The Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR (SCR) was founded in 1924, following the establishment of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the new Soviet state. The Society's founding members were a group of key British and Soviet artists and intellectuals of the day, including E.M. Forster, Julian Huxley, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Sybil Thorndyke, Alexei Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Konstantin Yuon - and Huntly Carter. Carter gave the Society's first lecture in December 1924, was central to the curation of its first exhibition in May 1925, and remained a member until his death in 1942. This article discusses Carter's contribution to the work of the SCR, focusing especially on his dissemination of knowledge about the new Soviet theatre in Britain. It provides information about the Society's Huntly Carter Collection, donated after his death by his friend and supporter, the M.P. Joseph King.
This article explores the content and provenance of the Huntly Carter Papers, which were acquired by the Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, as part of the Herbert P. J. Marshall Collection. The article tells the history of this important acquisition and also examines the circumstances that led to the acquisition of the Herbert P. J. Marshall Collection by the University of Notre Dame in the early 1990s. It describes the scope and organization of the Huntly Carter Papers. The article underscores the importance of the Marshall Collection and especially the Huntly Carter Papers for the study of early Soviet theatre, cinema, and literature and for European and British avant-garde culture.
In 2023, I wrote a play, The Revival of Huntly Carter, which received a staged reading in Oxford. This essay reflects on the process which set me on a path of exploring Carter's legacy. It looks at how academic studies of Carter, theatre history, and the role of music in left-wing theatre influenced the choice of content: the play needed to reflect the influences upon Carter, and it had to be entertaining, using the theatrical devices which he himself admired - song, presentational theatre, melodrama, agit-prop. The process highlighted the fundamental gaps in our knowledge of Carter's biography and legacy: why, after four books, thirty years of media articles, and correspondence with leading European theatre makers, is he not better known? What should we make of his efforts at inspiring radical forms of workers' theatre in 1920s Britain? And what can actors, directors and writers of today learn from him?
In 1911, Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes presented its third Parisian season at the Th & eacute;& acirc;tre du Ch & acirc;telet. Among the audience was British art and drama critic Huntly Carter, who declared the company's synthesized spectacles 'the most important' advance in the period's pursuit of artistic theatre. For the better part of the next two decades, Carter continued to theorize on the theatrical implications of the Diaghilev repertoire, establishing himself as one of the most consistent and perceptive critics writing on the company in Britain. Nevertheless, his body of criticism has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This article traces Carter's engagement with the Ballets Russes across periodicals, books, and archival materials, revealing how the company's evolving repertoire repeatedly reshaped his theatrical ideals. Diaghilev ballets stirred his thoughts on a formal Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic, 'impersonal' modes of acting, and the politicized minimalism of agit-prop performance, fuelling his ongoing appeals for theatrical renewal in Britain.
Given Huntly Carter's prolific career, it would be expected that his impact would be seen in the writings and production aesthetics emerging from Britain's small group of experimental, politically-active theatres. However, Carter's influence seems surprisingly limited. This article unpacks the reason for this by examining the work of Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood's theatre companies: the Red Megaphones, Theatre of Action, Theatre Union, and Theatre Workshop. Even though Carter wrote extensively about subjects of interest to these companies, there is no definitive evidence of influence. Rather, they looked to another theatre writer, L & eacute;on Moussinac. This paper draws attention to Carter's absence through a comparison with the tangible inspiration of Moussinac. In so doing it reappraises Carter's work in relation to performance practice, reimagining the books not only as textual descriptions but as (albeit unrealised) material for theatrical experimentation.
The British theatre industry in the first three decades of the twentieth century exuded confidence. Most of its key players believed that its continued success was closely linked to the economic model of supply and demand, a model in which long runs provided healthy profits for the leading managers, actors and playwrights. In many ways it was a theatre pulling away from the continent, where subsidies, director’s theatre, and dramaturgical practices increasingly came to the fore. It may not be surprising then that few critics and practitioners were interested in continental European theatre. However, Huntly Carter was one of the commentators who showed an active interest in theatre in Germany. His study of the influential German theatre director Max Reinhardt was, therefore, not just a discussion of his practice but an attempt to introduce to a largely ignorant British public the advantages of a theatre run on continental terms.
