Introduction: Maps Worth Studying

Early modernist writings — that is, those modernist writings produced in the rough period between the turn of the twentieth century and the years of the First World War – are filled with allusions to utopian themes.1 From Ford Madox Ford’s anonymous essay ‘Nice People’ (1903), which invokes a scare-quoted fifteen minutes ‘over a table’ as a magic ‘solvent of all disagreements’ (1903, p. 578); to Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1915), which explores the allegedly ‘utopist’ (1915, p. 11) character of Axel Heyst; to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which Stephen Dedalus aims ‘to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race’ (1916, p. 213), as well as much more besides, early modernism is chockfull of references to different kinds of idealistic scenarios in which various socio-political yearnings find their ‘voice’. But such passing references to utopian ideas of the kind just quoted do not a complex literary discourse make. On the contrary, it is from the questioning of such ideas, along with the politics to which they respond, that such complexity emerges in early modernism’s varied textual forms. These questionings of utopian themes appear frequently in novels but just as often in short stories, poems, magazine articles, essays, autobiographies, and works of cultural criticism and reminiscence. They remain not just aesthetically mesmerizing but politically relevant due to the self-reflexivity with which their grasp of ideological processes is advanced. Moreover, these questionings refute descriptions of modernist literary cultures as narrowly inward-looking; modernism was not, as was for so long held, obsessed with Art and indifferent to exterior realities. As the New Modernist Studies have shown, literary modernist cultures were profoundly focused on socio-political matters. Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920, inevitably partial and selective though it is, intervenes in this field by considering early modernism’s investigations of a broad set of political and existential problems, centrally among them questions of utopianism, meliorism, and perfectibility.