“Socialist Realism, Socialist Expressionism” examines how Expressionist aesthetics metamorphosed from a radical critique of bourgeois liberalism into full-blown fascism. During his period of involvement with National Socialism, Gottfried Benn treated the Volk as an aesthetic object – as a work of art that could be shaped and refined through direct eugenic interventions. Yet Benn’s staunchest critics on the left did not dismiss his aesthetic definition of the Volk outright. Instead, they appropriated the Volk for a leftist politics. Examining the celebrated Expressionism Debate of 1937–1938, I argue that Marxists like Georg Lukács refrained from a vocabulary of class struggle in order to promote a populist aesthetics that associated the Volk with a distinctly anti-modernist literary mode: the realist novel. Hence the chapter grapples with populist cultural politics from both the radical left and right at the moment when the liberal tradition descending from Kant was reaching its nadir.

This chapter discusses the reception of Hopkins in the 1920s and 1930s and his influence on modernism and twentieth-century criticism. It proposes Hopkins’s importance to the emphasis on difficulty and ambiguity in modernist critcism, as well as on relations between sound and sense. It also observes Hopkins’s significance for theories of rhythm, metre, and diction in modernist poetry.

The introduction sets out the aims of the book and explains in brief the history of Hopkins’s writing and reception. It begins by discussing Hopkins’s posthumous publication and its distinctive effect upon his early reputation and influence, notably in relation to modernism. The introduction then goes on to relate the more recent historical emphasis in Hopkins scholarship before setting out the approach taken in the book and outlining its contents.

Although poetic modernism marked the height of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s seminal influence, British, American, and postcolonialist poets around the globe (including in Ireland, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, and the Caribbean) continue to engage intensely with his work. Many have learned to write in their own idiosyncratic voices while honouring or debating with Hopkins, and even while intentionally echoing his innovative techniques or his ecological and spiritual themes. The topic of Hopkins’s poetic legacies is ripe for further scholarly attention. Even a brief assessment of writers he has influenced reveals that his voice has deeply shaped the contours of contemporary anglophone verse.

This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.

Conrad’s novels engage in a critique of imperialism, but the precise nature of that critique persists as a source of debate among scholars. This chapter argues that three of Conrad’s novels – Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory – level an increasingly sharp critique at a system of capitalism and imperialism based on the modern corporation. In the novels, an opposition develops between an idealized British model of family-based capitalism and a corporate capitalism corrupted by investor ownership. In this dichotomy, the novels associate the family-based system of capitalism with the positivity of material value, meaning, character, and emotion that stands in contrast to the utter waste – the “nothing” of Victory’s end – left in the wake of an invisible and ever-changing network of social relations temporarily connected within the speculative structure of investor ownership and the new imperialism.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.

Via an analysis of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, this chapter explores how novels adapted to accommodate the metropolitan spaces of London, and it argues that Wells’s novel links the financialization of the British economy and the cultural turn toward London to the emergence of a new novelistic poetics and to the development of a new novelistic character. Tono-Bungay narrates the rise and fall of Teddy Ponderevo’s financial empire, but the source of drama in the novel is more often the narrator’s inability to reconcile classical novelistic poetics with the logic of value production under finance capitalism and with his experiences in London. The narrator longs for a new mode of representation that can account for the largely imaginary and highly volatile value produced by the financial empire, and he finds inspiration for that new mode of representation in the urban spaces of London.

This chapter explores how The Moonstone and A Study in Scarlet are interested in finance capital even though they do not appear to concern themselves with such questions. They are both interested in the collapse of character as value form and in the appearance of professional class characters. As the earlier novel, The Moonstone remains committed to the ethical universe of class society and shores up the value form of character. As such, it serves as a point of contrast to A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel. Traditionally marginalized in literary studies as an example of popular detective fiction, A Study in Scarlet can be read as a proto-modernist novel that participates in the historical process of finance capital in two ways: It orients its ethical universe around the emerging professional society, and its structure refuses to resolve contradictions in the legibility of character.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

The conclusion applies the semiotics of affect imagined by Imagism and The Waste Land to several of the novels from the earlier parts of the book, including The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, The Waves, and Voyage in the Dark. The conclusion argues that in late Victorian novels affective expressions are incorporated into a novelistic poetics of character, while in the proto-modernist and modernist novels affective expression becomes an object of literary conjecture, a vector of critique, and a source of literary and economic value.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.