A Book Display to Accompany Dr. Russell Perkin’s Author Talk: “A Heap of Broken Images”.
Notes by Dr. Russell Perkin, Department of English, Saint Mary’s University
Amid the social dislocation caused by the First World War (1914-18) and the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, authors, musicians, and visual artists looked for new ways of expression that would break with the past and represent the experience of modernity. Their endeavours and achievements became known as the modernist movement. In literature written in English, this movement reached its high point in 1922, the year of publication of modernism’s two most iconic masterpieces, James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris in February, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in periodicals in the United States and England in October, and in book form in New York in December. In September 1923, The Waste Land appeared in a limited British edition issued by the Hogarth Press, run by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. Woolf did the typesetting herself.
Two important modernist texts by women were also brought out in 1922. Virginia Woolf broke with the conventional structure of her first two novels in Jacob’s Room, a work that deals with the First World War. Katherine Mansfield, who was fighting the tuberculosis that would end her life the following year, published her important collection The Garden Party and Other Stories.
Looking back on 1922, we can see it as a key year in the transition from the Victorian age to the modern world. According to the American novelist Willa Cather, “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized the phrase “the jazz age” to describe the 1920s, the era of prohibition and the flapper. It is significant that the action of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the great American novel of the 1920s, takes place in 1922. The innovations of 1922 that we can see with hindsight as central to defining modernity include radio broadcasting, with the first BBC transmission in November 1922. Advertising and marketing were developing rapidly, and it is significant that the phrases “mass market” and “brand name” are first recorded in 1922, with “mass media” to follow in 1923.
Literature, Culture, and History in 1922: A Bibliography
Goldstein, Bill. The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature. Henry Holt, 2017.
Jackson, Kevin. Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013.
North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Rennison, Nick. 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year. Oldcastle Books, 2021.
Notes by Dr. Russell Perkin, Department of English, Saint Mary’s University
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish writer from a precariously middle-class family. He left Ireland to pursue a literary career abroad; following Joyce’s death his work gradually assumed a central place in the Irish cultural tradition. Joyce published Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). The action of Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904, and June 16 is celebrated around the world as Bloomsday, after the name of the principal character, with public readings from the novel.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born into a literary family in London, and was a very productive woman of letters, writing novels, essays, and biographies, and operating the Hogarth Press. Following the innovative novel Jacob’s Room (1922), she published the modernist masterpieces Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) and the pioneering work of feminist criticism A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf’s reputation has steadily grown since her death, and in recent decades she has been one of the most widely studied modern authors..
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She is known for several collections of short stories which express the experience of consciousness through evocative description and symbolism. Many of her best stories are based on her childhood experiences, e.g., “At the Bay,” “Prelude,” and “The Garden Party.” Other well-known stories include “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and “Bliss.” In some of her stories set in New Zealand, Mansfield writes with a sensitive awareness of indigenous Māori culture.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up in a prosperous family in St. Louis, Missouri. After studies in Harvard and in Paris, he moved to England to pursue graduate studies, but instead of returning to a professorship in the U.S.A., he settled in London, where he worked in a bank while becoming a central figure in British literary life. Many people are familiar with his early poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” His major works are The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot wrote a great deal of literary criticism, along with a number of plays; however, his biggest popular success is the musical Cats, adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber from Eliot’s book of light verse Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.