ABSTRACT
I have called this chapter ‘twisting’ because in it I wish to twist a number of ideas around T.S.Eliot’s early poem ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and then unravel the tangle back forty years to the others in the three or four decades around the turn of the century. It suggests new frames of reference, but also tries to revision a general narrative for these theories. It charts a crisis in ideas of memory coincident with modernism, but insists that the crisis does not lie in some sudden break from the Victorians. Real histories, like memories, are not processional. Nor are they stories of deliverance. They are convoluted and dispersed like experience itself, and the contexts we attribute in them are often sinewy and contingent. The organization as well as the substance of this chapter tries to recognize these facts.
