expressed in typological interpretation to the idea that “simultaneity is … transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar” (24). Accordingly, nations must overcome their own recency and cultivate a sense of authority and identity by creating narratives of their own antiquity. Anderson observes, at the outset of Imagined Communities, that paradoxically, in spite of their “objective modernity,” nations typically possess a “subjective antiquity in the eyes of the nationalists” (5). These two perceptions of time are intertwined: “As it is with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity – product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century – engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity’” (205).

The writers I engage in this book each use their art to articulate tentative modes of belonging to the homes they inhabit and to those they have left behind. In so doing, they do not so much reify a static vision of the nation, as explore its imaginative possibilities. In this sense, they are exemplars of what Homi Bhabha refers to as “the hybridity of imagined communities” (7). Attending to the manifestations of nostalgia in their works illuminates the mechanics of this process, emphasizing how modernism – and modernist nostalgia – can accommodate not only self-conscious alienation, distance, and irony, but also affection, affiliation, and rootedness.

I.2 Modernist Nostalgia

In spite of nostalgia’s dubious reputation, in the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the emotion’s creative and conceptual possibilities. Over the same period, nostalgia has become an increasingly pervasive force in Western popular culture, feeding what journalist Megan Garber has referred to as “the memorial-industrial complex” (n.p.).⁴ Hit television shows like Downton Abbey and Stranger Things immerse viewers in bygone decades, whilst social media regularly prompts its users to reflect with fondness on their own past experiences. Meanwhile, politicians on both sides of the aisle deploy nostalgia to court their constituents’ votes. Its prevalence in Brexit rhetoric and in Donald Trump’s ambition to “make America great again” are only the most obvious examples of a larger trend. And in a world rapidly transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, nostalgia for the world pre-2020 became almost inescapable.⁵

Oversaturated as we are with appeals to nostalgia, it may be tempting to uncritically repudiate the emotion. Yet, if this recent surge of human longing suggests anything, it is that nostalgia possesses enormous power: to unite and console, as well as to enchant and mislead. By stepping out of the present media echo-chamber to examine nostalgia’s subtler manifestations in modernist epic, we can gain a more balanced perspective of the emotion’s potential as well as its dangers. In tracing the modernists’ deeply conflicted yearning for past wholeness, we may find a new map by which to navigate our present moment. The burgeoning scholarly conversation surrounding nostalgia’s role in modernist literature attests to this possibility.

The term “nostalgia” was coined in 1688 by medical student Johannes Hofer, whose dissertation, Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimweh, gave a name to the curious ailment afflicting soldiers forced to leave their homes. A Latinization of the Greek words nostos, or return home, and algía, or pain, nostalgia literally means home sickness, or, as Hofer puts it, “the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land” (381). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers two definitions of nostalgia. Its primary meaning, which first appears in English in 1756, is, “Acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition; homesickness” (“nostalgia”). Gradually, that notion of homesickness lost its medical valence and become a purely emotional condition: as the OED puts it, “Sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past” (“nostalgia”). This second, now primary meaning did not emerge in English until 1900 in the American Journal of Sociology.⁶ It is this final metamorphosis from pathology to sentiment (though the taint of disease has never wholly left), coinciding with a sense of temporal rupture so profound as to make the emotion at once inevitable and undesirable, which characterizes modernist nostalgia.

While in common usage, nostalgia tends to mean longing for a personal past, the modernist nostalgia analyzed here primarily directs its desires toward the historical past. As Robert Hemmings puts it, “What … distinguishes modern nostalgia is the shock of the gulf between the retrospectively constructed innocence or benevolence of the pre-traumatic past and the present staggered by the lingering after-effects of modern war” (10). This recognition of nostalgia’s flexible objects has been central to the scholarly conversation surrounding nostalgia which has emerged in the past two decades.

Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia has become the cornerstone of this conversation, offering a definition of nostalgia at once sensitive and conceptually robust. She defines nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed … a sentiment of loss and displacement, but … also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (xiii). This account points to the affective complexity of nostalgia, which encompasses both pain and pleasure in varying measures. She likewise distinguishes types of nostalgia according to the responses it evokes within those who experience it: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately” (xviii). While Boym makes it clear that she is identifying a spectrum of responses, rather than a rigid binary (41), she nonetheless devotes considerable attention to restorative nostalgia’s political dangers – analysis which echoes Spender’s concerns about fascism. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, because it is inherently self-critical, seems a more viable source of personal and artistic inspiration. Indeed, Boym offers this schema not just as a clarification of the workings of nostalgia, but as a partial antidote to its more pernicious effects: “Instead of a magic cure for nostalgia, a typology is offered that might illuminate some of nostalgia’s mechanisms of seduction and manipulation” (xviii).

