Modernism’s Whims

Abstract Hatched from the nonsense word ‘whim-wham’ in the seventeenth century, ‘whim’ began its linguistic life in obscurity, and even having risen to prominence in the nineteenth century retained a furtiveness and futility, which it still has. To say that you act ‘on a whim’, though not quite to admit to a fault, is to acknowledge your soft-willed indulgence of an impulse, one often in which the proportion of folly is riskily high. Thomas Hardy writes: ‘The lover of all in the sun-sweep is fool to whim.’ A whimsical state of mind may call any course of action feasible, any new romance, or equally, any mischief. Modernism’s Whims is about modernism’s ambivalent relationship with whims which, when indulged, may endanger the strongholds of its professional ethos: networks, institutions, legacies. The book’s period-specific argument is further focused in chapters on four modernist whimsicians (Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare), and backdropped by a long history of the literary whim, starting in the Middle Ages with proto-nonsense and ending in the present with a fatal reptilian bark.