Forming modern times: the transatlantic day novel, 1884-1941

Watson-Morris, Aidan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130163 Copy

Description

Title

Forming modern times: the transatlantic day novel, 1884-1941

Author(s)

Watson-Morris, Aidan

Issue Date

2025-07-10

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Parker, Robert D

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Parker, Robert D

Committee Member(s)

• Hutner, Gordon
• Courtemanche, Eleanor
• Gaedtke, Andrew

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• modernism
• day novels
• transatlantic
• new formalism
• aesthetic theory
• social time
• work

Abstract

Between the years of 1880 and 1940, an increasingly popular feature of the anglophone novel—its restriction of narrative duration to a single day—became paradigmatic of its era. Forming Modern Times: The Transatlantic Day Novel, 1884-1941 narrates transatlantic literary history with this idiosyncratic form as the protagonist: the single-day novel. The single-day novel locates a cross section of literary history that overlaps with the modernist canon but also finds once popular, now little-read texts in the fault lines of the archive. I tell the history of the day novel without its best-known modernist exemplars, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), to recover a microtradition at its moment of becoming. These texts speak to each other in a frequency only audible through an attunement to the formal logics of the single day novel in the first half of the twentieth century, when writers are thinking through the portability and problems of a literary paradigm still in the making. The novel of the single day asks its readers to question the forms of time that pace out the rhythms of social life, especially as mediated by the abstract structures and strictures of work in global capitalism. A cultural desire for a “universal day” or “universalized everyday,” manifest in the 1884 Prime Meridian Conferences, conditions the utopian dream of everyday aesthetics at the turn of the century. As the single day became a figure for collective time, such novels offered a staging ground for the remaking of social time. Novels such as Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne (1917), Nathalie Colby’s Black Stream (1927), John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 (1929), Storm Jameson’s A Day Off (1933), Betty Miller as B. Bergson Spiro’s The Mere Living (1933), Henry Green’s Party Going (1939), Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! (completed in 1937, published in 1963), and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) all fissure official time and the time of everyday life. Developing a minimal teleology, I organize these novels into the decades of their publication, as the form pursues its routes through avant-garde, political, and commercial traditions. Following the aleatory trajectory of the form as it runs orthogonal to conventional accounts of modernism and traverses competing value systems through the first half of the century, I map a strange path through the archive that opens onto broader questions of aesthetic form, labor and leisure, and the temporality of everyday life—questions that authors rephrase, re-inflect, and reanimate to diverse ends. In their form, these novels produce a theory of the synecdochic relations between part and whole that informs my method of constellating each day novel as a moment of literary-historical time. This literary history in intervals provides a prehistory of the present, as an all but unnoticed twenty-first-century day novel renaissance mirrors the early twentieth century, conditioned in the contemporary period by a parallel, radical intrusion of work into the time of daily life. To read the day novel today aslant the day novel of the twentieth century renews a collective dream of the different forms our everyday lives might assume.

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130163

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Aidan Watson-Morris

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