20th-century Literature and Modernism : oso

The Strong Spirit

Andrew Gibson — 2013-05-23

Author:: Andrew Gibson
ISBN:: 9780199642502
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199642502.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-05-23

This study provides the first comprehensive historicization of Joyce’s writings from 1898 to 1915 in relation to the distinct phases of British-Irish history during the period—1898–1903, 1904–6, 1906–12, 1912–15—and their shifting currents. It also pays close attention to the (sometimes different) historical contexts on which the works focus. The young Joyce emerges, in a new and distinctive intellectual portrait of him, as a very particular, modern kind of ‘strong spirit’ (to use his term), a late colonial artist passionately committed to freedom and justice for Ireland, yet also a radical doubter, rigorously sceptical about any prospect of their realization. At the turn of the century, with a concept of ‘national resurgence’ much in the Irish air, Joyce meditates on art as a distinctive form of anti-colonial and emancipatory project. His early essays espouse a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment within a colonial culture. However, the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution in 1903, the election of 1906, and the Third Home Rule Bill crisis of 1912 call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the ‘Triestine Writings’, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to the problematics of Irish emancipation by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it. The result is a set of varied, extremely subtle and complex, or ‘labyrinthine’, structures of thought anticipating the extraordinary aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy

Kirsty Martin — 2013-05-23

Author:: Kirsty Martin
ISBN:: 9780199674084
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-05-23

How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others’ autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily, and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word ‘empathy’), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response. Attending closely to the detail of literary texts—to literary depictions of gesture, movement, and rhythm, to literary explorations of the bodily and of transcendence—this book argues that central to modernism was an ideal of sympathy that was morally complex, but that was driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel. Offering new readings of major literary texts, and original research into their historical contexts, this book also sets modernist texts alongside recent discussions of emotion and cognition. It offers a fresh reading of literary modernism, and it suggests how modernism might continue to unsettle our thinking about feeling today.

Fictions of Autonomy

Andrew Goldstone — 2013-05-23

Author:: Andrew Goldstone
ISBN:: 9780199861125
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861125.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-05-23

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 Birth of a Jungle

Michael Lundblad — 2013-05-23

Author:: Michael Lundblad
ISBN:: 9780199917570
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199917570.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-05-23

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

On Literary Worlds

Eric Hayot — 2013-01-24

Author:: Eric Hayot
ISBN:: 9780199926695
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926695.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

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.

At the Violet Hour

Sarah Cole — 2013-01-24

Author:: Sarah Cole
ISBN:: 9780195389616
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389616.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

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.

The Poor Bugger’s Tool

Patrick R. Mullen — 2012-09-20

Author:: Patrick R. Mullen
ISBN:: 9780199746699
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746699.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

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.

English as a Vocation

Christopher Hilliard — 2012-09-20

Author:: Christopher Hilliard
ISBN:: 9780199695171
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Criticism/Theory, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695171.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book is a history of the most influential movement in modern British literary criticism. F. R. Leavis and his collaborators on the Cambridge journal Scrutiny in the 1920s and 1930s demonstrated compelling ways of reading modernist poetry, Shakespeare, and the ‘texts’ of advertising. Crucially, they offered a way of teaching critical reading, an approach that could be adapted for schools and adult education classes, modelled in radio talks and paperback guides to English Literature, and taken up in universities as far afield as Colombo and Sydney. This book shows how a small critical school turned into a movement with an international reach. It tracks down Leavis's students, analysing the pattern of their social origins and subsequent careers in the context of twentieth-century social change. It shows how teachers transformed Scrutiny approaches as they tried to put them into practice in grammar and secondary modern schools. And it explores the complex, even contradictory politics of the movement. Champions of creative writing and enemies of ‘progressive’ education alike based their arguments on Scrutiny's interpretation of modern culture. ‘Left-Leavisites’ such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall wrought influential interpretations of social class and popular culture out of arguments with the Scrutiny tradition. This is the first book to examine major figures such as these alongside the hundreds of other teachers and writers in the movement whose names are obscure but who wrestled with the same challenges: how do you approach a baffling poem? How do you uncover what an advertisement is trying to do? How can literature inform our everyday experiences and judgements? What does ‘culture’ mean in modern times?

World Views

Jon Hegglund — 2012-05-24

Author:: Jon Hegglund
ISBN:: 9780199796106
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796106.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.

Maps of Utopia

Simon J. James — 2012-05-24

Author:: Simon J. James
ISBN:: 9780199606597
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199606597.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man’s only alternative to self‐destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells’s late‐Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries—with consequences for the nature both of Wells’s writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late‐Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870–1 Education Acts. It considers Wells’s best‐known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono‐Bungay. It also examines less well‐known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon, and Wells’s journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells’s best‐selling book in his own lifetime.

