Cross-channel modernisms

Described by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as 'a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure', in the early twentieth century the English Channel, 'or La Manche in French', represented both a political and intellectual barrier between European avant-gardism and British conservatism, and a bridge for cultural connection and aesthetic innovation. Organised around key terms 'Translating', 'Fashioning' and 'Mediating', this book presents ten original essays by scholars working on both sides of the Channel. Cross-Channel Modernisms historicises the artistic exchanges between Britain, France and beyond, and proposes a rich conceptual apparatus of 'crossings' and 'channels' through which we can read modernism and understand it as emerging from, and intervening in, an always-already shifting, multivalent, transnational context.

Introduction : cross-channel (transmanche) modernisms / Claire Davison, Jane Goldman and Derek Ryan -- Interlude : translating / Derek Ryan -- On unknowing French? Rhythm and le rythme on a cross-channel exchange / Claire Davison -- Impressions of translation : Ford Madox Ford's cosmopolitan literary crossings / Max Saunders -- Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust : table-talk, tribute, translation / Emily Eels -- Interlude : fashioning / Claire Davison -- Cross-channel modernisms and the vicissitudes of a laughing torso : Nina Hamnett, artist, Bohemian and writer in London and Paris / Jane Goldman -- Jean Rhys's comédie anglaise / Vassiliki Kolocotroni -- Betray to become : departure in James Joyce's A portrait of the artist as a young man / Naomi Toth -- Interlude : mediating / Jane Goldman -- Close up and cross-channel cinema culture / Laura Marcus -- Debussy at the Omega Workshops / Charlotte de Mille -- Across the other channel : Elizabeth Bowen and modernist mediation / Lauren Elkin -- Coda : "you, who cross the channel" : Virginia Woolf, departures and the spectro-aesthetics of modernism / Patrizia A. Muscogiuri.