| Sumario: | Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury shows how a set of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have variously engaged Bloomsburian legacies to explore the possibilities for thinking about intimacy today. Blending postcritique's affirmative turn, contextualist close reading, and metamodernism's study of contemporary engagements with modernist pasts, Wolfe finds that even as the ultimate progress of intimacy is a mixture of slight gains amid troublingly enduring impasses, the imaginative resources of the Bloomsbury Group and those of its inheritors continue to offer the potential for rethinking intimacy in more open and optimistic ways. In doing so, Wolfe exemplifies the power of methodologically pluralistic studies of literature that are ultimately oriented toward socially liberating values. The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel: States of Repair reads the post-1945 British novel as attempts to reimagine and reassess the failed promise of the welfare state, understanding 1945 as a pivotal year that fostered the possibility of social transformation, though faltered. By examining how postwar infrastructures such as housing, healthcare, work, and the justice system configured, negotiated, and sometimes collided with individual subjectivities, Rich redefines what we have termed "contemporary literature" in Britain by consistently linking the development of national identity back to the ideation welfare state, famously epitomized by the 1942 Beveridge report. Rich argues that these novels continue to debate what constitutes care, community in the advent of reconstruction, even in retrospect. Through an academic dialogue with Breaking down Boundaries and "Making it New": Oriental Elements in Western Modernism (2023) by Qian Zhaoming, founder of the comparative study of Taoist and Zen Influenced Chinese literature and arts and Western modernism, we expand and complement Qian's views on Western modernism and the influence of Taoism and Zen on it, and engage in some friendly academic dialogue and debate with them. By deconstructing some of Qian's traditional, holistic ideas about Taoism and Zen and their influence on Western modernism, we reveal inherent conflicts in Taoist philosophy and reconsider its impact on Western modernism.
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