Nevertheless, to use Boym’s taxonomy as a means to reject and pathologize restorative nostalgia, as some scholars have done, would be an error.⁷ The desire to restore past ideals, traditions, or practices, while sometimes objectionable and occasionally dangerous, need not always be negative. To unequivocally reject the emotion is to decline a powerful source of motivation and meaning-making – Jameson’s “revolutionary stimulus” or, as Robert Hemmings describes it, a source of “adaptive possibility” (3). Likewise, David Gervais identifies nostalgia as an essential conceptual resource for Victorian social critics like William Morris, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin.⁸ A similar presupposition underlies the emerging scholarly conversation surrounding “Solastalgia,” the term Glenn Albrecht gives to “the lived experience of distressing, negative environmental change” (Earth Emotions x). Nostalgia lies at the heart of this emotion – love and longing for a vanished landscape – and, as Paul Bogard writes, “in that love lies the energy to defend the world we have known and to create the future we want … those who follow to know” (xxi). Nostalgia is certainly a conservative emotion, for the most abstract value of the word conservative: it fixates on recalling or preserving aspects of the past. To concede that point, however, is not to admit that it is necessarily reactionary or always worthy of suspicion.

Over the past decade, scholarly conversations surrounding modernist nostalgia have increasingly acknowledged this complexity. In 2013, Tammy Clewell edited Modernism and Nostalgia, the first volume focused entirely on the modernist movement’s intricate negotiations with its longing for inaccessible homelands and vanished pasts. Clewell argues that modernist nostalgia is not, as Spender contends, purely negative. Rather, it is characterized by internal conflict: “modernist nostalgia involves a tension between past and present that structures many of the most well-known texts of the period” and “a politics of nostalgia emerges in the contested struggle between the regressive abuses and creative uses of nostalgic longing” (1). Clewell’s emphasis on tension highlights nostalgia’s flexibility, its tendency to manifest in a multitude of forms and to serve widely variant agendas.

Likewise, Kathleen Riley’s 2021 monograph Imagining Ithaca traces the influence of the Odyssey in twentieth-century literature and film to explore nostalgia’s many possibilities. Riley, like the novelist Milan Kundera, considers the Odyssey “the founding epic of nostalgia” (Kundera 7; cited in Riley 21), and the texts she analyzes all, in one way or another, draw on the conceptual resources of Homer’s epic to process their complex relationships to the idea of home. While Imagining Ithaca does not take up the modernist epic as a genre, it nonetheless speaks to the epic tradition’s far-reaching influence in modernist literature and to its entanglement with the experience of nostalgia. Moreover, Riley demonstrates the wide range of potential objects for twentieth-century writers’ nostalgia. Nostalgia, in her words, is “the contemplation of Home from a distance,” and she identifies many forms of distance: “created by the upheaval of war, by the anguish of mental illness, by self-imposed exile, by growing up, or by being born too late” (23). Riley’s study underlines both the centrality of epic to modernism and the many possible forms of nostalgia.

Building on these previous schemas of nostalgia, in this book I distinguish between two forms of nostalgia according to their objects: “geographic nostalgia” longs for a distant place, while “archaeological nostalgia” longs for the past of a place one already inhabits. When Odysseus yearns to return to Ithaca, he experiences geographic nostalgia. When T. S. Eliot considers the history of Little Gidding alongside his own spiritual experience there, or when David Jones imagines an earlier period of British history when his art might have found a more receptive audience, they are experiencing archaeological nostalgia. These categories are not perfectly distinct: to long for a distant place, for instance, inevitably involves longing for a past experience of that place; archaeological nostalgia often imagines the landscape of the past as different from that of the present. But geographic nostalgia structures itself primarily around space, while archaeological nostalgia looks back in time.

This language of archaeology intentionally draws on the imagery Spender deploys in his critique of nostalgia. He contends that nostalgia “is not so much a rebirth as a burial of the contemporary world under the heaped-up memories of the past” (209). The modernists I analyze, however, are not so much attempting to bury the present as they are to excavate memories of the past and bring them into juxtaposition or alignment with the present. The language of juxtaposition admits of Clewell’s emphasis on tension while also allowing for coherence and concord. Rather than rejecting the present, the modernist epic utilizes both geographic and archaeological nostalgia to construct alternative modes of national identity, reactivating lost memories, values, and possibilities for the modern world.

These accounts of nostalgia participate in a larger scholarly project of reassessing modernism’s relationship to prior literary and cultural norms, without eliding difference. Modernism exists in the delicate counterpoise between the rejection and reinvention of tradition. Scholars have observed such patterns in relation to modernist understandings of sentimentality,⁹ of empathy,¹⁰ and of literary realism,¹¹ to name but a few examples. While nostalgia was, for the most part, a twentieth-century invention, it is nonetheless associated with Victorian – or perhaps Georgian – sentimentality.¹² Nonetheless, scholarly reflexes to define modernism in opposition to the century that came before it make it easy to dismiss the relevance of nostalgia. If modernists are nostalgic, this is, as Spender supposes, an extension of the regrettable reactionary tendencies associated with certain branches of the movement. But modernist nostalgia is subtler, more pervasive, and more enlivening than such an assumption would admit.

