Adolphe 1920 and Modernism

The subject of this chapter is John Rodker’s novella Adolphe 1920 (1929), which was serialised by Ezra Pound in 1927–28 but rarely recognised in academic criticism until the 1990s. The chapter details some ways in which Rodker’s modernism differs from his contemporaries’. First, it is observed that Adolphe 1920 develops a distinctive prose style for the representation of feeling and mood. The chapter then shows how Rodker’s affinities with late nineteenth-century French writing made him a target for distaste from some contemporary critics, among them Wyndham Lewis. Lewis’s reading of Rodker is challenged here, and the novella’s contemporary reception is considered in relation to the wider reception of French decadence in Anglophone modernism and criticism. Observing that the novella borrows aspects of its style from modern writing in French and from African-American music performed by bands such as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, the chapter argues that Adolphe 1920 redraws modernism into a new set of connections.