Prosthetic fictions: Cold modernism in Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh

This dissertation focusses on writers whose work has been marginal to consensus accounts of literary modernism. I argue that their work derives from the aesthetic of cold modernism, which approaches embodiment on terms invested in the external aspects of character, the physical body, and plot.;Chapter 1, "Wyndham Lewis and Cold Modernism: Tarr (1918) and Mrs. Dukes' Million (1909)," examines Lewis's first novels, where he explodes character by first portraying it as a unit of the double and then as a crowd. This is an early stage in Lewis's aesthetic development; he discards common notions of what constitutes the individual and plot.;Chapter 2, "Waspish Segments: Lewis, Prosthesis, Fascism," argues that Lewis's bodies change as a result of World War I and its new kinds of wounded bodies. Lewis uses prosthesis in Snooty Baronet and then Hitler, a journalistic account of 1930s Berlin, where Lewis encounters the assembled female body of the transvestites as the prototype for the body politic. Using Roger Caillois's article on mimicry, I show a wider European interest in insects and armored bodies.;Chapter 3, "Chez Loy," examines Mina Loy's work through her "domestica," which emphasizes the crossing of the familiar, bourgeois elements of her "house poems" with a rigid and alien eroticism. Loy approaches meaning or depth from a wholly physical perspective. I contextualize this approach by reading her work in the context of the avant-garde fashion magazine Rogue.;Chapter 4, "The Authentic Copy: Loy, Vogue, Chanel," focusses on a specific instance of the conflict over originality, the fashion world's use of "the authentic copy," which Loy, as a designer, was both drawn to and horrified by. Loy's ambivalence about originality is contrasted with the couturier Coco Chanel, whose ease with piracy made her unique.;Chapter 5, "Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies: Prosthesis and the Boring," argues that boredom in Waugh's life and work creates in the fiction a prosthetic body whereby plot, character, and tone are supplemented by repetition and flatness. In flouting readerly expectation, boredom is a condition of cold modernism, and Waugh exemplifies this, at once despite and because of his antimodern sentiments.