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Modernism: Keywords (Keywords in Literature and Culture (KILC).)
by Melba Cuddy-Keane Adam Hammond Alexandra PeatGuided by the historical semantics developed in Raymond Williams' pioneering study of cultural vocabulary, Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries on words used with frequency and urgency in “written modernism,” tracking cultural and literary debates and transformative moments of change. Short-listed for The Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection Highlights and exposes the salient controversies and changing cultural thought at the heart of modernism Goes beyond constructions of “plural modernisms” to reveal all modernist writing as overlapping and interactive in a simultaneous and interlocking mix Draws from a vast compilation of more than a thousand sources, ranging from vernacular prose to experimental literary forms Spans the “long” modernist period, from its incipient beginnings c.1880 to its post-WWII aftermath Approaches English written modernism in its own terms, tempering explanations of modernism often derived from European poets and painters Models research techniques based on digital databases and collaborative work in the humanities
Modernism: Race, Modernism, Modernity (The Basics)
by Laura WinkielModernism: The Basics provides an accessible overview of the study of modernism in its global dimensions. Examining the key concepts, history and varied forms of the field, it guides the reader through the major approaches, outlining key debates, to answer such questions as: What is modernism? How did modernism begin? Has modernism developed differently in different media? How is it related to postmodernism and postcolonialism? How have politics, urbanization and new technologies affected modernism? With engaging examples from art, literature and historical documents, each chapter provides suggestions for further reading, histories of relevant movements and clear definitions of key terminology, making this an essential guide for anyone approaching the study of modernism for the first time.
Modernism’s Second Act: A Cultural Narrative
by Ira NadelEuropean modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance.
Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Paul FortunatoOscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Women’s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright. Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wilde’s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image – both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism – thus we can call Wilde’s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.
Modernist Circumnavigations: Around the World in Jules Verne's Wake
by Kevin RiordanThis book shows how Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days changed the global imagination. Through his novel, the world was converted into a personal itinerary, scaled to the individual traveller and, by extension, to the individual reader. Exploring Verne’s modern legacy, this study shows how subsequent generations of artists and writers took on Around the World in Eighty Days as an adaptable guidebook to the modern world. It investigates how Verne’s work leads its reader beyond the book itself. It considers Verne’s place in world literature, traces some of the many real reenactments of Verne’s itinerary, and recalls the theatrical adaptations of Verne’s story. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation and the 150th anniversary of Verne’s novel, this book offers new insights into the largely overlooked influence of Verne on twentieth-century literature and culture and on the field of global modernism.
Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (Modernist Latitudes)
by Jessica BermanJessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.
Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny
by Eve C. SorumThis book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy.
Modernist Eroticisms
by European LiteratureThis volume explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in the work of a range of major European modernists (including Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Mann, Proust and Rilke) as well as in that of some less-well-known figures of the period such as Dujardin and Jahnn.
Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture (Studies in Publishing History: Manuscript, Print, Digital)
by Jennifer Julia SorensenThe years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the material forms and circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed, Jennifer Sorensen shows how authors and publishers conceptualized the material text as an object, as a body, and as an ontological problem. She examines works by Henry James, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, showing that they understood acts of reading as materially mediated encounters. Sorensen draws on recent textual theory, media theory, archival materials, and paratexts such as advertisements, illustrations, book designs, drafts, diaries, dust jackets, notes, and frontispieces, to demonstrate how these writers radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. Placing the literary text at the center of inquiry while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what counts as that, Sorensen shows that modernist generic and formal experimentation was deeply engaged with specific print histories that generated competitive media ecologies of competition and hybridization.
Modernist Fiction and News
by David Rando"Modernist Fiction and News "characterizes modernism in terms of its intimate, creative, and experimental relationship with a newly reorganized and rapidly expanding news industry. Writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf engage with the discourse and narratives of the news in order to establish an experimental space in which to represent experience with the hope of greater immediacy and faithfulness to reality. "
Modernist Fiction and Vagueness
by Megan QuigleyModernist Fiction and Vagueness marries the artistic and philosophical versions of vagueness, linking the development of literary modernism to changes in philosophy. This book argues that the problem of vagueness - language's unavoidable imprecision - led to transformations in both fiction and philosophy in the early twentieth century. Both twentieth-century philosophers and their literary counterparts (including James, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce) were fascinated by the vagueness of words and the dream of creating a perfectly precise language. Building on recent interest in the connections among analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness demonstrates that vagueness should be read not as an artistic problem but as a defining quality of modernist fiction.
