Modernism and Illness Experience: Embodied Strategies of Textual Production

The role that ill health plays in thematic concerns of modernist literature has been a topic of scholarly interest in recent years. Less considered, however, is the relationship between ill health and modernist practices of writing. The primary research aims of ModIX are to provide a sound methodology for exploring this relationship and to define modernist writing strategies and accommodations as they relate to authors’ illness experiences. Methodologically innovative, ModIX applies affect theory to genetic criticism in order to trace the author’s body as a tool and facilitator of writing. The project focuses on three key modernist authors who experienced illness to a life-altering degree: James Joyce (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). Drawing together insights from affect theory, health humanities and archival studies, ModIX will reconstruct the literary geneses of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and selected short stories by Katherine Mansfield, all written during periods of the authors’ ill health and needs for care. ModIX’s research objectives are to consolidate affective genetic criticism as a methodology, to understand modernist illness experience phenomenologically, and to reconstruct the networks of care that surrounded these modernists as a result of ill health and creative needs. ModIX goes beyond the state of the art to understand the lived experience of illness not only as a biographical fact, but as a dynamic, material factor in shaping, facilitating and sometimes frustrating modernist literary labour and production. ModIX is an archival project that will produce original and impactful results. The project outputs will include three peer-reviewed articles in high quality journals, a monograph proposal, and a research summit to form the basis for a large-scale interdisciplinary ERC project on illness experience and literary production.