Introduction

This chapter outlines the scope of the book, discusses Rose Macaulay's life and writing, and summarises the other chapters in the book, making connections to their coherence as a unified argument that Macaulay was a writer of modernity in British literary culture of the twentieth century

John Buchan’s short stories of empire: the Indian protagonist in ‘A Lucid Interval’ (1910)

The first part of this essay examines how John Buchan (1875-1940) wrote imperial fiction, which he largely did before the First World War in the first part of his writing career. He did this in different texts and forms: the short stories ‘The Far Islands’ (1899), ‘The Kings of Orion’ (1906), ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ (1910a), ‘A Lucid Interval’ (1910b) and ‘The Green Wildebeest’ (1927); the novels The Half-Hearted (1900), A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Prester John (1910); in political analysis in The African Colony (1903); and in journalism, in ‘An Imperial Club for London’ (1903). The second part of the essay will analyse ‘A Lucid Interval’ , with pedagogical material on its publishing and metahistory

Comic short fiction and its variety

Humour in fiction functions as the salt that enhances taste, and crosses the boundaries of form and genre. It works impalpably in solution, disseminating through characterisation, and as crystalline grains of joke, embedded in its medium. In short fiction, humour’s protean quality has a stronger effect because it is less diluted. A humorous narrative voice will infuse an otherwise serious sequence of events with a comic perspective. Comedy delivers social shame for public enjoyment, and can reveal hidden meaning at the end of the narrative. The pervasive but discreet quality of the comic in short fiction frequently disguises its workings, however, and makes it hard to identify as a convenient set of aesthetic characteristics. We also cannot separate comic short stories from their medium. Short fiction is distinguished from the novel by its transmission in, historically, the magazine and the newspaper. The evolution of comic short stories through twentieth-century book history arrives in the age of the e-reader still linked closely to its medium, which offers digitised commute-length reading

Women and their bodies in the popular reading of 1910

This article discusses the presentation of women's bodies in popular newspapers that reflects an awareness of reproductive health and access to the knowledge and language of sex, ?on or about December 1910?. Originating in Virginia Woolf's biographical writing, diaries and letters, it uses the popular reading of the British public in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, including features and adverts in newspapers, health manuals, and commercially successful novels, to show how Woolf's isolation of a single moment of change for human character was, for most of the population, part of a longstanding social evolution in popular sexual knowledge and moral standards. Novels by H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, Una L Silberrad and Arnold Bennett are discussed, as are coded adverts for abortifacients and menstrual irregularity

Virginia Woolf’s shadow: sex bias in academic publication

The principal findings of this chapter on gender patterns of authorship and subject in scholarly publications on British authors in the period 1930-60, are that, within these parameters, women authors publish on female subjects much more than male authors do, and male authors rarely publish on women subjects, unless they are Virginia Woolf. An unanticipated result from the data shows that, as a subject, Woolf dominates the British academic monograph market for this period. She throws a historiographical shadow like no other twentieth-century woman author, which exacerbates a serious imbalance in the publication of scholarship on other women writers of this period

In Step with Our Parents: 3-Part Educational Series

The purpose of this project is to educate adult children caring for their parents, so they can identify as caregivers so they can better cope with, identify with, and/or navigate the role of care giving, and be aware of the resources available to them