Americanizing Britain

Genevieve Abravanel — 2012-05-24

Author:: Genevieve Abravanel
ISBN:: 9780199754458
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754458.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

Unseasonable Youth

Jed Esty — 2012-01-19

Author:: Jed Esty
ISBN:: 9780199857968
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199857968.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siècle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development – never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.

Synge and Edwardian Ireland

Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene — 2012-01-19

Author:: BrianCliffLecturer in Irish Studies, Trinity College DublinNicholasGreneProfessor of English Literature, Trinity College Dublin
ISBN:: 9780199609888
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609888.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

J. M. Synge’s dramatic career, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almost exactly coincided with the years of Edward VII’s reign. Those years have long been studied in a British context, but this is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge’s work—including a new sociological awareness, the rise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the arts and crafts movement, Irish classical music, and comedic writing by Somerville and Ross—this collection shows how the Revival’s preoccupation with folk culture intersected with the new networks of mass communication in the late imperial world. Although Synge is best known as a dramatist, this book concentrates on his prose and the ethnography of his photographs, the work in which his engagement with Edwardian Ireland can be most significantly seen. Often misunderstood as apolitical, Synge’s writings and photography display a romantic resistance to modernity alongside their more accurate observations of contemporary conditions. It is through this ambivalent modernity that his work continued to haunt not just advocates like W.B. Yeats but even Synge’s critics, including Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, all of whom were forced to come to imaginative terms with Synge through their own work. This book aims to change readers’ sense of Synge’s significance, and by doing so to illuminate in a quite new way the era of Edwardian Ireland during this period of rapid modernization.

‘Strandentwining Cable’

Scarlett Baron — 2012-01-19

Author:: Scarlett Baron
ISBN:: 9780199693788
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693788.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

‘Strandentwining Cable’ explores the works of two of the most admired and mythologized masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose: Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) and James Joyce (1882–1941). This book is a study of their literary relationship. In six chronologically ordered chapters it carries out a detailed intertextual analysis of Joyce’s engagement with Flaubert over the entire course of his writing career. In doing this, it delineates the contours and uncovers the effects of one of the most crucially formative artistic relationships of Joyce’s life, charting the stages of a complex and ceaselessly evolving connection. Travelling through Flaubert’s native Normandy in 1925, on a holiday trip that bears all the appearances of a pilgrimage journey, Joyce acknowledged to himself – in a private notebook devoted to the preparation of Finnegans Wake – that ‘Gustave Flaubert can rest having made me.’ The book identifies and interprets the traces of Joyce’s responses to Flaubert from his early work through Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Drawing on extensive bibliographical, archival, and manuscript evidence, it sheds light on the timing and circumstances of Joyce’s reading of such Flaubertian masterpieces as Madame Bovary and L’éducation sentimentale as well as of lesser- known works such as Salammbô, La Tentation de saint Antoine, Trois Contes, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues. Examining letters, notebooks, drafts, and published texts, it shows that in all his creative endeavours Joyce uses Flaubert’s writing to think through the dynamics and implications of any text’s inevitable relations to other texts, and argues that these reflections helped crystallize his own sense of literature as a dense intertextual web of ‘strandentwining cables’. Ultimately, this study contends that the ever more radical and self-conscious nature of the citational methods Joyce adopted and adapted from Flaubert paved the way for the emergence of intertextual theory in the 1960s.

Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes — 2012-01-19

Author:: Edward J. Hughes
ISBN:: 9780199609864
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

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.

Pragmatic Modernism

Lisi Schoenbach — 2012-01-19

Author:: Lisi Schoenbach
ISBN:: 9780195389845
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389845.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

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.

Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey

Nergis Erturk — 2012-01-19

Author:: Nergis Erturk
ISBN:: 9780199746682
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746682.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Challenging comparative methodologies based on models of literary influence, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey argues that the emergence of modern Turkish literature cannot be understood independently of a discourse of phonocentrism that first matured in the mid-nineteenth century, with the unprecedented intensification of print and translational practices in Ottoman Turkey. While mid-nineteenth century proposals to simplify Ottoman Turkish and to reform its orthography were generally propelled by desire to overcome the diglossia of Ottoman Turkish, the discourse of phonocentrism took an explicitly nationalist turn by the turn of the twentieth century, aiming for the establishment of an impossibly self-same or self-identical Turkish identity. Of particular significance are the Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced Perso-Arabic lettering with Latin phonetic orthography, and the purging during the 1930s of Arabic and Persian loan words. In readings of literary works by Recâizade Ekrem, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Peyami Safa, and Nâzım Hikmet, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey suggests that the modern literary archive, profoundly self-conscious of its own conditions of possibility, continuously dramatizes and exposes the limits of historically new writing practices. Where Eurocentrist critical discourse idealizes the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful will to rational modernity, the literary texts analyzed in this book offer an alternative critical narrative: one of extreme self-surgery and profound self-alienation. Staging an alternative, non-identarian relation to the Turkish “mother tongue,” these literary works point to the possibility of an open communicability, cognizant of difference.

