After weeks of faffing about I have finally come up with a preliminary reading list for my modernist project. There are many utterly valid reasons why I haven’t done this before. I’ve been away in England again for my mother’s birthday – I won’t embarrass her by writing how old she is, this being the internets and public, but she is very very old and it was a ‘significant’ birthday. I’ve started back at my Flemish classes, which are four mornings a week and encroach rather upon time for writing here. And the weather is depressing and murky, so I’ve spent more time lying on the sofa eating cheese and reading children’s books than I have thinking about modernism.
I am limiting the works I’m reading to 1900–45 (ish). I’ve tried to find at least one title for each author, but I don’t know whether they’re always ‘the best’ or the most representative; if anyone can give me some recommendations I would be a happy woman. There’s no time frame for this, I can read modernist texts until I shrivel up like an old bat and my eyes fall out, so if I get obsessed with an author I can just carry on devouring as much of their work as I fancy.
Oh and secondary reading – no idea where to start with that. All suggestions welcomed.
(Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and John Quinn, undated; from here. Who is John Quin?)
British, Irish and American
W.H. Auden, Selected Poems
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, maybe something else?
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame
Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Basil Bunting
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
e.e. cummings, Selected Poems
H.D., HERmione
T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Four Quartets
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Robert Frost
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Henry James, The Golden Bowl
David Jones, In Parenthesis
Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry
James Joyce, Ulysses
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (yes, I know it was 1947 but hey)
Mina Loy
Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
Marianne Moore
Olive Moore, Spleen (she was mentioned on Obooki's Obloquy and looked intriguing)
Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell
Ezra Pound
Kathleen Raine, Poems 1935–1943 (included really because I have it and haven’t read it yet)
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Wallace Stevens
Dylan Thomas
William Carlos Williams
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves
William Butler Yeats
Continental European
Anna Ahkmatova
Guillaume Apollinaire
Ivan Cankar
Constantine P. Cavafy
Knut Hamsen, Hunger
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Robert Musil, A Man Without Qualities
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Luigi Pirandello
Marcel Proust, In Search of Time Past
Rainer Maria Rilke
Italo Svevo, The Conscience of Zeno
Ernst Toller
Paul Valéry
(Anna Ahkmatova in 1924; from here)