The intent of this book is not primarily to vindicate nostalgia, but rather to trace with nuance its interactions with the concept of nationality in modernist epic, resisting the satisfaction of unveiling and dismissing the emotion. Thus, while my argument will engage the question of xenophobic nationalism and fascism as elements of modernist thought, it will not treat the presence of nostalgia as a sign of political morbidity. Rather, focusing on nostalgia illuminates modernism’s complex balance of tradition and innovation; community and individuality; and regionalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

I.3 Modernist Epic

[I]s Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

(Marx 111)

When Karl Marx’s words, written first in the 1850s, were finally published in 1939, they contributed to a well-established critical narrative tracing the decline of epic and the rise of the novel. In Theory of the Novel, György Lukács (1920) and in “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin (1936) both famously argued that the epic was no longer possible in modern society and that its cultural role had been usurped by the novel.¹³ As Lukács explains, “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (56). These accounts (which draw to varying degrees on Hegel’s Aesthetics) describe epic as the product of an integrated society, a culture of total coherence which is no longer attainable. Mikhail Bakhtin concurs in his 1941 essay “Epic and Novel,” wherein he declares the epic “already completely finished, a congealed and half moribund genre” (14). For these scholars, the epic itself and the era that produced it are already past, perhaps themselves objects of nostalgia. As Marx writes, “Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?” (111).

Though persistent, these wistful reports of the epic’s death have proven greatly exaggerated. Ironically, even as Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Lukács composed their funeral orations, British and Irish modernist were conducting their own dialogue with classical tradition, engaging in formal experiments that re-made epic for the twentieth century. Epic form has evolved over the centuries, alongside its writers’ understandings of national and cultural identity, but it assuredly has not vanished. The real question is precisely how the modernist writers adapt the epic to their purposes, and what role nostalgia plays in that process of adaptation.

One genealogy of the epic tradition would declare the modernist long poem supplants it. Whether this is because the epic proper is defunct, or because the long poem is an evolution of the form, remains a subject of debate. Scholars like Peter Baker and Brendan Gillott presume the epic’s death in terms highly reminiscent of Lukács and Bakhtin. As Baker narrates it:

The long poem has its historical and developmental roots in epic, but epic poems are based on, indeed work out of, a cultural consensus of values. In the absence of such a cultural consensus – which no critic of modernism would argue exists and which as much as any single factor defines the condition of modernity – the hero of the traditional epic poem is clearly impossible.

(2)

Gillott puts it more simply: “It is generally agreed that by the end of the nineteenth century the epic, as a genre, was dead. With the advent of literary modernism came a new kind of longform poem, which became known to criticism simply as the ‘modernist long poem’” (17). Margaret Dickie likewise refuses to apply the term epic to the long poem because the term invokes “other qualities … absent from the Modernist long poem” (6). Oliver Tearle, by contrast, classifies certain very long modernist poems – such as Pound’s Cantos – as modern epics, while mid-length poems like The Waste Land fall under the heading of long poem instead (17–19).

Many scholars read the long poem as a different species altogether from the epic. Yet most of these scholars acknowledge that the modernist long poem in some sense emerges from or responds to the epic. Tearle reads the presence of Odysseus in modernist literature as ironic – a way to “suggest the unheroic age that followed the war” (16) – as well as to figure “a continuum between ancient and modern wars, and classical and modern poetry” (17). The language of the continuum implies both connection and opposition at once. Gillott, even as he declares the epic dead, sees it as a key source of the long poem (14). Baker, though he considers the epic hero impossible in the modernist period, argues that “modernist and postmodern poets are in fact seeking to achieve the level of ethicity present in the successful epic poems of the past, but in the absence of the traditional epic hero and without centering on their own internal feelings or experiences” (2). And, though Dickie prefers to avoid the baggage associated with the language of epic, she nonetheless describes The Waste Land – her exemplary long poem – as a “public poem” which “had as its subject the culture it surveyed and judged” (6). In other words, the long poem fulfills a public role that can only be compared to the one previously occupied by epic.

In A Long Essay on the Long Poem, Rachel Blau DuPlessis offers a more pliable account of the relationship between the epic and the long poem. In her account, the long poem is “heterodiscursive and heterogeneric,” and “creates structures of transit among several genres” including the epic (23, 52). Genre evolves with every iteration, and this is particularly true of epic:

to say “epic” now is to have passed through dazzling centuries of social and literary changes filtering and mediating access to any Homer/Virgil (etc.) amalgam with high-born hero and his sociopolitical challenges … We are so far from tribal or ancient “epic”-ness that the word – while certainly not empty – must be seen in its range of contemporary poetic uses.

(48)

DuPlessis here reminds us that to reject the label of epic if a poem does not conform to a rigid set of formal or political characteristics would be to ignore the natural evolution of genre and the creative uses to which twentieth-century poets put the epic tradition. She does not go so far as to claim that every long poem should be read as an epic but rather asserts that a substantial subset of twentieth-century long poems draw on the epic in their matter and their search for form.

