by Dickon Edwards At the end of each year, critics like to put out their lists of highlights. In a similar vein, the following represents my own survey of the year 2019 in terms of the books and other media which affected my field of research. My field is camp modernism. ‘Camp’ as in the aesthetic of exaggeration and parody, often with implications of identity, and literary ‘modernism’, as in the innovative literature of the early twentieth century. My argument is that the best examples of camp modernism in literature are the works of a British writer who tends these days to be overlooked, Ronald Firbank. Firbank published a series of novels from 1915 to his death in 1926, including Vainglory, Valmouth, and The Flower Beneath the Foot.  He is described in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’ as one of the two ‘conscious ideologists of camp’, the other being Oscar Wilde.[1] In May 2019 Sontag’s essay was used as the theme to one of the biggest events in the American celebrity and fashion world – the opening gala for the summer exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Or as it’s usually known more simply, the Met Gala. This year’s gala required guests to interpret the exhibition’s title, ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’. Among the guests was Billy Porter, the actor from the TV series Pose, which narrates the lives of trans people of colour during the New York drag balls of the late 1980s. At the Met Gala, Porter dressed in gold lamé as an androgynous Egyptian-like deity from the ancient world, carried on a litter by a group of half-naked men in similarly ornate Egyptian veils, matched more anachronistically with gold painted jeans. On Twitter, Porter supplied his own annotation to his costume: ‘The Category Is: Old Testament Realness.’[2] Viewers of Pose, or indeed RuPaul’s Drag Race, will recognise that statement as a catchphrase from drag contests. The serious implication is that camp plays with the idea of categories as received structures of power. Camp asks what defines such categories, who defines them, what they mean, and why they exist at all. I was reminded of the way that modernism, too, is a much-questioned category, and that it’s works like Firbank’s novels or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) which bring this interrogative aspect of camp into the category of literary modernism. Happily for me, the catalogue accompanying the Met exhibition begins with a epigraph from Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory (1915), one which also relates to Billy Porter’s costume: ‘If we are all a part of God then God must indeed be horrible’.[3] As Firbank’s line suggests, among camp’s targets of categories and power is religion – Firbank particularly specialises in camp humour about Catholicism, as exemplified in his last novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). The irony about the Met Gala, of course, is that the event itself is a demonstration of a type of power in 2019, namely the power attributed to celebrities and fashion designers. The use of the Sontag essay as a theme, meanwhile, suggests that ‘Notes on Camp’ has become a kind of religious text in itself on the subject of camp, with Sontag herself now an intellectual deity, much worshipped and much consulted. Though thankfully, not unquestioned herself: 2019 saw the publication of a major biography of Sontag by Benjamin Moser, which portrayed her, not always kindly, as a camp icon herself – a self-mythologising intellectual diva. One result of all this camp discussion in May was that journalists were suddenly talking about my field of research.  Sometimes they got their facts wrong. The BBC news site...