Yeats and Violence

Michael Wood — 2011-10-03

Author:: Michael Wood
ISBN:: 9780199557660
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557660.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.

Writing Weimar

David Midgley — 2011-10-03

Author:: David Midgley
ISBN:: 9780198151791
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151791.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The years of the Weimar Republic saw complex cultural change in Germany as well as political turmoil. This book draws on the large amount of research done on the period since the 1980s in order to show how literary writers developed critical perspectives on the social and political issues of the time, and how those perspectives are related to longer-term developments in German culture that run beyond the watershed events of 1918 and 1933. Individual chapters discuss the dominant trends in the poetry, the theatre, and the novel, as well as the literary representations of the city, technology, and the First World War. The book also sheds new light on one of the abiding mysteries of German culture in the 1920s: precisely what were the implications of the term ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ as it came to be applied to the cultural trends of the time?

The Woman Reader 1837–1914

Kate Flint — 2011-10-03

Author:: Kate Flint
ISBN:: 9780198121855
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121855.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book provides an invaluable source of information on nineteenth-century culture and the woman reader. Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read? The book examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and poetry, through medical and psychoanalytic works, advice manuals and periodicals, to autobiographies and contemporary social research, in her detailed study of this central cultural debate in nineteenth-century society. Engaging also in recent feminist theory, the book explores the manipulation of the figure of the woman reader in well-known works like Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, in sensation novels and New Woman fiction, and in stories found in series such as The Princess’s Novelettes. This is supported by evidence from actual readers — working women, as well as the privileged — as to how they understood their own highly varied reading experiences.

Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance

Alice Fox — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alice Fox
ISBN:: 9780198129882
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129882.001.0001
Published in print:: 1990
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.

Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures

Charles Forsdick — 2011-10-03

Author:: Charles Forsdick
ISBN:: 9780199258291
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199258291.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book studies 20th-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, this book complements these by presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent. This book explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of ‘elsewhere’. It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of travel (and travel literature) across the 20th century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early 20th-century reflection on travel and exoticism and Albert Kahn's ‘Archives de la Planète’, the book goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroën 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of Nicholas Bouvier and the ‘Pour une littérature voyageuse’ movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature.

The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939

Ritchie Robertson — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ritchie Robertson
ISBN:: 9780199248889
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248889.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is a literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Trying to avoid hindsight and drawing on a wide range of literary texts, this book offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. It examines both literary portrayals of Jews by Gentile writers — whether antisemitic, friendly, or ambivalent — and efforts to reinvent Jewish identities by the Jews themselves, in response to antisemitism culminating in Zionism. The author deals with German-Jewish relations comprehensively and over a long period of literary history.

The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan — 2011-10-03

Author:: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
ISBN:: 9780198184997
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184997.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This study engages with the troubled question of authorial subjectivity and ethics in Modernism in general and in Conrad's short fiction in particular, and offers an original theoretical perspective, inspired by the work of Derrida and the early philosophical writings of M. M. Bakhtin. Part One of the book focuses on the relational dynamics in Under Western Eyes and The Secret Sharer, and develops a ‘heterobiographical’ reading matrix, which serves as a psycho-textual and philosophical approach to modes of authorial presence in the text. Part Two offers close readings of ten short stories spanning the whole of Conrad's career and clustered into five chapters — Writing and Fratricide, The Pathos of Authenticity, The Poetics of Cultural Despair, The Romantic paradox, and Addressing the Woman. This part of the book engages with the interpretative problems posed by these stories through a cultural-historical perspective, linking Conrad's essentially Romantic sensibility and his unique position on the threshold of Modernism with some of the issues that have emerged from the ‘Postmodern turn’: the relationship between metaphysics and subjectivity, the conception of inter-subjectivity as prior to and constitutive of subjectivity; the permeability of textual and psychological boundary-lines; and the desire for subjective aesthetization.

Strange Country

Seamus Deane — 2011-10-03

Author:: Seamus Deane
ISBN:: 9780198184904
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184904.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues: national character, conflict between discipline and excess, division between the languages of economics and sensibility, and modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture–its novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, and poems–take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised.

Space, Conrad, and Modernity

Con Coroneos — 2011-10-03

Author:: Con Coroneos
ISBN:: 9780198187363
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187363.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Recent literary and cultural criticism has taken a spatial turn. This book locates this development within the opposition between a space of things and a space of words, tracing various aspects of its emergence from the geopolitical idea of ‘closed space’ which developed in the early 20th century to the influence of Saussurean linguistics in contemporary criticism and theory. The focus of the study is the work of Joseph Conrad, in whom the opposition between a space of words and a space of things is strikingly figured. Part I deals with several versions of closed space to raise questions about the relations between geography, language, and interpretation. Part II deals with the agitation around finitude and the limit, and the desperate attempt to discover in the resources of language a means of liberation. Through these ideas the book explores some of the more disreputable, marginal, or unglimpsed elements in modernism — including the rise of spy fiction, anarchist geography, the spiritualist movement, the invention of artificial languages, the history of laughter, and solar energy. Among the figures drawn into dialogue with Conrad are John Buchan, Woolf, Joyce, Peter Kropotkin, René de Saussure (brother of the famous Ferdinand), Henri Bergson, the filmmakers George Méliès and Carol Reed and, in particular, Michel Foucault — this ‘nouvelle cartographe’ as Gilles Deleuze described him — whose anxious negotiation with spatial ideas touches the book's deepest understanding.