In the same spirit, this book reads the modernist long poem not as a new growth from the ashes of the epic, but as part of a development and revision of the established tradition. The long poem sets aside certain conventions of the epic genre, but it remakes others. With its experimental, fragmentary form, it engages at every level with the struggle to make sense of and find belonging within modern life. As such, it can provide particularly nuanced and fertile examples of nostalgia. Moreover, because, as Dickie argues, these texts strive for a public voice to address a culture in crisis, they often speak to issues of national identity that lie at the heart of this project. However, I do not focus exclusively on poetry in this study: part of the modernist revision of the epic tradition, in my reading, involves a movement beyond rigid genre categories.

An alternate account of epic’s survival sets aside genre to focus instead on artistic ambition and social function. As with criticism of the long poem, these arguments see a small group of highly ambitious literary texts either replacing or continuing the epic tradition. Edward Mendelson, for instance, proposes the category of ‘encyclopedic narrative’ as an alternative to epic: “Each major national culture in the west,” Mendelson argues, “as it becomes aware of itself as a separate entity, produces an encyclopedic author, one whose work attends to the whole social and linguistic range of his nation … For the most part, encyclopedic authors set out to imitate epics, but, unlike epic poets, they write about the ordinary present-day world around them instead of the heroic past” (1268, original emphasis). Ironically, as Paul Saint-Amour notes, Mendelson’s readers immediately ignored his distinction between the epic and the encyclopedic narrative and treated the categories as synonymous (Tense Future 204–5). This conflation is helped by Mendelson’s chosen examples: Dante’s Commedia and Joyce’s Ulysses are difficult to separate from the epic tradition.

Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1996), by contrast, applies its titular term to what it calls “world texts” (4) – ambitious, experimental works, including modernist “monuments” like The Cantos, The Waste Land, and Ulysses (1). Moretti differs considerably from Mendelson – nor should this surprise us, because Mendelson is trying to distinguish his chosen texts from the epic, while Moretti is trying to define an evolution in epic tradition. Moretti’s “modern epic” is preoccupied with the global rather than the national (51), and with the past rather than the present: “In the … case [of the epic], we have the specific historicity of a universe in which fossils from distant epochs coexist with creatures from worlds to come. In this huge symbolic stratification, there is no trace of that great novelistic invention which is the present … The present does not exist in epics” (88).

Moretti’s account of modern epic is important for this study because it transcends genre: he identifies plays and poems, novels and operas all as epic in their way because of their shared “global ambition” (51), their preoccupation with the past, and their modes of formal experimentation. The modern epic is a product of bricolage (19, 120), expansive, experimental, and polyphonic (95–96). Where I differ from Moretti is in my emphasis on the nation, which continues to play a significant role even in those “world texts” he identifies – Ulysses foremost among them, as we will see in Chapter 1 – and in the number of modernist texts I am willing to consider under the heading of epic. Moretti contends that “the rarity of world texts is a constitutive aspect of this symbolic form” (4). But if we set aside the insistence that modern epic transcends notions of national identity, then a wide range of texts engaged with the epic tradition and with modernity’s uneasy relationship to the past become available to our analysis.

The question of the relationship of twentieth-century epic to the nation is an enduring cause of critical contention. Moretti sees modern epic as transcending the nation. In his fascinating book Tense Future, Saint-Amour argues the opposite: twentieth-century verse epic exists and is defined by its nationalist and martial rhetoric: “far from being an anachronism during the 1920s and ‘30s, epic was so congruent with the emergent discourse of total war as to seem utterly contemporary” (185). Those texts which Moretti might consider under the heading of modern epic, Saint-Amour prefers to treat as a separate genre, the “encyclopedic fiction,” which “reconstellates” the relationships between “war, form, and totality” (10). Encyclopedic fictions, in Saint-Amour’s view, offer a counter-narrative to epic:

“To write in full-throated epic mode in the age of total war would be to accept the premise of Achilles’ shield: that full militarization is the best, and maybe only, occasion for world portraiture. Set beside such an epic premise, the fragmentariness and internal fissuring of long modernist fictions begin to look less like the flaws through which a longed-for totality seep away and more like a critical refusal of epic’s all-too-vital political logic”.

(185)

While Saint-Amour’s argument is helpful in many ways, particularly in articulating how modernism’s encyclopedic narratives resist the (implicitly triumphalist) totalizing militarism which is conventionally understood as central to the epic tradition,¹⁴ I disagree with his notion that epic as a genre category should not be applied to works like Joyce’s Ulysses or Ford’s Parade’s End (Saint-Amour’s key examples of the encyclopedic fiction). As Václav Paris argues in The Evolution of Modernist Epic, “If we separate modernist attempts at something like epic from epic as such … Modernism ends up disconnected from a historical discourse that had a consistent presence and real influence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (27). I concur. One can distinguish Ulysses from The Odyssey in any number of ways, but those divergences cannot erase their fundamental likenesses.

