20th-century Literature and Modernism

Though literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe literary history owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that form the core of the idea of technological development. No real surprise: putting progress at the center of historicity is one of the things that makes us modern. But if you think like a modern person then it's very hard to ever really make a good case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. This book makes that case. It does so by rethinking from the ground up our concepts of literary history and progress, redescribing the history we know (or think we know) in a new language that requires us to be far more worldly and global in our arguments about literary change. To do, so, the book begins with an argument that literature is a world-creating activity. Connecting the cosmographical imagination to the historical shifts in world-view caused by the Columbian discoveries and Copernican revolutions, the book shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form.

This book reevaluates twentieth-century literature and culture by studying the interrelations between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism. Each modernist formation is explained through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Conrad's canonical profile in literary histories of English modernism is placed side by side with Rhys's contested position in postcolonial accounts of Caribbean writing and Pramoedya's prominent role in the history of Indonesian anti-colonial nationalism. The different models of reading at the heart of each writer's fiction lead to a reassessment of transnational modernism. The book argues that each passage of literature becomes the site of a contest between competing genealogies of modernism and modernity. Re-examining the linguistic and literary coordinates of Anglophone modernist studies, and combining the insights of Caribbean writers and theorists with recent work in Indonesian studies, the book outlines the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology and resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.

Is Irish history at the dawn of the twenty-first century still, as Stephen Dedalus quipped, a nightmare? With the demise of the Celtic Tiger, the collapse of the housing bubble, and the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, Ireland is an island looking for a new story. This book argues that queer culture has a vital role to play in the creation of a reinvigorated national image for the Republic and for Northern Ireland. Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Roger Casement, and James Joyce, the author reveals how these writers deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. Turning to Ireland’s postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill, the book shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization. Irish queer aesthetics operate as both a mode of self-making and a novel form of social labor linked to modern transformations of capitalism. Situating his work in relation to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the author brings together the disparate fields of queer theory and theories of empire to promote Irish culture’s contributions to a more just world order. This book engages an array of sources and media to make an original contribution to Irish and modernist studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of economic and aesthetic value.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, this book traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habit, continuity, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. They developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including “habit,” “institution,” “prediction,” and “bigness,” the book offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein’s characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; or how institutions in James’s novels-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-manage to shape and influence the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism’s legacy.

As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which reached its reading public almost two decades later, A la recherche du temps perdu was being written against a backdrop of momentous historical events in France. This book seeks to establish the nature of Proust’s engagement with many of the social and national issues of the day, from his early public campaigning, pre-1908, first as a Dreyfusard and then as an opponent of the separation of Church and State in 1905, through to the mature writer’s reflection, channelled through his novel, on key ideological issues: the new patterns of leisure and social mobility, the First World War and xenophobic nationalism, and continuing evidence of class-based politics in the immediate post-war period. By reconstructing attitudes to class and nation as articulated not just by Proust but by his contemporaries (Bourget, Barrès, Daniel Halévy, Benda, and others), the book attempts to gauge his volatile responses to these issues. In this regard, A la recherche functions as a capacious warehouse in which antagonistic social attitudes are voiced and tested, often, crucially, in ironic, ambivalent ways by Proust’s Narrator and characters. Analysis of the incremental composition of the novel further helps reveal the multiple styles of response to social antagonism that Proust’s work throws up. What emerges is a complex image of Proust as a free-floating iconoclast and radical commentator, a social conservative and fitful defender of class hierarchy, and a writer who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted social-class compartmentalization.

A la recherche du temps perdu occupies an undisputed place in the unfolding intellectual history of the ‘moi’ in France. There is, however, a general tendency in writing on this novel to celebrate the wonders of the moi sensible uncritically. This effaces all that is morally dubious or frankly experimental about Proust’s account of selfhood. It denies the rigour with which Proust tries to understand exactly why it is so difficult to explain one’s own actions to another. The great party scenes, for example, or the countless digressions, read like manuals on how acts of self-justification take place. Proust, however, is not merely interested in some kind of taxonomy of excuses, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and Schadenfreude. He wants to know why self-justification tends to be interpreted as indicative of moral or psychological weakness. He asks himself whether self-justification informs isolated moments of everyday existence or whether it endures in an overall conception of self that lasts an individual’s lifetime. He investigates whether it dictates the functioning of an entire social group. Can we decide, he asks, whether justifying one’s self should be written off as morally repugnant, or taken seriously as evidence of moral probity?

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a hybrid, a novel-essay, a capacious work of fiction containing a commonplace-book. It might, as Roland Barthes has suggested, be thought of as the product of profound and cherished indecision, Proust's indecision between two styles of writing, the moralistic and the fictive/novelistic/romanesque. This book is an exploration of this indecision. The shorter Proust, Proust the moraliste, is a prolific writer of maxims, from the laws of the passions to the aesthetic manifesto of the Temps retrouvé to the rapacious teeming/fertile/spawning/exuberant/luxuriant reflections on sexuality, politics, and society. Yet these maxims, whose grammar lays claim to timelessness, are bound up in narrative, the story of their evolution and disintegration. Proust's moralizing exposes our affective relationship with law statements, with authority, and it is this question that engages A la recherce in an epistemological debate that crosses the boundaries between the two cultures, art and science. What might be called the epistemological alertness of Proust's text is explored at this interface between ‘modernist’ science and literature.

This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.

This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media. The book begins with Henry James’s response to the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, examines the controversies of Walter Pater’s circle, George Moore’s heterodox responses to nationalism in Britain and Ireland, Joseph Conrad’s representations of terrorism, Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the shocks of patriarchy, and Ford Madox Ford’s fictional account of the Great Depression, and concludes with an Epilogue on the impact of the Blitz on Elizabeth Bowen’s spy fiction. Each of these chapters illustrates Parkes’s central thesis that the formal and stylistic practices of literary impressionism emerged from dynamic and often provocative interactions between aesthetic and historical factors. Thus the book suggests how impressionism’s widely attested psychological and philosophical dimensions were inextricable from its public, historical dimensions.