This essay recovers the history of the early phase of the Workers' Theatre Movement (WTM) in Britain (1926-28). In 1928, the Hackney People's Players took over the organisation of the WTM, and most discussions of workers' theatre focus on this later, more celebrated, phase. This has had the effect of obscuring important connections between workers' theatre and the theatre practitioners, artists, composers, and critics associated with early modernism. In its early years the WTM aimed to use experimental drama as an agitational tool, and committee members included Aleksandr Bakshy, Huntly Carter, Edith Craig, Eden and Cedar Paul, and Christina Walshe. The fullest account of this significant moment in the history of the British theatre is found in the writings of Huntly Carter. Since the October Revolution of 1917, Carter's attention had been caught by the experimental theatres of the Soviet Union, which seemed to share his commitment to social transformation through art. This essay provides a detailed account of the development of the WTM's ideas and activities and argues that the first WTM should be remembered as an ambitious, if abortive, British avant-garde.
The introduction summarises what we know of Carter's biography and sets out his intellectual trajectory. It discusses his contribution to modernism and his reception, and explains the rationale for the present special issue.
This paper examines H.D.'s poetry and prose, investigating mechanisms of prophecy and imaginative strategies deployed to decrypt signs of the future. Setting H.D.'s work in the context of a broader modernist interest in the link between futurity and hieroglyphs and other symbolic markings, it shows how H.D. departs from the typical model of ephemeral, insubstantial annunciation by giving prophecy a distinctively physical character. In Trilogy, the signs, glyphs, and runes that constitute the prophetic message are constantly subject to effacement and ruination. This paper argues that Trilogy envisions the failure and vulnerability of language to be the opening for new models of propheticism which are polyvocal, feminist, and ecocritical. Ultimately, while H.D.'s prophetism refuses to make specific claims on the future, its fragile inscription on plants, stones, buildings, and bodies ensures that it retains a potent imminence - pointing toward a new world which is, in some sense, already at hand.
This article investigates Guillaume Apollinaire's 1917 play, Les mamelles de Tir & eacute;sias, as a profound exploration of male childbirth and its cultural significance. While the play's themes of gender-bending and male pregnancy were often dismissed as 'outrageous fantasy' by critics, this analysis argues for a serious re-examination of Apollinaire's work. I contend that Apollinaire's portrayal of a husband giving birth is not a farcical metaphor, but a prophetic intervention that reflects and challenges the gender anxieties of his time. By connecting the play to contemporaneous cultural and historical contexts - including anxieties over depopulation, the rise of feminism, and theories of 'inversion' - the article demonstrates how Apollinaire problematized rigid gender norms. It asserts that the play's 'fantasy' serves as a surrealist technique to unearth unspoken truths about the body, identity, and the fluid nature of gender. Ultimately, I argue that Apollinaire's work, by resignifying the act of birth, reveals how literature can generate new realities and possibilities for gendered experience.
This article reframes global modernism through & Eacute;douard Glissant's relational poetics, using Derek Walcott's play Malcochon (1959) as a case study in transmedial and transcultural exchange. Written as a deliberate imitation of Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1950), Malcochon draws on the conventions of Japanese cinema, Noh and Kabuki theatre, Euro-American modernist poetics, and Caribbean folk performance. In tracing the diverse influences that animate the play, the article expands on Shu-mei Shih's argument that East-West modernist exchange was often mediated through Japan, repositioning her triangular model within a broader, multidirectional, transhistorical web of relations rooted in Glissant's concept of totalit & eacute;-monde. This remodelling involves demonstrating how a seemingly unrelated cultural geography - the Caribbean - serves as the fourth of many further nodes in a global, recursive network. Walcott's play ultimately emerges as an emblem of relationality, a concept reconceived for global modernism not only as a spatial or diagnostic heuristic, but as a generative compositional force.
What happens to close reading when there is too much choice? To encounter Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel, The Waves, is to feel an essayistic urge with every sentence - to find one's critical attention repeatedly distracted and redirected. This essay argues that Woolf's non-hierarchical prose enables reflection on a particular characteristic of close reading which has yet to be acknowledged within critical discourse: its contingency. Through a reading of the novel's excessive, sprouting, listing prose in terms of the critical experience which it designs and demands, this essay proposes that The Waves highlights the actuality and generativity of methodological arbitrariness, drawing attention to close reading's dependence on, and relishing of, chance encounters, undirected selections, and unpredictable associations.
Virginia Woolf criticized Edwardian realists for conflating the trappings of the contemporary world - 'the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour' - with likeness to life. Yet she declared ordinary life to be fiction's essential subject and filled her novels with fleeting impressions and fragmentary details. Positioning Woolf alongside other twentieth-century writers as a key theorist of the ordinary, this essay casts new light on the implication of fiction for Woolf in regimes of visibility and value, showing how her writing mobilizes the contradictions of ordinariness. The conceptual paradoxes of attending to the ordinary lend themselves in her work to a dialectical process of revaluation whereby an ordinary life is given shape and reclaimed while being folded back into the de-hierarchized generality of ordinary life, promising further revaluations.