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain

Ruvani Ranasinha — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ruvani Ranasinha
ISBN:: 9780199207770
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199207770.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

Science and Structure in Proust's

Nicola Luckhurst — 2011-10-03

Author:: Nicola Luckhurst
ISBN:: 9780198160021
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160021.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

The Reluctant Modernist

Roger Keys — 2011-10-03

Author:: Roger Keys
ISBN:: 9780198151609
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151609.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Andrei Belyi (1880–1934) is generally regarded as the greatest and most influential prose-writer to emerge from the Symbolist movement in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. His early prose ‘symphonies’ and novels are often compared with the work of such European ‘modernists’ as Joyce and Proust. This book attempts an analysis of the place of Belyi's fiction within the modernist prose tradition in Russia; a tradition which has been obscured by decades of ideological distortion. Paradoxically, Belyi himself, a mystic by nature who sought only transcendent certainty from the flux of experience, would have been reluctant to claim this tradition as his own. This book demonstrates the inadequacy of the various ‘isms’ (Symbolism, Impressionism, etc.) which have until recently bedevilled most critical attempts to sort out the prose of the period, giving an overview of Belyi criticism from both within and outside the Soviet Union. The book includes a detailed analysis of Belyi's prose works, paying attention to his philosophical and literary influences, including reading of Kant and Gogol and its particular effect upon his theory and practice, and locating him in his own Russian context. Sections devoted to Belyi's greatest novel, Petersburg, and other works, such as The Silver Dove and Dramatic Symphony, analyse Belyi's use of structure and plot, leitmotifs and acoustic symbolism. The book marks Belyi's attempts to reconcile the Symbolist vision of the writer as having revelatory mystical authority with the concept of ‘perspectivism’, implied author, narrator and character offering a number of different voices which cannot claim cognitive authority beyond the fictional context in which they occur.

Proustian Passions

Ingrid Wassenaar — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ingrid Wassenaar
ISBN:: 9780198160045
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160045.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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?

Obscure Objects of Desire Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

Johanna Malt — 2011-10-03

Author:: Johanna Malt
ISBN:: 9780199253425
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Angela Smith — 2011-10-03

Author:: Angela Smith
ISBN:: 9780198183983
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183983.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) described being haunted by her in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, this book explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Their particular inflection of modernism is interpreted through their shared experience as ‘threshold people’, familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone of transition and habitation. Writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, this book shows how the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterised by moments of disorienting suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, and the domestic made menacing.

Kafka

Ritchie Robertson — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ritchie Robertson
ISBN:: 9780198158141
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158141.001.0001
Published in print:: 1987
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Franz Kafka wrote Das Urteil, his first major work of literature, in a single night in the autumn of 1912. It was for him a breakthrough, and closely connected with it was the awakening of his interest in Jewish culture. This is a general study of Kafka, which explores the literary and historical context of his writings, and links them with his emergent sense of Jewish identity. What is emphasized throughout is Kafka's concern with contemporary society — his distrust of its secular, humanitarian ideals — and his desire for a new kind of community, based on religion.

Joyce's Kaleidoscope

Philip Kitcher — 2011-10-03

Author:: Philip Kitcher
ISBN:: 9780195321029
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195321029.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as a masterpiece of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread. Its linguistic novelties, layered allusions, and experimental form can make it seem impenetrable. This book attempts to dissolve the darkness that surrounds the Wake and to display instead its mesmerizing play of light. The book offers an original, appealing interpretation of Joyce's novel while also suggesting an approach to the magnum opus. Focusing throughout on the book's central themes, the book proposes that Finnegans Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question—“What makes a life worth living?”—that Joyce explores from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now at its end. Alert to echoes, the book progresses through the novel, adding texture to his portrait of an aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and who he has been. The novel's complex dream language becomes meaningful when seen as a way for Joyce to investigate issues that are hard to face directly, common though they may be. At times the view is clouded, at times it's the music or sheer comedy that predominates, but one experiences in the retrospective momentum a brilliant clarity unlike anything else in literature. With a startlingly profound compassion and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel, this book believes, is a call to life itself.

