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, ... More

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.