Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

Chapter 4 moves from eating to feeding, returning to Nightwood and juxtaposing it with Olive Moore’s novel Spleen in order to reveal the ethics of care and control that are developed in each book. Feeding, in both novels, is a way of nurturing that is also a mode of control. In Spleen, a woman rejects the normative pleasures of marriage and motherhood, refusing to feed her child. While this might seem like a valorization of queer negativity in the form of the literal rejection of the child, the chapter reads the novel instead as one that values queer potentiality by refusing the coercive pleasures of nurture. Turning back to Nightwood, it discusses a metaphorical hunger, arguing that Barnes draws on the figure of the mother feeding her child to demonstrate how care may be coercive even in a relationship between adults.

Chapter 3 explores modernist uses of the pastoral that deny the escape into nature and emphasize instead the biological limitations of human life. This dark pastoral mode coincides with setbacks to nature preservation in the United Kingdom during and following WWI and heightening during the economically stressful 1930s. Beginning with the iconic presentations of decay and destruction found in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the chapter considers Eliot’s symbolic registers of waste and regeneration in relation to actual attempts at land restoration in the United Kingdom. As the first large land holding entrusted to the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the case of Woodwalton Fen presents the tensions between “reserving nature” and “putting lands in order.” The undoing of pastoral retreat at the hands of anthropogenic control develops further in the early poems of W. H. Auden and arrives most forcefully in the fiction of Djuna Barnes, whose dark pastoral aesthetic subverts Thoreauvian notions of self-sufficiency in nature. Robin Vote as the “black sheep” in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood poses a queer resilience to those who seek to tame and exploit living beings.