Bryony Randall explores the twin concepts of daily time and of everyday life through the writing of several major modernist authors. The book begins with a contextualising chapter on the psychologists William James and Henri Bergson. It goes on to devote chapters to Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H. D. and Virginia Woolf. These experimental writers, she argues, reveal everyday life and daily time as rich and strange, not simply a banal backdrop to more important events. Moreover, Randall argues that paying attention to the everyday and daily time can be politically empowering and subversive. The specific social and cultural context of the early twentieth century is one in which the concept of daily time is particularly strongly challenged. By examining Modernism's engagement with or manifestation of this notion of daily time, she reveals a highly original perspective on their concerns and complexities.

This article begins by considering modernist literary criticism's engagement with the everyday. It surveys a wide range of critical works which have in some way addressed the everyday in modernist literature, including work on the city, transport, the cinema, technology, and advertising, and concludes this opening section with an invitation to consider in more depth the paradoxes of the term 'everyay'. The next section observes the connection between the emergence of what we now call modernism in the late nineteenth century and early everyday life studies, namely in the work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The final section offers some further readings of the everyday in modernist literature, specifically in the work of Virginia Woolf, Observing that some recent work on modernism and the everyday has refocused attention on temporality and formal considerations, this section insists on the significance of attending to the everyday not only as content, where those things written about are identified as everyday, but also as a formal and temporal quality which informs the style and structure of modernist texts in their attempts to defamiliarise and make new the everyday in modernity.The conjunction of modernist literature and the everyday might, at first glance, appear unlikely. There has, however, been over the last couple of decades increasing critical attention paid to the everyday in modernist literature and ⁄ or its everyday qualities. Two major developments in modernist literary studies have enabled and nourished the work carried out in this critical field. A proliferation of theoretical positions has opened up approaches to the established canon of modernist texts. Marxist, feminist and postcolonial criticism in particular, but also deconstructive and poststructuralist approaches, have enabled us more readily to read these texts' engagement with, grounding in, and interrogation of, the everyday. In so doing, such critical approaches have often sought to open up these texts to 'everyday' readers, encouraging them to revel in the domestic agrammaticality of Gertrude Stein's prose poems, to feel drawn in by the democratic inclusiveness of Ulysses. At the same time, the shape of the field surveyed by modernist studies has changed; it now includes texts from the mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century and beyond, vastly more women writers and writers from working class and ⁄ or non-Western backgrounds, and texts from genres and discourses not previously considered 'literary'. So new perspectives, attentive to the everyday, are being taken on the classic texts of high modernism, and the expanded scope of modernist literary critics' attention demands awareness of the breadth and depth of engagement with everyday life in texts we might newly consider 'modernist'.These two trajectories have shaped the development of the so-called 'new modernist studies', associated with the inauguration of the Modernist Studies Association in 1999. Within this varied field, there has, however, been a c...

No abstract

In this article, the concept of ‘telling the day’, taken from the recent work of sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, is used as the starting point for a consideration of two texts which share as one of their key aims the accurate rendering of the working lives of women around the turn of the last century. These texts are Beatrice Webb's ‘Pages from a Work-Girl's Diary’ (1888), and a chapter from The Tunnel (1919), the fourth chapter-novel of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. I pay particular attention to the temporality of the way that these texts ‘tell the day’ of their working women protagonists. Apparently from very different genres (early participant-observation sociology, and literary modernism), this article both takes seriously the status of Webb's text as ‘literary experiment’, and argues for the productivity of seeing Richardson as engaging in kind of feminist sociology.

If the line is the privileged semantic unit in verse, we could ask whether the sentence plays the same role in prose. This possibility holds particular relevance for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which presents an intriguing collage of many different sentence styles. This collection of sixteen original essays by international Woolf and modernist scholars is the first dedicated exclusively to Orlando. It offers fresh perspectives on Woolf’s text, and presents original critical discoveries via a sentence-based mode of literary analysis. Through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences, it aims to recuperate this text as one of Woolf’s most dynamic modernist experiments. Focusing on single sentences in order to address Orlando’s many interlacing connections between aesthetics and contexts, the contributors address questions such as: To what extent does Orlando enact a politics of the sentence? How does Woolf’s manipulation of generic, gendered, sexual and racial boundaries play out on the level of the sentence? The contributors highlight Orlando’s rich allusions to other literary works as well as the cultural and political contextual webs woven by its modes of satire, parody, and pastiche. Attending to Woolf’s syntactic manipulations that unsettle the boundaries of the sentence, this volume both performs intricate literary analyses of her poetic language, and examines the social, political and cultural loads carried by the sentences in Orlando.