Aidan Watson-Morris (he/him)

My dissertation project revises diagnostic accounts of an elitist high modernism through attention to the popularity of the single-day novel form as it circulated in England and the United States in the early twentieth century. Following the restructuring and economization of daily life in the late nineteenth century, I track a newly contingent understanding of time as a form to be shaped through human agency within the English cultural imaginary. By theorizing the everyday as an aesthetic form through which historical tensions about time and value were negotiated, I read a constellation of canonical and lesser-known modern novels as moments in the “unbecoming” of social time. I argue that the interwar diurnal novel animates enduring, ambivalent relations between forms of time and collective life. By attending to form, I suggest, we learn how literary modernism appeared at a remove from the temporal forms of everyday life which the modern novel itself helped to construct.