Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of recent ‘pleasure,’” or the proliferation of mass produced, broadly available leisure which can degrade or uninteresting the brain. He and his contemporaries, together with James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to notably redefine excitement, developing exhausting and oblique paths to thrill via their notoriously daunting paintings. Laura Frost follows those experiments within the artwork of unpleasure, connecting modernism’s signature features, similar to irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an bold try to reconfigure bliss.

In the matter with excitement, Frost attracts upon a large choice of fabrics, linking interwar amusements, corresponding to the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian perfume Chanel no. five, and the unique confection Turkish pride, to the inventive play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the increase of celebrities comparable to Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee opposed to modern sociological, medical, and philosophical writings on rest and desire.

Throughout her learn, Frost contains contemporary scholarship on fabric and visible tradition and vernacular modernism, recasting the period’s high/low, elite/popular divides and formal innovations as efforts to control sensual and cerebral event. shooting the not easy tensions among those artists’ dedication to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced but deployed of their writing, Frost calls realization to the relevant function of enjoyment in shaping interwar culture.