Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage

Modernist writers in the early twentieth century aimed to write in inventive and transformative ways, but they lived in places celebrated for their association with the achievements of past generations. For E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, this contrast was strongly felt: living and writing in London, they found themselves in a city that was being fashioned as 'historic' in ways incongruous with their own critical ideals. In this innovative study, Andrea Zemgulys reads the early writings of Forster, Eliot and Woolf against the development of a growing heritage industry in England generally and London in particular. Her study offers fresh analyses of major works and a fascinating history of the making of literary and historical heritage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

Introduction; Part I. Heritage: 1. English originals: literary heritage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 2. Reading in place: the subjects of literary geography; 3. Making it newly old: heritage and memory in turn-of-the-century London; Part II. Modernism: 4. Transit: modernism's London and E. M. Forster's Chelsea; 5. In London with a Baedeker: touring T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; 6. Consummate labor: Virginia Woolf's trek to a better literature; Conclusion; Index.