This dissertation considers the interaction between English modernism and the problematic of nihilism, focusing on select works by Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and Anthony Ludovici. While it might be supposed that nihilism is a concept belonging to German or Russian intellectual histories, or that nihilism is strictly a philosophical problem, this dissertation shows how these three writers deployed distinct conceptions of nihilism in their work. It highlights that the problematic of nihilism was, therefore, both transnational in scope and explored in various genres of writing, arguing in turn for the formative role that nihilism played in English modernist production. At the same time, this dissertation emphasizes nihilism’s unsettled character, arguing that each author’s concept of nihilism is distinct in type, origin, and scale, gesturing in the process towards the different implications of these distinct conceptual deployments. In tracing these distinct deployments of the concept, this dissertation problematizes various critical accounts concerned with modernism and nihilism, offering new readings of how nihilism is conceptualized and represented in each author’s work, as well as a new framework for distinguishing between nihilisms.

The German-Jewish philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders (1902-1992) had an extremely long and prolific career as a public intellectual. Foremost among his concerns was understanding the implications of the nuclear age. Though he was immersed in a vibrant and influential circle of 20th-century intellectuals including Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno, he is little known in the English-speaking world. Previous work in English has surveyed and situated Anders in his philosophical milieu and undertaken investigations of his arc as a post-Marxist critic of technology; more broadly, Anders is generally viewed as an anti-nuclear theoretician. This dissertation views Anders first and foremost as an organizer and activist, one who pursued writerly attempts to grapple with a movement mobilization problem across three eras of anti-nuclear protest. I argue that Anders' philosophy is best viewed as a series of imaginative interventions intended to enable people to undertake resistance within the confines of the nuclear security state. I approach the argument in four chapters. In the first, I show how Anders reacted to crises of competence and authority by recruiting a network of prestigious scientific correspondents. The second chapter examines his epistolary exchange with the former bomber pilot Claude Eatherly in order to see how the philosopher attempted to frame and deploy Eatherly as a moral exemplar and unifying activist symbol. The third examines the tensions between Anders' exacting literary standards and the global demands of translation for a multilingual, international activist audience. The final chapter follows Anders to the limits of writerly language and analyzes the philosopher's eventual endorsement of violence. Ultimately, I show that Anders' concrete, occasional methods for philosophy were overwhelmed by his inability to maintain contact with rapidly fragmenting, highly changeable arrays of affiliation and identification within the activist milieus of the late Cold War.