In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf’s ambitious narrative invention, Mary Beton, visits the British Museum, and censures the male anger she unearths there while prodding at an avalanche of books written by men about women. Yet Woolf performs a clandestine ironisation of Beton’s own criticism, for Beton colludes with male misogyny in her analysis of women writers and their alleged forfeiture of the intellectual quality she calls ‘integrity’. With whose voice is this said, for example: ‘It is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brönte the novelist’ (p. 73)? How is it that Beton is satisfied to argue that Brönte ‘had more genius … than Jane Austen’, only to bring forward the record that concludes Jane Eyre is diminished by anger, ignorance, fear and rancour? This essay argues that with Beton’s disparagement of female emotionalism and her rally behind the cultivation of integrity that produces the shape of the work ‘whole and entire’, Woolf suggests that Beton has adopted patriarchal aesthetic criteria; indeed, Beton betrays herself in this section of the narrative when she says that ‘it is the masculine values that prevail’ (p. 73). And if she has let them prevail with her, then we need, at the minimum, to stop automatically inscribing ‘Woolf says’ for ‘Beton says’. By writing this nuanced expression of Beton’s complex wrestling with critical tradition, Woolf not only brings mainstream literary criticism to the bar for its failure to extract women and their productions from misogynistic frameworks, but she works, with fictional disguise, to sophisticate the reader’s understanding of the female critic’s lengthy struggle with Britain’s anti-feminist critical machinery, and she instructs us in how to become better critics and readers of women writers and of women in fiction.

“Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” analyzes and classifies group affect and other forms of thinking together, such as Heraclitean flows of group thought, sensation, and experience made available through new structures of collective feeling. The chapter counters arguments about the role of the leader with the proposition that the crowd may behave as an assemblage governed by an attractor, figured by characters such as James Wait, aboard the Narcissus, or Stevie in The Secret Agent. The function of Bloom for the crowd in “Cyclops” speaks to the crowd’s management of its anxieties and their effects. The chapter explores the interpenetration of public and private spaces in Sean O’Casey’s plays to understand crowds’ precise attachments to and exercise of design over the histories and semiotics of the metropolis, testing whether and in what manner they gain the sense of a shared life and act as a performative mass body.

One might, with good reason, choose any one of many historical moments from which to take a baseline reading of political and other kinds of crowds. Democracy failed in Athens in 411 BCE, when the demos, under coercion, voted democracy out and an oligarchic constitution in. Urbanized forces of authority have always and everywhere demonstrated obsessive concern about the discipline and control of potent crowds. If crowds are ubiquitous and immemorial, why the dramatic moral panic and disruptive cultural anxiety around crowds, just at the turn of the twentieth century? What had changed since the multiple and numerous crowds of popular nineteenth-century movements, such as the Chartists or French Communards? Before what Lederer describes as the twentieth-century rise and quasi-triumph of the oceanic collective, humans were usually counted on as loyally inhabiting a variety of exclusionary identificatory allegiances, which nineteenth-century European liberal culture generally schematized as local or ancestral kinship-, place-, class-, and race-specified groups.

"Compositions of the Crowds of Modernism" gives a preliminary assessment of modernist crowds’ of-what and with-what, that is, the experimental taxonomies and relations of collective life as composed in fiction by writers such as Conrad, Woolf, and H.G. Wells. The chapter describes some of the terrains and territories of modern crowds, including the structures and political ecologies within which mass societies were forming and to which modernist literatures respond. It enlists concepts such as equal relations, virtuality, and crowd symbols to understand the twentieth century’s disruptive struggles over inherited and established identities such as nation, gender, class, or race.

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

Is assembly revolutionary? For centuries, human action en masse has been associated with violence, and justly feared for enforcing majoritarian privileges over the civil and humanitarian demands of minority populations. The words mob violence, lynching, or pogrom still catch the heart. At the same time, we wonder and debate whether a crowd might be an effective instrument of change from below. Might it not offer a sense of agency with new powers to the subject who has felt her ability to make effective political demands in the world to be chimerical? Recall the crowds occupying Tahrir Square in 2011 before the fall of Hosni Mubarek, sharing scanty food, working around official and unofficial interference with communications and basic services, facing down the expert police forces from the interior ministry, checkpoints and barricades operated by the army, and the weapons, cavalry charges, and flaming explosives of the “unacknowledged” pro-Mubarek paramilitaries.

In Chapter Four, “Crowds and Agility,” the project turns to the fully imagined agile movement and potential virtuosity of modernist crowds, their reworked vocabularies across, and between media, their effectiveness in turning situations to advantage, and their conflictual relations with federating powers, established inequities, and inherited elitisms. In order to demonstrate the full scope of potentials involved, the chapter opens up to range more widely across a variety of media, aesthetics, and categories of works within modernism that simultaneously contribute to contriving a social space and interfering with its undemocratic spectacularization. In its most fully realized form, the modernist agile crowd claims to be unclassifiable within previous categories of social fields, and insists on a fundamental heterogeneity at the level of demand and composition.