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan — 2011-10-03

Author:: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
ISBN:: 9780198117858
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117858.001.0001
Published in print:: 1991
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

A study which relates Conrad’s work to the crisis of modernity in the late 19th century, this book discusses ‘faultlines’ — ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures — in nine of the major novels and novellas. These faultlines are diagnosed as the symptoms of an unresolved tension between Conrad’s temperamental affinity with the Nietzschean outlook and his fierce ideological rejection of its ultimate implications. Presenting Conrad as ‘a modernist at war with modernity’, the book studies the perpetual tug-of-war between the artistic will to meaning and the writer’s susceptibility to the modern temper, both as a theme and as a structuring principle in his work. The modes of this struggle are defined as the ‘failure of myth’, the ‘failure of metaphysics’, and the ‘failure of textuality’. The inquiry draws on the work of Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Bakhtin, Heller, and MacIntyre, amongst others, to present the ethical and epistemological issues which are interwoven with Conrad’s aesthetics.

Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma

John W. Griffith — 2011-10-03

Author:: John W. Griffith
ISBN:: 9780198183006
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183006.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is a detailed analysis of Conrad’s early fiction, which as a response to his travels in so-called primitive cultures: Malaysia, Borneo, and the Congo. As a sensitive observer of other peoples and a notable émigré acute, he was profoundly aware of the psychological impact of travel, and much of his early fiction portrays both literal and figurative voyages of Europeans into other cultures. By situating Conrad’s work in relation to other writings on ‘primitive’ peoples, the book shows how his fiction draws on a prominent anthropological and biological dilemma: he constantly posed the question of how to bridge conceptual and cultural gaps between various peoples. As the book demonstrates, this was a dilemma which coincided with a larger Victorian debate regarding the progression or retrogression of European civilization.

History and Value

Frank Kermode — 2011-10-03

Author:: Frank Kermode
ISBN:: 9780198122241
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Criticism/Theory, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122241.001.0001
Published in print:: 1989
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The author returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we appear to have forgotten how urgent and powerful it seemed in a time of economic crisis and imminent world war. The general questions suggested by the title are answered first by a study of bourgeois left-wing literature in the 1930s – including a case study of a forgotten novel of the period (Stephen Haggard's Nya) – and then by a consideration of the problem of value in work belonging to a period earlier than one's own. The last chapter concentrates on the most recent attempt to make these issues manageable – namely, postmodernism, which rejects all notions of wholeness, and speaks of a catastrophic break with the past.

Edwardian Poetry

Kenneth Millard — 2011-10-03

Author:: Kenneth Millard
ISBN:: 9780198122258
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122258.001.0001
Published in print:: 1991
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The poets writing in the first years of the 20th century have commonly been discussed in isolation. This book considers together seven poets — Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, A. E. Housman, John Davidson, and Rupert Brooke — and argues that their work is worthy of more serious critical attention than it has previously received. Through an analysis of numerous individual poems, the chapter isolates certain common concerns: the changing and perhaps fading value of England; a distrust of the medium of language itself; a distrust also of the creative imagination. In its reassessment of these poets, the book provides a literary context for their work, finding in it a kind of pre-War modern British poetry distinct from the Modernism of subsequent decades. In establishing a literary context for the poetry of this century's first decade the book offers a revision of modern literary history and points towards an alternative line in 20th-century British poetry that culminates in the work of Philip Larkin.

Death and the Author

David Ellis — 2011-10-03

Author:: David Ellis
ISBN:: 9780199546657
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199546657.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

At the heart of this book is a dramatic account of D. H. Lawrence's desperate struggle against tuberculosis during his last days, and of certain, often bizarre events that followed his death. Around this narrative, the author offers a series of reflections about what it is like to have a disease for which there is no cure, the appeal of alternative medicine, the temptation of suicide for the terminally ill, the diminishing role of religion in modern life, the institution of famous last words, the consequences of dying intestate, and so on. These are clearly not the most immediately appealing of topics, but they have an obvious significance for everyone and the treatment of them here is by no means lugubrious. Lawrence is the main focus throughout, but there are extended references to a number of other famous literary consumptives such as Keats, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka, Chekhov, and George Orwell. Not a long book, it is divided into three parts called ‘Dying’, ‘Death’ and ‘Remembrance’ and is made up of twenty-two short sections. Although it incorporates a good deal of original material, the annotation has been kept deliberately light. The aim has been to combine the drama of events — a good story — with a consideration of matters that must eventually concern us all, and to present the material in a lively and accessible form.

D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’

Amit Chaudhuri and Tom Paulin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Amit Chaudhuri, Tom Paulin
ISBN:: 9780199260522
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their ‘difference.’ In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English ‘great tradition,’ this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of ‘Englishness’ itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic set him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian ‘difference’ is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, it involves a search for a critical language by which the poetry, and its ‘difference’, might be addressed. In doing so, this book takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘grammatology’ and ‘ecriture’, and Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, ‘The Poetry of the Present,’ this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critiqued the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. The book also, radically, allows a post-colonial identity to inform the reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity.