I argue that the paranoic-critical analysis that Salvador Dali does of the The Angelus painting in his The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus emphasizes the figure of the omnipotent mother. This shows us a specific kind of ontological regime in which one would be totally subject to the other. This is particularly obvious in the way Dali relates the painting to a coffee set leading to an experience of ontological instability producing generalized anxiety and terror. By looking at Heidegger's analysis of a jug and looking at Levinas's comments on freedom and the constitution of the subject, two alternatives to Dali's picture are found. Whereas Dali gave a picture of total instability, Heidegger will give one of total rigidity leading to a compromise in Levinas of a situation in which I am both capable of a certain level of self-constitution while also having to be in relation with the other.
This article argues that in its spatial and temporal construction, Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin offers a critique of utopian futurity. By focusing on the character and narratorial position of Christopher, the author's namesake narrator-protagonist, the article traces the complex interplay of ironic detachment and nostalgic yearning, and the way knowledge of the future shapes perceptions of the past, in creating the temporal experience I name 'ante-utopian'. Christopher's character is likewise proven to be the core of the novel's representation of urban space, dominated by a form of detachment that amplifies anti-utopian critique by undermining the values of connectedness emphasized by Nazi visions of utopia. I conclude by considering the potential of 'ante-utopia' to expand our understanding of literary anti-utopianism beyond the limits of the dystopian mode.
Although interwar Japan witnessed the simultaneous emergence of modernist literature and vibrant metropolitan cultures in Tokyo and other urban areas after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the rapid modernisation and Westernisation of the country were also troubled by haunting anxiety over the loss of native tradition and rising animosity against foreign influences, exacerbated by economic depression and the upsurge of militant nationalism in the 1930s. In this volatile situation, William Plomer (1903-73) and Ito Sei (1905-69) employed modernist techniques in their respective novels to explore cities such as Tokyo and Otaru as spaces of diverse translational practices that negotiate between the forces of modernity and the ghostly return of past traumas. Using Sherry Simon's notion of a 'translational city' and Sakai Naoki's critique of a restricted conception of translation as critical lenses, this paper reads Plomer's and Ito's works together to observe how they interrogate the promises and perils of East-West encounters in interwar Japanese cities traversed by dividing lines of languages, cultures, and genders, even as their exiled perspectives were assisted by the cross-linguistic circulation of modernist texts.
Ra & uacute;l Ca & ntilde;ibano's photography offers a richly textured visual account of contemporary Cuba, characterised by an interplay of modernist and surrealist aesthetics. This article examines how his work engages with and expands upon Latin American photographic traditions, exploring tensions between past and present, urban and rural, the everyday and the unusual. Through a documentary approach that incorporates abrupt juxtapositions, unconventional perspectives and striking use of light and shadow, Ca & ntilde;ibano's images challenge linear representations of Cuban culture and identity. This article situates his work within broader global modernist debates and uncovers a deeper understanding of the historical context of his photographic essay 'Ciudad' (City). In this essay spanning three decades, Ca & ntilde;ibano captures Cuba's shifting social and political landscape, documenting moments of intimacy, resilience and collective memory. Furthermore, he explores Havana's architectural modernity and human landscapes, revealing a layered vision of the city underscored by the complexities of revolutionary legacy and economic struggle. By placing his work within the history of Cuban photography, from epic revolutionary imagery to a more introspective sociological aesthetic, this article emphasises how Ca & ntilde;ibano provides a distinctive perspective on contemporary Cuba-one that is both deeply personal and part of a wider visual discourse on modernity, representation and visual culture.
There is relatively little Anglophone literature from Singapore's early twentieth century, and much of it was written by colonial officials or foreign visitors. Recently, however, scholars have recovered more local works from the period, fiction that extends Singapore's local literary history while also connecting to coincident global modernisms. Lim Boon Keng's Tragedies of Eastern Life (1927) and S. Rajaratnam's "The Tiger"(1942) both anticipate and comment on Singapore's modernity, but they are both set elsewhere, in peninsular Malaya. Neither author names Singapore at all, and they turn instead to foreign models to express their personal investments in the colonial city's development. This article examines how these works write back to Singapore from elsewhere, offering rural contrasts to the city's twentieth-century urban development. The untimely modernism in these stories-and, I argue, in Singapore generally-serves as a recuperative historical counterweight to the city-state's unrelenting modernisation.