Saint-Amour points us to a divergence in twentieth-century epic, between the “bellicose holism” which he considers definitive of epic in the interwar period, and the “counter-totalizing” efforts of the encyclopedic fiction, which “[takes] up totalization under the sign of its impossibility” (10). This distinction parallels the argument made by C. D. Blanton in Epic Negation, which distinguishes late modernism from High Modernism by its relationship to historical totality. Where the High Modernist epic, most notably Pound’s Cantos, seeks to represent a coherent historical whole – perhaps the sort of totality that Hegel and his Marxist heirs considered essential to epic – the interwar period produces “epic negated, an elusive poetics devised under the force of an injunction to include history, but caught simultaneously in a history too complex and often too menacing to include straightforwardly” (4). This distinction between High Modernism and late modernism will be addressed in Chapter 3. For the present, I will merely note that the kinds of struggle with history and tradition, the paradoxical and counter-cultural rewriting of epic tradition described by both Blanton and Saint-Amour, play a central role in my understanding of modernist epic. Modernist writers make visible, in a variety of ways, a skepticism of totality and militarization that is already present, in nascent form, in earlier epics. It is an organic outgrowth of this tradition, even when it constructs itself as a counter-tradition, or, in Saint-Amour’s words, a “counter-totality.”

And there is reason to believe that such a counter-tradition grows not in opposition to the epic tradition but from within it.¹⁵ Epic has long been associated with the idea of the homeland – Odysseus’ relentless longing for Ithaca and Aeneas’ divine calling to found a city being the paradigmatic examples. It is likewise inextricable from the project of distilling a nation’s origins and identity. Lukács gestures toward this reality when he states that epic’s “theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community” (66). But the epic tradition’s perspective on community is often subtly melancholic.

Implicit in many of the great works of the epic tradition is a sense of loss, the subtle awareness of the cost of a nation’s triumph. The experiences of homelessness and longing – indeed, of nostalgia – pervade the epic tradition from Homer onward. Classical epic makes space for nostalgia, for elegy, for the mourning of the defeated and the melancholy of historical change. To read the Iliad as a poem glorifying war is to ignore the title: this is not the song of the Argives’ triumph but of Ilium’s fall. It is the poem of the city, and it ends, not with victory, but with burial. The Odyssey is in large part a poem about the desire for and difficulty of coming home. Even the Aeneid incorporates strong nostalgic elements, both in Aeneas’ longing for his ruined home of Troy and in the poem’s larger regret for the peaceful Latin society that precedes Rome’s founding.¹⁶ Indeed, as Francis Blessington points out in connecting these classical epics to Paradise Lost, the poems all share “the concern with the Golden World that precedes the world of epic battle” (75). Or, as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey puts it in Gaudy Night, “epic actions are all fought by the rearguard” (402). Their narratives look back on a vanished age of heroism, but in doing so also imagine with longing the peaceful world preceding these mythic conflicts. Epic may thus be characterized by triumphalism, but it is a triumph always tinged with the awareness of loss and transiency. Indeed, in terms of their larger project, epics are often nostalgic, for to express the essence of a culture is to acknowledge that it may not endure; to preserve its glory is to recognize its impermanence.¹⁷ For this reason, the epic genre can offer unique insights into the operations of nostalgia in a text, particularly in relation to the artist’s understanding of their community and national identity.

The reader may fairly inquire at this point how I will classify texts as belonging to the category of modernist epic. The critics I have discussed so far offer no consensus as to the nature of twentieth-century epic, but what emerges from their work is a general rejection of linear and codified narratives of the genre, which creates space for new perspectives on epic’s role in twentieth-century literature. Building on this conversation, my argument defines modernist epic not primarily according to its formal features, but according to its conceptual qualities: expression of a culture’s collective identity, conscious engagement with epic tradition, and scope.

In elaborating this definition, I draw upon the notion of “weak theory,” a strand of affect theory shaped most notably by the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Wai Chee Dimock. Paul Saint-Amour, who applies weak theory to modernist studies in Tense Future and in his later article “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” describes it as an interpretive mode which “tries to see just a little way ahead, behind, and to the sides, conceiving even of its field in partial and provisional terms that will neither impede, nor yet shatter upon, the arrival of the unforeseen” (Tense Future 40). Saint-Amour applies this notion to modernism itself, contending that “modernist studies’s emergence as a field has been concomitant with a steady weakening of its key term, modernism” (“Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” n.p.). In keeping with this approach, I here offer a “weak theory” of epic, as a genre that poets draw upon to varying extents in order to articulate nuanced forms of national identity which disrupt xenophobic notions of a restricted genealogical heritage. While each text which this volume analyses can be understood as epic in a useful and illuminating sense, this classification need be considered neither final nor necessarily primary. My goal is not to create a bright line outlining modernist epic as a category, but to illuminate how modernism both draws upon and modifies the notion of epic as part of its larger historical and political projects. Here, lines are intentionally and productively blurred.

