Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

This chapter maps aesthetic modernism across Europe as a whole, showing its key generational clusters in their multiple transnational circuits of influence and exchange. It focuses on the major literary modernists and the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. It finds coherence in a range of shared thematics: outsiderliness; journeying; formal innovation; abandonment of narrative causality and linear time; estrangement and alienation; subjectivity and the unconscious; assertive and experimental sexualities. The gendered dynamics of insistent masculinity and women’s effacement again reappears. The collective generational esprit of the aesthetic modernists is carefully demonstrated via the various regional circuits: Scandinavian; northwest European; Balkan; Soviet-centered; German-speaking central-European. Cinematic modernism was a particular instance, emanating from Moscow across Berlin to Paris. Using Piscator and Brecht within a larger argument about Weimar Berlin, the chapter concludes by identifying a distinctive left modernism.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

This chapter highlights the parameters of modernity, because democracy today cannot rest on earlier practices created for small cities, like Athens, in the ancient world. Therefore, in 1917 and 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber described two new vocations, of “Science” and “Politics,” as characteristic of societies that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Scientists” used instruments and experiments to discover “knowledge” more reliable than “opinion.” The result is that their work overthrew many traditional beliefs and led to “disenchantment.” “Politicians” arose because, when “subjects” became “citizens” in many Western states, they needed leaders and spokespeople who would help them to organize their sentiments and express their preferences. In which case, politicians, elected on behalf of voluntary support from below, ruled on the basis of “tradition,” “legality,” or “charisma.” Weber’s terms overlooked at least two large problems. Charismatic politicians could break the “iron cage” of “bureaucracy,” but, as “demagogues,” they could also lead voters in undesirable directions. Voters, perhaps advised by scholars, would have to resist being led astray, but Weber said nothing about how they, in effect, should exercise a third new “vocation” in modern societies. Citizens were not present before the Enlightenment; they are everywhere now. What are they supposed to do? Weber did not say.

Elizabeth Bowen began her career in a period of profound literary upheaval, as some of the most prominent writers of the era attempted to reorient literary fiction away from the social world and towards subjective life. Bowen subscribed to a modernist understanding of literary fiction as fundamentally concerned with investigating and representing the nature of human experience. But if she subscribed to a humdrum humanism that saw little difference between how people experienced the world in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth, she also had an acute sense of the historical variability of writers’ techniques for representing human behaviour. This essay tracks how Bowen’s feelings about modernist modes of experiential description evolved over her career, from her enthusiastic embrace of them in the 1920s to an increased scepticism about their monomaniacal application from the late 1930s onwards – a shift reflected in the changing prominence of stream-of-consciousness styles of writing over her oeuvre. Bowen’s later thematisation of the limits of modernist methods and gradual retreat from them is born not of an aversion to innovation, but of a desire to generate effects that these methods alone are unable to create.

This essay accounts for the pervasive presence of technology in Elizabeth Bowen’s life and writing, arguing that her work develops a nuanced, often ambivalent engagement with technological modernity. From her first novel, The Hotel, to the late and idiosyncratic Eva Trout, Bowen presents technology not merely as a backdrop but as a dynamic force shaping identity, social interaction, and temporal awareness. The chapter traces how Bowen’s characters interact with technological objects – including cars, telephones, radios, and computers – not only as tools but as extensions of the self and mediators of experience. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects, it demonstrates how Bowen’s characters use technology to navigate psychological development and social belonging. This culminates in a reading of Eva Trout, in which technology becomes a totalising force, anticipating postmodern concerns with cyborg identity and media saturation, and positioning Bowen as a prescient analyst of the evolving relationship between humans and machines.

This chapter explores Pablo Neruda’s militant trajectory, asserting that his political commitment was not merely circumstantial but permeated his entire poetic oeuvre. Divided into two sections, the first section scrutinizes the political implications of his work, discernible from Residencia en la tierra onward, where societal issues arising from the crisis of capitalist modernity culminate in a robust Marxist commitment. The second part employs the Foucauldian concept of “parrhesia” to analyze Neruda’s actions and work, emphasizing his explicit commitment in Chile. There, he supported Allende’s socialist government and confronted the challenges of Pinochet’s subsequent neoliberal dictatorship. This analysis underscores the integral connection between Neruda’s political engagement and his lyrical creations, contributing to the recognition of the inseparable political dimension within his poetic work.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, the nation’s authentic character was sought among the ‘timeless’ countryfolk rather than in its ancient ancestry. Paradoxically, this turn from ‘past to peasant’ took place during a period of accelerated, technology-driven and urbanizing modernity, as more unrestricted, commercially driven, mass-appeal cultural media became available. This chapter traces the interaction between the modern city and the timeless country, from world fairs to the art theatres of the fin-de-siècle. The chapter concludes by outlining how the new modern and decorative arts (Arts and Crafts, art nouveau) functioned as carriers of progressive national revival movements in Europe’s sub-imperial capitals, from Dublin and Barcelona to Prague and Riga; and how their anti-imperial emancipation agenda was uneasily poised between progressive cosmopolitanism and nativist essentialism.

The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

The book’s Introduction begins by considering definitions of folk music, specifically that developed by the International Folk Music Council during the 1950s. I point out that Cecil Sharp’s work had a profound influence on this conception. The underlying logic behind such definitions is a habit of opposition in which folk music is situated as a paradigm of authenticity in contrast to something else tainted with commerce, frivolity, or bourgeois individualism. I show that folk music has most often been understood through a characteristic form of Marxist nostalgia surrounding older forms of culture opposed to modernity, capitalism, mass media, and the culture industry. The appeal of the folk, I suggest, has chiefly been as a vehicle of critique – a way of identifying alternative ways of being. As illustrations, I turn to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anti-colonial vision of Indian nationalism as well as the recent ‘ShantyTok’ trend on TikTok. Ultimately, folk music and song are inextricable from the social communities they have brought to life.

An introduction to the idea of national identity, the question of its modernity, and its relation to ethnic and racial identity. The possibility that England uniquely lacked such an identity, or that the whole English population was never immersed in it, is also considered.

Historiographies of modern literature are often dominated by a view that perceives modernity as emerging from a break with tradition. This chapter challenges that view by arguing that Hasidic hagiography, a devout religious genre, played a fundamental role in modernizing Jewish culture and shaping the Jewish masses as a new phenomenon in Jewish experience. It proposes a historical model that examines the negative dialectic tensions among fragments of literary history, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage in film theory. The approach compares fragments of literary history as independent “shots” within a dynamic system. The chapter contrasts the Hasidic popular genre of the 1860s with the contemporary Hebrew writings that set the tone for literary canonization and historiography. It highlights how Hasidic literary, theological, and ideological values differed from and even threatened the teleological narratives of secular Hebrew literature while also complementing them. Hasidic popular stories provided lingual flexibility freeing rabbinical Hebrew from the confines of Halakhic writing and avoiding eschatological national and secular ideologies. This allowed the masses to achieve modern literacy without breaking with tradition. The historiographical montage enables a reconsideration of literary historiography as a dynamic network of convergences and ruptures.