20th-century and Contemporary Literature

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.

The child is a prominent figure in German literature and in German literary criticism alike. This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child’s perspective to present the Third Reich. It examines a number of texts ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s. It also considers how children at this time were brought up and educated to accept unquestioningly National Socialist ideology, and thus questions the possibility of a traditional naive perspective on these events. Authors, as diverse as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf, together with many less well-known writers had all used this perspective and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the enormity of the Third Reich. This study asks whether this perspective is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the period, or a means of discovering a new language which had not been tainted by Nazism. This raises and addresses issues central to a post-war aesthetic in German writing.

This book traces a long-standing concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and his identity as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.

This book investigates a critically important development in the history of modernity: the unprecedented marketing of various forms of authenticity in late 19th and early 20th-century Britain. The selling of objects and places allegedly free of commercial taint—what the book terms the “commodified authentic”—marks a crucial but overlooked turn in modern culture and offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. Writers, marketers, town planners, and architects simultaneously began to draw on the commodified authentic in creating novels, houses, model communities, and commercial displays. The book examines how, in these disparate works, new objects and places were packaged as mini-representations of theoretically noncommercial values; the book explores nostalgic versions of the commodified authentic (such as evocations of an authentic rural past); originary versions (such as appeals to an original, genuine article); and aesthetic versions (involving images of a purified aesthetic free from any taint of the mass market). The chapters draw on literary, commercial, and architectural examples, considering two significant clusters of activity in differing locations. The first cluster (part I, “Commodified Nostalgia and the Country Aesthetic”) focuses on the country, investigating how both rural villages and houses—well-established repositories of authentic meaning—became new sites for intense commercialization that were explicitly produced through modern industry and factory work. The second cluster (part II, “Urban Authenticities”) shifts the focus to the city, arguing that authenticity-often considered antithetical to the urban setting-was translated into malleable images developed within urban spaces. The simultaneous moves to create “authentic” spaces or objects that were supposedly outside the marketplace and also to embrace commerce as the best way to make such spaces and objects controllable and accessible in fact represented a powerful way to balance the contradictions of modernity, as well as an innovative tool to sustain the paradoxes of literary modernism.

This book remaps the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. Offering an account of the emergence of modern war culture, it explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene challenged and contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful mass media and culture industry. Modern war cultures, the book contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by claims to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. The book argues that the Great War failed to produce an official war culture, famously producing instead a war literature of protest, marked by modernist tropes of alienation and disintegration. Challenging conventional maps of modern culture, it contends that the interwar period saw a parallel logic of consolidation and reconstruction as the imperial war machine struggled to reinvent itself, culminating in the emergence of a fully mobilized and persuasive official war culture during the Second World War. The book reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war.

This book studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet‐critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Beginning with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas, the book situates these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, though in another sense drastically other, an otherness bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career‐long contemplation of the ideal of poetic ‘integrity’, and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

The exotic, it is demonstrated in this book, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to and reconfigurations of the landscape and experience of modernity. In evocations that may be principally descriptive, symbolic, imaginative, or aesthetic or metaphysical, exotic spaces contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, promotes new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigures the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment, collapse of the rational self, liberation of the imagination, and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically ‘primitive’ nature of modern experience. In original new readings of canonical authors and rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility and possibilities of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature.

The idea of aesthetic autonomy—of art as a law unto itself—was a central preoccupation of modernism. Yet recent literary scholarship has tended to reject autonomy out of hand as a denial of literature’s social and historical contexts. This book argues instead that autonomy is modernism’s distinctive mode of social relations; it demonstrates the many forms of relative autonomy modernist novelists, poets, critics, and theorists imagined and strove for. Using a combination of formalist reading, Bourdieuean sociology of culture, and historical contextualization, the book uncovers the centrality of autonomy problems and aspirations in unexpected modernist topoi: the relations between domestic servants and aesthetes; visions of literary and musical late style; the Parisian expatriate lifestyle; and the figure of tautology. Through these topoi, this book analyzes four successively more expansive versions of autonomy for the artwork: from the world of labor, from the artist’s personality, from political community, and from referentiality. The book's analysis shows that autonomy is indispensable to a historical understanding of transnational modernism from late-nineteenth-century aesthetes (Wilde, Huysmans, Henry James), to high modernists (Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens), to late modernists (Djuna Barnes, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man). Goldstone concludes that autonomy remains equally vital as a key concept for a renewed, sociologically rigorous literary study—of modernism and of other literary epochs—and an important but contentious doctrine in contemporary literature.

The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.