In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

Abbie Garrington's Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing explores the modalities of sensory perspective grounded in haptic readings of modernist texts. With examples ranging from manicurists and sculptors to masturbators and palm readers, the book argues that haptic sensory experience facilitates sexual and spiritual contact in the modern imagination. Garrington examines how the psychic spaces of modernism touch the visible/material world, with the hand, palm, and fingers as the primary catalysts. She illuminates the physical and symbolic complexity of literary modernism in important critical, historical, and technological contexts in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and D.H. Lawrence. Haptic Modernism is notable for its haptic-oriented analyses of how various texts, technologies, and media were received by modernist audiences.

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Women inherit the craft of their foremothers across culture, place, and history, but also in more intimate, subtle modes that attest to the feminist complexity of this book’s approach to material culture. Moving across transaesthetic registers, this section describes the archival discovery of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)’s needlework archive, which forms the basis of the next chapter. A handcrafted donkey figurine in the collection, which was inherited by the author and that has taken on a multifaceted symbolism that expresses the endurance of those crafted objects at the fringes of institutional archives, gives way to a reflection on associative methods and epistemologies of feminist resistance, gift economies, and institutional archives.

How might an archive of broken things teach us about the fragility and resilience of craft? This interchapter begins with an examination of objects from the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas archive to theorize attachments between makers and literary worlds. It argues for the significance of aesthetics such as the miniature, the ephemeral, and the sentimental to how writers invoke materiality and meaning. Moving between contemporary art by Rachel Kneebone and Jila Peacock, it connects the cracked tome or broken line—the showing of the breaks and scars—to more intimate narratives of cultural catastrophe such as war or a pandemic.

How do transnational histories connect to craft? What is the value of experimental praxis to literary studies? How might transnational craft archives intersect with the natural history of places? The third interchapter describes an experiential approach to these questions, discussing how the author learned traditional bobbin lacemaking on the Isle of Wight and collected lace bobbins in Ireland alongside experiments with ink and pigment. These archival experiences help theorize Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison’s writing about craft and her Irish ancestry. Examining a broadside crafted to commemorate Goodison’s retirement, this interchapter traces the endurance of fifteenth-century ink recipes alongside diasporic, Irish-Caribbean connections in feminist writing.

Where do traditional crafts and digital forms intersect? How might adaptation and assemblage be forms of handiwork? This interchapter studies the work of Kabe Wilson, a multimedia artist who rearranged Virginia Woolf’s 1929 long essay on women’s rights and creativity, A Room of One’s Own, into the anagrammatical work Of One Woman or So by Olivia N’Gowfri. The author compares Wilson’s transmedia adaptations of Woolf to the multiple levels of methodology involved in studying craft. Extending craft studies to the postdigital present through processes such as 3-D scanning, this interchapter theorizes tactility and artistic encounters between media and across time.

Early photographic processes relied on glass plate negatives, which, when studied closely, reveal cracks and surface fractures in visual images. This chapter studies Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs alongside the work of Virginia Woolf (who was also Cameron’s grand-niece). In repositioning Woolf as a crafter in her own right, this section highlights her attention to medium and process in letterpress work, knitting and sewing, scrapbooking, and film photography as a continuation of Cameron’s disruptive, fragmentary photographs. In theorizing early wet-collodion plate photography as a glass-based craft, Cameron’s broken glass plate negatives form part of a conversation with Woolf’s antiwar resistance writing. How do images of broken and distorted glass materialize the trauma of war and disrupt linear time? How does looking not just at the images but also at the treatment of the negative surfaces themselves foreground Woolf’s later preoccupation with broken glass as she fights against erasure in feminist and artistic contexts? Through an intergenerational aesthetic collaboration with Cameron, whose archive similarly demands a closer, feminist rereading, Woolf carries forward Cameron’s broken, shattered photographic glass plates as the material basis of her rewriting of linear time in the era of world war.