The Atmospheres and Ambiences of Modernist Literature

The figure of atmosphere has emerged with increasing prominence over the course of the last twenty years as a means of reconfiguring our ways of engaging with literary texts. We propose to embark on a rereading of modernist literature with a renewed attention to the atmospheres, ambiences, or Stimmungen that modernist works seem intensely engaged in. As we reread these works of modernist literature today in the era of what Bruno Latour calls our ongoing “ecological mutation,” perhaps we may learn to patiently attune our attention to what is in the background: the atmospheres and ambiences that make our world and our situations of reading what they are and what they may become. We welcome papers that engage with atmosphere/ambience in any imaginable form in the works of modernist literature in the Anglophone world from the marginal to the canonical.