Involuntary Cure: Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier

This article takes a disability studies approach to Rebecca West’s 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier, the story of an amnesiac soldier returned from the Front. Such an approach highlights the extreme sanism of the novel’s ending, where the characters agree that if Chris were left in his amnesiac state, he “would not be quite a man.” This essay argues that although the novel initiates an incisive critique of sanism as a set of patriarchal and class-bound behavioral norms, it is unable to follow through on that critique. West’s ableism overrides the novel’s concern with the injustices of class, gender, and war, prompting the novel’s insistence that the “mad” soldier, Chris Baldry, be involuntarily cured.Keywords: Rebecca West, madness, shell-shock, disabilit

Deformity in Virginia Woolf's The Years

Discusses the deformity of Sara Pargiter from a disability studies perspective

Figuring the modern: Jews as metaphors in modernist British fiction.

By using the vehicle the Jew to represent facets of modern life, interwar British novelists grappled with their own pressing political, social, and aesthetic concerns. This study analyzes and critiques the use of Jews as metaphors in experimental fictions by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson and then contrasts their representations with Pamela Frankau's attempt to realistically portray a Jew in late 1930s Europe. The project demonstrates the complexity of the writers' sympathetic identifications; the causes for and outlines of the political and aesthetic issues which they project onto the figure of the Jew; and the thematic and ethical results of the writers' interactions with the images of Jews available in British and European cultures. Chapter I explains the cultural processes by which Jews became available as metaphoric vehicles. Chapter II distinguishes the metaphoric representation of Bloom's Jewishness in Ulysses from the more realistic side of the portrayal, analyzing the content and functions of the former. Chapter III traces the figure of a greasy Jew through drafts of Woolf's The Years and its unpublished predecessor The Pargiters, revealing that the Jew bears the weight of Woolf's worry that imaginative freedom was becoming impossible for the woman artist in the 1930s. Chapter IV argues that early volumes of Richardson's Pilgrimage project Miriam Henderson's confusion about gender onto the Jew. But later volumes, written after Richardson confronted her own prejudices, portray Miriam's racialist antisemitism more clearly. Chapter V interprets the split portrayal of Shem as Jew in two chapters of Finnegans Wake: 1920s versions use the Jew to represent a forgotten writer of western culture, while lines added in the mid-late 1930s attend to a Jew marked and endangered by his race. In all of these fictions, one aspect or moment of a portrayal inflects the other, creating richly layered but problematic metaphoric representations. The Epilogue introduces Pamela Frankau's 1939 novel, The Devil We Know. This realist novel holds a mirror up to modernism. In its image of a Jew as an ordinary man, it reflects both the artistic successes and political failures that emerge from modernism's figuring of the Jew.Ph.D.English literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131935/2/9938477.pd