D. H. Lawrence

Anne Fernihough — 2011-10-03

Author:: Anne Fernihough
ISBN:: 9780198112358
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.001.0001
Published in print:: 1993
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasizing the influence on this most ‘English’ of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, the author focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910–1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's ‘green’ critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Sigmund Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.

Conrad's Narrative Method

Jakob Lothe — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jakob Lothe
ISBN:: 9780198122555
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122555.001.0001
Published in print:: 1991
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book applies recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad's works. Using a broadly structuralist approach, the book analyses Conrad's sophisticated narrative method, focusing on his use of devices, functions, variations, and thematic effects or implications. More widely, the book explores the relationship between Conrad's narrative method and the complex thematics engendered and shaped by this method. Discussing the notions of major post-structuralist critics such as Edward W. Said and J. Hillis Miller, the book develops and applies a critical methodology which is flexible enough to respond to the varying interpretative problems presented by Conrad's fiction.

Conrad and Women

Susan Jones — 2011-10-03

Author:: Susan Jones
ISBN:: 9780198184485
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184485.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Supported by an enduring critical paradigm, the traditional account of Conrad's career privileges his public image as man of the sea, addressing himself to a male audience and male concerns. This book challenges received assumptions by recovering Conrad's relationship to women not only in his life but in his fiction and among his readers. The existing interplay of criticism, biography, and marketing has contributed to a masculinist image associated with a narrow body of modernist texts. Instead, this book reinstates the female influences arising from his early Polish life and culture; his friendship with the French writer Marguerite Poradowska; his engagement with popular women's writing; and his experimentation with visuality as his later works appear in the visual contexts of women's pages of popular journals. By foregrounding less familiar novels such as Chance (1913) and the neglected Suspense (unfinished and published posthumously, 1925), the book emphasizes the range and continuity of Conrad's concerns, showing that his later discussions of gender and genre often originate in the period of the great sea tales. Conrad also emerges as an acute reader and critic of popular forms, while his unexpected entry into important contemporary debates about female identity invites us to rethink the nature of his contribution to modernism.

British Writing of the Second World War

Mark Rawlinson — 2011-10-03

Author:: Mark Rawlinson
ISBN:: 9780198184560
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184560.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices that connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relation both to propaganda and to Peoples' War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, prisoners of war, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.

Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 To 1939

W. J. McCormack — 2011-10-03

Author:: W. J. McCormack
ISBN:: 9780198128069
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128069.001.0001
Published in print:: 1985
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The period between Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce was a critical force in the development of modernist literature in the origins of Protestant Ascendancy ideology. This study uncovers the origins of Ascendancy and traces its cultural significance by means of a series of detailed critiques of central texts and concepts.

The Abbey Theatre, 1899-1999

Robert Welch — 2011-10-03

Author:: Robert Welch
ISBN:: 9780198121879
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121879.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.

A Sense of Shock

Adam Parkes — 2011-09-22

Author:: Adam Parkes
ISBN:: 9780195383812
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383812.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

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.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play

Thomas Karshan — 2011-05-01

Author:: Thomas Karshan
ISBN:: 9780199603985
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603985.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘everything in the world plays’, including ‘love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns’. Each of Nabokov's novels contains a scene of games: chess, Scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play. This book studies this central theme in Nabokov, and the first work apart from Boyd's critical biography to draw in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, only collected and republished in 1999 to 2000, and on highly restricted archival material in New York and Washington. It argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and indeed that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. It traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As it does so it demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and Alexander Pope and the humanist tradition of the literary game. As such it provides what is the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for and influence on contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard.

The Passage of Literature

Christopher GoGwilt — 2011-01-01

Author:: Christopher GoGwilt
ISBN:: 9780199751624
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751624.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

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.

Stevie Smith and Authorship

William May — 2010-09-01

Author:: William May
ISBN:: 9780199583379
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583379.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902–71). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as a dotty eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. The book follows her work through draft and proof stages, showing her reluctance to cede editorial control to her publishers, considers how her performances undermine her printed texts, and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry. It also draws on reader-response theory to re-examine the construction of her literary biography in her novels and essays, recasting her as mastermind, rather than victim, of her own critical reputation. The book is also the first to consider the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

Self Impression

Max Saunders — 2010-05-01

Author:: Max Saunders
ISBN:: 9780199579761
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-05-01

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.

Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Matthew Hart — 2010-05-01

Author:: Matthew Hart
ISBN:: 9780195390339
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-05-01

This book explores what happens when poets identify vernacular language with the spirit of transnational modernity. It asks whether vernacular poetries are doomed to be provincial or implicitly xenophobic. And it explains how modernist poets created new “synthetic vernacular” discourses in order to reimagine the relations among people, their languages, and the communities in which they live. This book begins with introductory chapters on the formal, literary‐historical, and ideological implications of “synthetic vernacular” writing. It then offers five case studies of Scottish, English, Caribbean, African‐American, and Anglo‐American poetries from the high modernist period through the 1990s. It combines discussions of critical theory and political history with extended analysis of poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamau Brathwaite and T. S. Eliot, Melvin B. Tolson and Harryette Mullen, and Mina Loy. In doing so, it produces a new interpretation of Anglophone modernism that disrupts the literary‐critical antinomy between “national” and “transnational” aesthetic and ideological values. Describing how poets make “synthetic vernacular” poems out of a disordered medley of formal and linguistic parts, this book explains how poetic modernism is shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of twentieth‐century history, in which the nation‐state's status as a primary mediator of cultural and political identity comes under unprecedented pressure but does not break.

