Johanna Pelikan

Funding the Fringe: Mina Loy and the Politics of Modernist Sponsorship

Pleading for support, a still relatively unknown Ezra Pound wrote to his patron John Quinn in 1915: “If a patron buys from an artist who needs money . . . the patron . . . makes himself equal to the artist” (qtd. in Paige 53–54). Pound’s elevation of the patron to a role comparable to that of the artist underscores the appeal of participating in the creation of art by supporting minor modernists through direct financial support or investments in infrastructures that benefited aspiring artists. At the same time, this perspective raises questions about the influence of sponsors over creative freedom, ownership, and promotion. This issue is especially relevant when examining Pound’s less successful contemporary, Mina Loy. In my presentation, I analyze Loy’s correspondences and selected artworks, exploring how her sponsorship by Peggy Guggenheim and Walter Arensberg shaped her artistic development, lifetime reputation, and posthumous recognition. To this end, I first examine how economic status influenced modernists’ success, noting that Loy’s pressing need for financial aid stemmed from her lowermiddle-class background and her position as a divorced, remarried, and widowed single mother. Next, I investigate different modes of sponsorship and their impact on artistic practice, exemplified by Arensberg’s indirect support of Loy through literary outlets such as the magazine Others and Guggenheim’s direct involvement in design decisions at Loy’s 1920s Paris lamp shop. Finally, I address issues of posthumous gatekeeping, particularly in light of Guggenheim’s long-standing possession of Loy’s artwork House Hunting (ca. 1950), ironically hung at Guggenheim’s Venice palazzo. In sum, my investigation of Loy’s sponsorship challenges the narrative of the modernist era as an economically independent, free-spirited space of artistic production. It demonstrates that, while patronage was an important factor, it was neither a guaranteed pathway to recognition nor without potential drawbacks for many aspiring modernist artists.

Johanna Pelikan is a postdoctoral researcher of North American literature and visual culture, currently teaching at the University of Hamburg where she received her PhD, and at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her PhD thesis on Mina Loy was published with Universitätsverlag Winter as Epistemic Itineraries: Reality Constitution in Mina Loy’s Creative Work in June 2026. She has written articles for Modernist Cultures and WiN: The EAAS Women’s Network Journal on Loy’s epistemology, aesthetics, and feminism. In her current project, she examines the politics of craft in and of African American literature of the long nineteenth century.

Angelica Belloli

The Time of Unemployment: Narrative Temporality and Suspended Adulthood in Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933)

This paper studies how mass unemployment shapes the temporal structures of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933). The novel has often been read as either a documentary record of British interwar unemployment or as a failed Bildungsroman whose young working-class characters are thwarted in the social advancement they seek. This paper aims instead to study characters’ social development, and in particular Harry Hardcastle’s, as a temporal effect of unemployment: because unemployment interrupts the expected transition from apprenticeship to stable wage labour, chronological maturation no longer guarantees the social one. Therefore, this analysis treats unemployment as a temporal structure that informs narrative progression, characters’ development, and the relationship between events and subsequent transformation, even though unemployment is itself marked by inactivity and the absence of events. While the paper draws on two critics of modernist narrative, it does so not to claim that Love on the Dole could be a modernist work, but to identify a formal problem it shares with modernism while resolving it by different means. Building on Jed Esty’s account of “frozen youth” in Unseasonable Youth (2012), this paper argues that Greenwood interrogates youth through the historically distinct conditions of mass unemployment. Moreover, Michael Sayeau’s analysis of the event’s privileged role in narrative transformation in Against the Event (2013) helps show how the novel develops alternative temporalities when events lose their transformative power, by redistributing narrative speed and frequency, for example through desire and delay and the decoupling of narrative focus from characters’ agency, among others. Finally, the paper reassesses Love on the Dole as a work that is aesthetically more complex than previous scholarship has suggested and whose formal complexity connects social commitment and formal innovation, long considered mutually exclusive.

Selected Bibliography

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Greenwood, Walter. Love on the Dole. 1933. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1993.

Hopkins, Chris. Walter Greenwood’s “Love on the Dole”: Novel, Play, Film. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018.

Levine-Clark, Marjorie. Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: “So Much Honest Poverty” in Britain, 1870–1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Sayeau, Michael. Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Windle, Jack. “‘What Life Means to Those at the Bottom’: Love on the Dole and Its Reception since the 1930s.” Literature & History 20, no. 2 (2011): 35–50.

Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Angelica Belloli is a PhD student in English Studies at G. d’Annunzio University (Chieti-Pescara, Italy) and currently a visiting PhD student at Malmö University. Her research examines the literary and cultural history of unemployment in Britain from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, using periodicals, poetry, novels, and short fiction, to investigate how unemployment was named and narrativized as both a social issue and a formal problem. Her project also seeks to reassess working-class literature by moving beyond inherited categories such as the social-problem novel and slum fiction, and by challenging the critical tendency to separate working-class and middle-class writing. Her recent presentations include papers on George Gissing at AIA 32, Turin; Charles Kingsley at Parthenope University, Naples; Gissing and Margaret Harkness at Georgetown University, Washington; Walter Greenwood at the University of Technology Sydney; and British working-class fiction at Malmö University.

Natalia Maliuta

Future of Ukrainian Modernism in Mykola Khvylovy’s Pamphlets: Class, National Identity and Decolonisation

Mykola Khvylovy was a Ukrainian modernist writer, publicist and activist who was one of the most notable representatives of the Executed Renaissance, a loosely associated group of Ukrainian public and cultural figures murdered by the Soviet regime during the systematic purges of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1930s. His pamphlets, articles and speeches are an important part of the public literary discussions amidst the cultural renaissance in Ukraine in the 1920s. His pamphlets, being simultaneously extensive critical commentaries as well as pieces of modernist prose, represent his own ideas and the ideas of the literary organisations he belonged to (e.g., “Hart”).

In my talk, I would like to demonstrate how Khvylovy envisioned the rebirth of Ukrainian literature through the empowerment of the working class and the severing of colonial ties with Russia. According to Khvylovy, the ultimate goal is the natural development of the unique Ukrainian cultural identity through the works written by new skilled working-class artists, who he encourages to draw inspiration from distinguished works of Western and Anglophone literature. He demonstrates how orientation towards Russia only reinforces colonial dynamics between the two countries, which will harm the development of the new vibrant Ukrainian literature by degrading it and making it subservient. Khvylyovy sees new Ukrainian literature as the manifestation of Ukrainian cultural liberation and hopes that the literary process in Ukraine can serve as a potential inspiration for other oppressed cultures.

Khvylovy’s works became even more relevant after the occupation of Crimea, parts of the Eastern Ukraine and Russia’s full-scale invasion, which all accelerated the de-colonialization process in Ukraine. His observations about the influence of class inequality and power dynamics on literature and culture, I contend, are still valuable for analysing modern social contexts worldwide.

Natalia Maliuta studied English Philology in Kyiv and Göttingen, focusing on Medieval Literature and Culture. She is working in administrative positions at the University of Göttingen, but intends to do academic research and writing in her spare time. Her interests include the interrelation of literature and politics, the development of cultural identities in political and social discourses and the role of literature in this process as well as female voices in Ukrainian literature. Specifically, she is interested in analysing female perspectives on transformative events as well as female agency and resilience through writing. Currently, she is rediscovering Ukrainian modernist literature and is exploring contemporary Ukrainian fantasy and science fiction written by female authors.