With this in mind, we can consider the major qualities of the epic tradition to which modernists lay claim. First, and most fundamental, epic expresses not only individual experience but also culture and collective memory. We can see this assumption at work in the modernist period through Ezra Pound’s famous definition of epic as “a poem including history” (ABCs 46), and E. M. W. Tillyard’s claim that the epic is “choric,” in other words that it “must express the feelings of a large group of people living in or near [the poet’s] own time” (12). Epic provides a way of thinking about the past in terms of its contribution to a present collective identity – whether that identity is national, or religious, or artistic, or gendered, or something else entirely. Each of the texts in this project engage with that sense of cultural expression in some form.

Second, epic involves reflexive engagement with its own literary heritage. As Catherine Bates puts it, “[I]t is a quintessential if not defining characteristic of epic to refer back to and revise what went before” (ix). This is especially true of modernist epic, which exhibits the movement’s broader struggle to place the past in coherent relation with the present in its intense consciousness of belatedness and partiality. This recognition constitutes a strong thread in studies of the modernist epic. John Whittier-Ferguson asserts in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic that “one of the hallmarks of modernism’s epics is that they continually signal their belatedness” (212). In Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic, Daniel Gabriel describes them as nostalgic for an unattainable past (1), characterized by fragmentation (4), and haunted by the inescapable “nightmare of history” (13). Theodore Steinberg describes modern epic in Twentieth-Century Epic Novels as instancing Gerard Genette’s idea of the palimpsest (19, 54). This image of a newer text inscribed over an older one, such that neither is effaced and the two interact reciprocally, recalls the language of archaeological nostalgia I introduce in Section I.2. Modernist epic builds upon and interacts with literary tradition, juxtaposing past and present to at once unsettle and illuminate.

Third, epic is characterized by its scope, a vague term which critics use liberally and capaciously. Of course, scope can refer to length; the paradigmatic epics are very long, and critics do use the term this way (see, for instance, Steinberg, Tearle, and Tucker). But critics frequently set aside the idea that an epic need be prodigiously long in favor of the greatness or significance of its range of concerns. Blanton sees this as a key contribution of modernist theorizations of the epic. Drawing on Pound’s famous dictum, Blanton writes, “[E]pic is also, in a slightly different inflection, a poem including history, measured neither by simple length nor by its relation to tradition, but rather its referential extent” (4). Tillyard exemplifies this same idea, writing in 1954 that one defining characteristic of epic is “amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness” (5–6). Peter Middleton connects a similar ambition to the project of the long poem in his provocatively titled essay, “The Longing of the Long Poem,” wherein he declares, “these poems don’t want to end. They long for more” (n.p.).¹⁸ This yearning – this longing for an artistic coherence or totality that gestures at transcendence – is often a constitutive feature of modernist epic.

The modernists were notably sensitive to the scope of epic as an artistic problem. Indeed, the struggle to achieve such a vision becomes a defining challenge for the modernist artist, such that the possibility of a modern verse epic was a significant question.¹⁹ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Poetic Principle popularized the idea that the sustained intensity of feeling required for poetry made the long poem impossible. In this sense we might understand Ezra Pound when he writes to T. S. Eliot that The Waste Land is “let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge” (Eliot Letters 497). Pound is, as his spelling suggests, more jocular than serious, and yet we might understand his comment to mean that The Waste Land is the longest piece of verse which sustains sufficient emotional elevation throughout. Poets like Pound and Eliot are working against this prevailing view in their approach to epic. This idea of poetic intensity, while placing impossible demands upon the long poem, may vindicate modernist epic against one criticism: that is, that modernist long poems are too short or fragmentary to constitute proper epics. The fragmentation of modernist epic may disrupt narrative structure, but the intensity maintained by such juxtaposition need not undermine epic scope or grandeur. It simply achieves a comparable effect in a more condensed space: that quality which Pound considers the very nature of poetry, “maximum efficiency of expression” (Literary Essays 56).

Each text treated in this book exemplifies these characteristics and preoccupations in their engagements with and revisions of epic tradition. Joyce’s Ulysses and Walcott’s Omeros – both explicitly responding to Homer’s Odyssey – are the most overt in their revisions of the genre. Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose seems, if it can be said to fit any genre, to be a Künstlerroman in verse. Here the notion of a weak theory of epic becomes particularly helpful, because the poem’s narrative of artistic coming-of-age cannot elide the scope of its cultural analysis and its protagonists’ geographical and spiritual searches for home, both of which involve it with epic tradition. Roberts’ Gods with Stainless Ears examines the state of the Welsh nation in wartime, declaring itself a “Heroic Poem”; likewise, Four Quartets’ relatively succinct poetic sequence encompasses both Eliot’s life experience and a theological account of cosmic history, involving both the poet’s personal struggles and the nation’s travails in time of war. Jones’ The Anathemata engages, in its 200 pages, the expanse of European history, including the mythos of Troy, contained within the theological frame of the Roman Catholic mass.