Modernist Fiction: An Introduction
by R. W. StevensonIn the revised edition of this popular text, Randall Stevenson has expanded, re-emphasised and amended his work to make it even more relevant to today's student studying the Modernist period in literature. The book covers a wide range of modernist novelists and novels, and also provides an invaluable guide to key developments in the genre. Stevenson has developed his text by adding a discussion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is now taught more regularly than Lord Jim. In addition he takes a fresh look at the politics of the Modernists, in conjunction with the politics of their texts, pointing out the drawbacks of politically-progressive readings of many modernist novels. Finally, in the section on gender, Stevenson includes discussions of such significant figures as Djuna Barnes, HD, Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West, as well as expanding the reference to Gertrude Stein throughout. The revisions in this updated text serve to make the authors' arguments sharper and allow the text to remain central to the discussion of modernism, modernity and the novel.
Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification
by Neil LeviWhy were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections—not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.
Modernist Futures
by David JamesIn Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform. By rethinking critical and disciplinary parameters, James brings scholarship on contemporary fiction into dialogue with modernist studies, offering a nuanced account of narrative strategies that sheds new light on the form of the novel today. An ambitious and incisive contribution to the field, this book will appeal especially to scholars of modernism and contemporary literary culture as well as those in American and postcolonial studies.
Modernist Idealism: Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature (Toronto Italian Studies)
by Michael J. SubialkaOffering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.
Modernist Literary Collaborations Between Women and Men
by Russell McDonaldMajor figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed 'cross-sex' collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to 'make it new.' Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.
Modernist Literature and European Identity (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Birgit Van PuymbroeckModernist Literature and European Identity examines how European and non-European authors debated the idea of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It shifts the focus from European modernism to modernist Europe, and shows how the notion of Europe was constructed in a variety of modernist texts. Authors such as Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aimé Césaire, and Nancy Cunard each developed their own notion of Europe. They engaged in transnational networks and experimented with new forms of writing, supporting or challenging a European ideal. Building on insights gained from global modernism and network theory, this book suggests that rather than defining Europe through a set of core principles, we may also regard it as an open or weak construct, a crossroads where different authors and views converged and collided.
Modernist Melancholia
by Anne EnderwitzModernist melancholia explores modernism's melancholic roots through the detailed discussion of writings by Freud, Conrad and Ford. The three authors bridge the gap between the Victorian age and modernity: they are influenced by the evolutionary-archaeological model of thought, which shaped nineteenth-century culture, and they anticipate modern conceptions of self and language. In consequence, modernist melancholia is intimately linked to the nineteenth-century obsession with loss and continuity and, at the same time, constitutes a formative moment of twentieth-century modernism, subjectivity and theory. The monograph discusses historical melancholia and linguistic crisis in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) and their jointly published works The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). Freud's ideas on melancholia provide the framework for the discussion, but instead of applying theory to literature, the book identifies in Freud's essays and works by Conrad and Ford similar ways of relating desire, history and a lack of meaning.
Modernist Mythopoeia
by Scott FreerWere all Modernists either skeptical or reactionary in matters of Christian belief? How can we express ideas of the sacred distinct from religious commitment? Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of poetic perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. Modernist mythopoeia is a literary means of eschewing the language of certainty while giving voice to the nature and function of transcendence in a post-religious context. As a comparative study, Scott Freer offers fresh readings on a range of key trans-Atlantic modernist texts, whilst considering their various mythopoeic method or vision: Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarauthustra, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Hilda Doolittle's Trilogy, D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. The 'twilight' of modernist mythopoeia is the nuanced and complex way of a godless aesthetic, for it accommodates various shades of secularity and religiosity and brings an inconclusiveness to the mysteries of human existence to be embraced and poeticized. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.
Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods
by S. FreerModernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.
Modernist Nowheres
by Nathan WaddellModernist Nowheres explores connections in the Anglo-American sphere between early literary modernist cultures, politics, and utopia. Foregrounding such writers as Conrad, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, it presents a new reading of early modernism in which utopianism plays a defining role prior to, during and immediately after the First World War.
Modernist Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics)
by Ronald Schleifer Tiao WangThis book examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world works. Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner. Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption.
Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Alex GoodyModernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhood and subjectivity.
Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Material Modernisms)
by Aimée GasstonThis book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories’ form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote. Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology.
Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture
by Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan GoldmanBringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by the volume's attentiveness to broader issues related to modernist aesthetics, as the contributors consider celebrity in relationship to identity, commodification, print culture, personality, visual cultures, and theatricality. As the first book to read modernism and celebrity in the context of the crises of individual agency occasioned by the emergence of mass-mediated culture, Modernist Star Maps argues that the relationship between modernism and the popular is unthinkable without celebrity. Moreover, celebrity's strange evolution during the twentieth century is unimaginable without the intercession of modernism's system of cultural value. This innovative collection opens new avenues for understanding celebrity not only for modernist scholars but for critical theorists and cultural studies scholars.