Conrad and History

Richard Niland — 2010-05-01

Author:: Richard Niland
ISBN:: 9780199580347
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580347.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-05-01

This work examines the philosophy of history and the subject of the nation in the literature of Joseph Conrad. It explores the importance of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic philosophy in Conrad's literary development, arguing that the Polish response to Hegelian traditions of historiography in nineteenth-century Europe influenced Conrad's interpretation of history. After investigating Conrad's early career in the context of the philosophy of history, the book analyses Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) in light of Conrad's writing about Poland and his sustained interest in the subject of national identity. These novels treat the question of the nation and history, with Conrad juxtaposing his belief in an inherited Polish national identity, derived from Herder and Rousseau, with a sceptical questioning of modern nationalism in European and Latin American contexts. Nostromo presents the creation of the modern nation state of Sulaco; The Secret Agent explores the subject of ‘foreigners’ and nationality in England; while Under Western Eyes constitutes a systematic attempt to undermine Russian national identity. Conrad emerges as an author who examines critically the forces of nationalism and national identity that troubled Europe throughout the nineteenth century and in the period before the First World War. This leads to a consideration of Conrad's work during the Great War. In his fiction and newspaper articles, Conrad found a way of dealing with a conflict that made him acutely aware of being sidelined at a turning point in both modern Polish and modern European history. Finally, this book re-evaluates Conrad's late novels The Rover (1923) and Suspense (1925), a long-neglected part of his career, investigating Conrad's sustained treatment of French history in his last years alongside his life-long fascination with the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Serious Poetry

Peter McDonald — 2010-01-01

Author:: Peter McDonald
ISBN:: 9780199235803
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.

Modern English War Poetry

Tim Kendall — 2010-01-01

Author:: Tim Kendall
ISBN:: 9780199562022
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562022.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

This book offers the fullest account to date of a tradition of modern English war poetry. Stretching from the Boer War to the present day, it focuses on many of the 20th-century's finest poets — combatants and non-combatants alike — and considers how they address the ethical challenges of making art out of violence. Poetry, we are often told, makes nothing happen. But war makes poetry happen: the war poet must transform even the most appalling experiences. This book not only assesses the problematic relationship between war and its poets, it also encourages an urgent reconsideration of the modern poetry canon and the (too often marginalized) position of war poetry within it. The aesthetic and ethical values on which canonical judgements have been based are carefully scrutinized via a detailed analysis of individual poets, including Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, Ted Hughes, and Geoffrey Hill.

The Victorians and Old Age

Karen Chase — 2009-09-01

Author:: Karen Chase
ISBN:: 9780199564361
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199564361.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

This book examines old age as it was culturally constructed in the 19th century. It begins with the agitated relations set in motion when the increasing number of elderly people unable to provide adequately for themselves found it necessary to contend with sciences which would classify them, arts which would represent them, and a state which was slow to adopt measures of support. The book analyzes illuminating moments in these relations which are displayed variously in narrative form, social policy and cultural attitudes. It considers the centrality of institutions and of the generational divide; it traces the power and powerlessness of age through a range of characters and individuals as distinct from one another as Dickens's inebriated nurse, Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; it studies specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions attached to aging and the complexities of representing age in pictorial and statistical “portraits.” The chapters are organized around major literary works set alongside episodes and artifacts, diaries and memoirs, images and inscriptions, that produced (and now illuminate) the construction of old age through Victoria's long reign. The argument demonstrates that if old age became for the Victorians such a conspicuous public topic and problem, it also became an intensely private preoccupation. The social formation of old age created terms, images, and narratives that lone individuals used to fashion the stories of their lives. The book is intent to respect the specificity of aging: not only the wide diversities of circumstance (rich and poor, urban and rural, watched and forgotten, powerful and dispossessed) but also the distinct acts of representation by novelists, painters, journalists, sociologists and diary-keepers.

'Tinkers'

Mary Burke — 2009-09-01

Author:: Mary Burke
ISBN:: 9780199566464
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566464.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

The history of the Irish minority Traveller community is not analogous to that of the ‘tinker’, a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by 16th-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J. M. Synge’s influential The Tinker’s Wedding was pivotal to this ‘Irishing’ of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure’s cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge’s empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-Independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labelled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the ‘tinker’ fantasy. Such change shapes contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Travele as lovable ‘white trash’ rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the ‘tinker’ is much more central to Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognized.