Each of these texts adapts the concerns and techniques of epic for the demands of twentieth-century culture and politics. Epic, in its grandeur and versatility, survives. And nostalgia is integral to this survival, as modernist epic expands upon the tradition’s elegiac strain to complicate notions of national identity. Rather than directly emulate the classical epic, these texts deploy aspects of epic form and self-critical expressions of nostalgia to adjust or reinvent their relationships to the national past and cultural tradition. The modernist nostalgia embodied by these epics is more than a reflexive rejection of social change or a means of escaping the disappointing realities of the present into an idealized past. Rather, nostalgia clings to elements of the nation’s past in order to reimagine its future, to invent more flexible forms of national identity that permit migratory modes of belonging. Nostalgia is often viewed as an instrument of exclusion, reinforcing visions of a “pure” national past undefiled by change or by foreignness. The nostalgia exhibited by modernist epic, however, is just as much a tool of the immigrant and exile, a way to assert belonging, to claim national identity – in essence, to choose a homeland.

I.4 Chapter Outline

This study can be divided into two halves, the first two chapters dealing with nostalgia’s role in High Modernist epic (Joyce and Loy) and the latter two addressing late modernist texts (Roberts, Eliot, and Jones). For Joyce and Loy, the nation is a fraught concept. Both are highly suspicious of forms of national identity that prove overly rigid, hierarchical, and exclusionary. Thus, both are skeptical of nostalgia when it is directed toward xenophobic ideals of cultural purity. Instead, they develop alternate modes of nostalgia that allow them to assert more flexible forms of identity and belonging. In keeping with this tension, Ulysses and Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose conduct an intricate harmony between satire and sincerity. By contrast, the late modernist writers examined here adopt more positive outlooks on the nation. Writing during the 1930s and 1940s, these authors reflect on the precipitous decline of the British empire and the geopolitical peril of World War II. Roberts, Eliot, and Jones are all acutely aware that their chosen nations – England, Wales, and Britain more broadly – may not survive these political tumults, nor the dizzying pace of cultural change in general, in any recognizable form. So nostalgia for these writers is no longer a tool to disrupt the nation’s hegemonic power, but a way to nurture community and belonging, a tool to recover the nation, in all its complexity and ambivalence.

Chapter 1 analyzes how Joyce’s Ulysses uses nostalgia for the Dublin of his youth to construct an account of Irish identity reliant upon personal experience of place, rather than participation in a narrowly construed national heritage. In 1904, Joyce left Ireland for the continent, to return only for brief visits thereafter. His fiction, by contrast, afforded him frequent opportunities for homecoming, and his geographical distance gives him the perspective from which to critique the paralysis afflicting his characters and his country. The work is made possible by distance, but it also constitutes a way of overcoming distance and, in Ulysses, of ennobling the society it critiques. Even as he offers in Ulysses an attentive recreation of the past that seems evidently nostalgic, Joyce savagely critiques a certain sort of nostalgia, most notably in the rigid and propagandistic vision of the past advocated by the Citizen in “Cyclops.” The chapter argues that, far from replacing fixation on the past with an exclusively future-oriented vision, Joyce introduces a more dynamic form of nostalgia which, rather than delving into the Irish past as the source of national identity, locates belonging in the personal memory of life in Dublin.

Chapter 2 considers the conflicted relationship of nostalgia to national identity in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose. To read Anglo-Mongrels in terms of nostalgia may seem an imposition on the text, given the author’s famous (if transient) affiliation with Futurism and the satirical style of this semi-autobiographical poetic bildungsroman. But attention to the poem’s moments of epiphany reveals nostalgia at work, albeit in a fragmentary fashion. The text returns – nostalgically, perhaps – to fleeting moments of unmixed optimism “to be carried like a forgetfulness / into the long nightmare” (164). Loy’s satire smashes the conventions of the nation which her father desperately desired to belong to – and which excluded him. Her glorification of wandering, of an artistically productive un-belonging, seems at odds with my emphasis on the productive role of nostalgia as a means of choosing one’s home. Yet Loy draws a genealogy for her protagonist’s moment of epiphany through her father’s inner exploration, a narrative of familial legacy that is, almost in spite of itself, nostalgic. Satire is thus an insufficient lens through which to understand the complexity of Loy’s project in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose. Her critique of British imperialism, gender hierarchy, and Victorian idealization of childhood can coincide with affectionate recollection of aspects of her personal and familial past.

Chapter 3 examines how T. S. Eliot and Lynette Roberts’ poetry relies upon visions of the submerged national past to find hope, meaning, or potential transcendence in the landscape of World War II. Pairing Roberts with Eliot may seem an odd choice. Her fellow semi-Welsh modernist, David Jones, might make a more obvious conversational companion, given their shared preoccupation with the Welsh past, their images of supernatural beings beneath the modern landscape, and their similar use of notes to explicate their poems. But while Roberts’ professional relationship with Eliot, who was instrumental in Faber’s publication of her poems, has been acknowledged, the kinship between their works emerging from the wartime context has been overlooked. This chapter aims to redress that oversight, illuminating shared patterns of reflection on history and violence. Both exhibit a tentative hope for cultural regeneration through the recollection of the national past.

