Rhythmic Modernism: the mimesis of life itself in the short fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

摘要

There is now a growing body of scholarship exploring rhythm in literary modernism, as it becomes increasingly clear how central the concept of rhythm is to early twentieth-century visions of the universe. Around this time, recent developments in the sciences increased the public's awareness of a multitude of intangible natural rhythms that surround us, coinciding with a peak in the popularity of vitalist philosophy. This meant that for some, rhythm came to be equated with the essence of life itself. Modernist writers looked for ways to respond to this new rhythmic paradigm, and attention to the question of rhythm in modernist literary culture shows that many writers considered textual rhythms to function mimetically – quite literally as mimicry of the rhythms of the universe.This thesis examines this 'rhythmic mimesis' in the short fiction of three closely networked writers: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In differing ways, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf each display a fascination with rhythm as a formal device and as a conceptual framework for understanding the world. I situate this analysis of modernist short fiction in the context of an intellectual history of rhythm and mimesis, which I position as important strands of modernist cultural debate. Accordingly, my first chapter investigates this rhythmic paradigm as it appears in literary cultural discourse, especially in relation to the romantic aesthetic philosophy of John Middleton Murry and the vigorous contemporary debates that took place over the relation between prose and poetry. The short story, as an exemplary modernist form and one often situated at the forefront of attempts to meld the capabilities of poetry and prose, provided these authors with a ready medium for both formal and thematic experimentation with rhythm. The following three chapters detail the ways in which Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf respectively respond to this intellectual and aesthetic context in both their nonfiction and short fiction. Whereas some classic accounts of modernism see it as a broadly anti-mimetic movement, close attention to the problematic of rhythm suggests that Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf were, on the contrary, vitally concerned with the representation of 'life itself'.