Fin de millénaire French Fiction

Ruth Cruickshank — 2009-09-01

Author:: Ruth Cruickshank
ISBN:: 9780199571758
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571758.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

The turn of the millennium in France coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, with the growth of the mass media and global market, further generating and manipulating crisis. This book contextualizes and studies the work of four influential writers of prose fiction—Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet—teasing their responses to this convergence. It suggests that the recurrent fictional and cultural trope of the turning point has both aesthetic and critical potential. Bringing together analyses spanning literature, thought, and culture, the identifies and critiques the ways in which, on the eve of the 21st century, different theoretical and fictional approaches confront the manipulation of crisis discourses. Drawing on a ‘long twentieth century’ of crisis thinking, the book counters the perception that a postmodern model of perpetual crisis is culturally dominant, and establishes instead a new critical framework with which to respond to the fin de millénaire aesthetics of crisis. The book demonstrates how prose fictions afford critical purchase on the global market, and on French co‐implication in it. It identifies how the four contrasting writers reflect, perpetuate, and challenge the misogyny and symbolic violence of late capitalism. This book emerges as both problematic and problematizing, bespeaking the need to intervene in debates about the mass media, neoliberalism, global market economics, and sexual and postcolonial identities, while also demonstrating the enduring agency—critical and creative—of literature itself.

Modernism and the Ordinary

Liesl Olson — 2009-05-01

Author:: Liesl Olson
ISBN:: 9780195368123
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368123.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-05-01

The book overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. The book shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. The book examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. The book shows how these writers responded to the difficulty of representing the ordinary without defamilarizing it or making it transcendent. The book also connects this problem to earlier modes of literary realism on both sides of the Atlantic, and situates modernism’s preoccupation with ordinary experience within the major historical events of the period, especially the two world wars. Ultimately, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism’s most compelling attributes: day-to-day experience comes to stand not as an impediment to the creative life, but as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged.

The Art of Scandal

Sean Latham — 2009-05-01

Author:: Sean Latham
ISBN:: 9780195379990
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-05-01

This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.

Irish Novels 1890-1940

John Wilson Foster — 2008-05-01

Author:: John Wilson Foster
ISBN:: 9780199232833
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232833.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-05-01

Studies of Irish fiction are still scanty in contrast to studies of Irish poetry and drama. This book attempts to fill a large critical vacancy and surveys popular and minor fiction (mainly novels) published between 1890 and 1922, a crucial period in Irish cultural and political history. Since the bulk of these sixty-odd writers have never been written about — certainly beyond brief mentions — the book opens up for further exploration a literary landscape, hitherto neglected, perhaps even unsuspected. This new landscape should alter the familiar perspectives on Irish literature of the period, first of all by adding genre fiction (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories, New Woman fiction, and Great War novels) to the Irish syllabus, secondly by demonstrating the immense contribution of women writers to popular and mainstream Irish fiction. Among the popular and prolific female writers discussed are Mrs J. H. Riddell, B. M. Croker, M. E. Francis, Sarah Grand, Katharine Tynan, Ella MacMahon, Katherine Cecil Thurston, W. M. Letts, and Hannah Lynch. Indeed, a critical inference of the survey is that if there is a discernible tradition of the Irish novel, it is largely a female tradition. A postscript surveys novels by Irish women between 1922 and 1940 and relates them to the work of their female antecedents. This survey aims also to alter the familiar perspectives on the Ireland of 1890-1922. Many of the popular works were problem-novels and hence throw light on contemporary thinking and debate on the ‘Irish Question’. After the Irish Literary Revival and creation of the Free State, much popular and mainstream fiction became a lost archive, neglected evidence, indeed, of a lost Ireland.

The Great War and the Language of Modernism

Vincent Sherry — 2007-09-01

Author:: Vincent Sherry
ISBN:: 9780195178180
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.

Elizabeth Bowen

Neil Corcoran — 2007-09-01

Author:: Neil Corcoran
ISBN:: 9780198186908
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186908.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book offers a critical account of Elizabeth Bowen, a significant 20th-century Irish writer still too little known and appreciated. It considers her novels, short stories, essays, and family history, showing how her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. The book explores Bowen's adaptation of Irish Protestant Gothic in relation to the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, especially the London Blitz. It reads her explorations of childhood as a response both to Henry James and to the European novel of adultery. Focusing on the ideas of return and reflex, it reads the presence of the supernatural, and of other kinds of haunting, in her work in relation to concepts drawn from both Freud and T. S. Eliot. The book also makes use of non-fictional materials in its interpretations, notably, Bowen's wartime reports from neutral Ireland and the diaries of her wartime lover Charles Ritchie. The intention is to demonstrate the ways in which Bowen's writing merges personal story with public history. The book's radical readings, which depend on a wealth of original research, propose that Bowen is as important to 20th-century literary studies as her much better-known Irish Protestant fellow writer, Samuel Beckett.