Chapter 4 turns to David Jones’ The Anathemata to raise questions about the nature of nostalgia itself. The Anathemata appears at first glance to be a highly nostalgic project, preserving within its epic structure a multitude of cultural fragments, the “things set apart” of the poem’s title. Jones worries that his attempt to connect past and present may prove illegible to his audience, a source of anxiety which contributes to the impression of nostalgia in his text. This chapter considers to what extent this continuous struggle to make the past relevant to the present, primarily in The Anathemata but with reference to The Sleeping Lord, properly constitutes nostalgia, and, if so, whether the making of art is, in a sense, inevitably nostalgic.

I conclude by moving beyond the conventional boundaries of British and Irish modernism to interrogate the role of nostalgia in postcolonial writing, taking Derek Walcott’s Omeros as a paradigmatic example. Modernist epic is defined by its struggle with the sense of historical rupture, and it uses nostalgia to confront and navigate that rift. Can this pattern hold true for those texts which emerge from postcolonial contexts, where any sense of national continuity is irreparably disrupted by the violence and oppression of imperialism? In Omeros, any return home is partial and fraught, the poem’s nostalgia roving from St. Lucia to Africa and back, at times losing itself in the sea between. Ultimately, the poem demonstrates how a nostalgia that cannot reconcile past and present may find its fulfillment in an imagined future – in the home that can be discovered or built there.

I.5 Modernist Paradox

An underlying theme of this book is the way that modernism constructs itself in the tension between grand artistic ambition and the simultaneous anticipation of failure or impossibility. Modernist epic, in Gabriel’s account, resists a past that nonetheless haunts it (13), or, according to Blanton, “must include a historical totality it cannot adequately represent” (abstract). Modernist nostalgia emerges from and seeks to repair a sense of irreparable historical rupture. We might think of this propensity for internal contradiction as fundamentally tragic, a part of the Great War’s psychological wreckage. Such a conclusion would be both interesting and generative, but this study opts for a different approach: to receive these contradictions as paradox, as starting points rather than endings.

Likewise, I do not identify nostalgia in modernist texts in order to find their authors guilty of suspect sentiment, but rather to create the opportunity for deeper understanding: deeper understanding of modernism’s relation to the past and to the nation, and of our own. As the term “archaeological nostalgia” suggests, modernist writers’ longings for the past must sometimes be sought beneath the surface of the text – one might even use that more freighted term, exposed. Such excavation can follow the patterns Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlines in Touching Feeling, wherein an attitude of paranoia drives readers to drag into the light every ethically and politically problematic dimension of a text. In the case of nostalgia, the mere recognition of such an emotion might have seemed shameful to many modernist writers, as it does to many of their readers. This volume aims at a ‘reparative reading’ of modernist nostalgia by rejecting that shame – uncoupling nostalgia from our innate aversion to sentimentality, and thereby making possible an attentive excavation of nostalgia’s diverse manifestations and conceptual possibilities in the modernist epic. My goal is not to dismiss the many political critiques of nostalgia – more pressing now than ever – but to see what possibilities might exist alongside those critiques, what the paradoxical manifestations of modernist nostalgia can offer us if we resist the urge to debunk or disenchant.²⁰

What remains constant, throughout this narrative of nostalgia’s role in modernist epic, is the flexibility and productivity of the emotion as a means for artists to understand the past and to define their relationship to the nation in the present. Scholars tend to underestimate nostalgia’s potential as an artistic and theoretical tool. It may, in some cases, armor a militant and exclusionary nationalism, but it also provides a way to embrace and navigate cultural hybridity. Epic form, with its unacknowledged heritage of loss and longing, provides an ideal environment for such nuanced forms of nostalgia. Modernist writers may, as Spender declares, express their hatred of the present through their idealization of the past, but they equally harness nostalgia to conceptualize the relationship between self and nation, adapting the epic tradition to imagine and lay claim to their chosen homelands.

Michael Ignatieff observes in On Consolation that, “To live in hope, these days, may require a saving skepticism to the drumbeat of doom-laden narratives that reach us from every media portal” (4). Likewise, should we wish to grasp nostalgia’s artistic, philosophical, and political possibilities, we must release our casual disdain for sentimentality, our tendency to pathologize what has not been fully understood. We must engage with the restless search for a kinder homeland to which nostalgia calls us. As the poet David Whyte proclaims, “Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation” (172). In its reinvention of past experience, nostalgia offers the imaginative tools to challenge dominant narratives, restore lost practices, and envision a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future. Nostalgia is not just an image of the past under good lighting. But its experience is, in many minds, suffused with a warm glow like candlelight – like sunrise.