Key Concepts in Modernist Literature

Key Concepts in Modernist Literature PDF Author: Julian Hanna
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310344
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Introducing the dynamic study of a literary period stretching from 1900 to the Second World War, the book reflects the exciting mix of European avant-garde, writers of the Harlem Renaissance and regional voices within Britain. Three distinct sections explore the major concepts, themes and issues that characterise the literature.

Bodies of Modernism

Bodies of Modernism PDF Author: Maren Linett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472053310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts

Modernist Soundscapes

Modernist Soundscapes PDF Author: Angela Frattarola
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.

Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity PDF Author: Jonathan Goldman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292723393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity. Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

Modernism and Subjectivity

Modernism and Subjectivity PDF Author: Adam Meehan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature

Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature PDF Author: Katherine O'Callaghan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351865889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
This volume explores the role of music as a source of inspiration and provocation for modernist writers. In its consideration of modernist literature within a broad political, postcolonial, and internationalist context, this book is an important intervention in the growing field of Words and Music studies. It expands the existing critical debate to include lesser-known writers alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, a wide-ranging definition of modernism, and the influence of contemporary music on modernist writers. From the rhythm of Tagore’s poetry to the influence of jazz improvisation, the tonality of traditional Irish music to the operas of Wagner, these essays reframe our sense of how music inspired Literary Modernism. Exploring the points at which the art forms of music and literature collide, repel, and combine, contributors draw on their deep musical knowledge to produce close readings of prose, poetry, and drama, confronting the concept of what makes writing "musical." In doing so, they uncover commonalities: modernist writers pursue simultaneity and polyphony, evolve the leitmotif for literary purposes, and adapt the formal innovations of twentieth-century music. The essays explore whether it is possible for literature to achieve that unity of form and subject which music enjoys, and whether literary texts can resist paraphrase, can be simply themselves. This book demonstrates how attention to the role of music in text in turn illuminates the manner in which we read literature.

A History of Modernist Literature

A History of Modernist Literature PDF Author: Andrzej Gasiorek
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118607333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, focusing on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of modernism during these years. A stimulating and coherent account of literary modernism in England which emphasizes the artistic achievements of particular figures and offers detailed readings of key works by the most significant modernist authors whose work transformed early twentieth-century English literary culture Provides in-depth discussion of intellectual debates, the material conditions of literary production and dissemination, and the physical locations in which writers lived and worked The first large-scale book to provide a systematic overview of modernism as it developed in England from the late 1890s through to the late 1930s

Modernist Heresies

Modernist Heresies PDF Author: PH D Damon Franke
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814257203
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In Modernist Heresies, Damon Franke presents the discourse of heresy as central to the intellectual history of the origins of British modernism. The book examines heretical discourses from literature and culture of the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period in order to establish continuities between Victorian blasphemy and modernist obscenity by tracing the dialectic of heresy and orthodoxy, and the pragmatic shifting of both heterodox and authoritative discourses. Franke documents the untold history of the Cambridge Heretics Society and places the concerns of this discussion society in dialogue with contemporaneous literature by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Orwell. Since several highly influential figures of the modernist literati were members of the Heretics or in dialogue with the group, heresy and its relation to synthesis now become crucial to an understanding of modernist aesthetics and ethics. From the 1880s through the 1920s, heresy commonly appears in literature as a discursive trope, and the literary mode of heresy shifts over the course of this time from one of syncretism to one based on the construction of modernist artificial or "synthetic" wholes. In Franke's work, the discourse of heresy comes forth as a forgotten dimension of the origins of modernism, one deeply entrenched in Victorian blasphemy and the crisis in faith, and one pointing to the censorship of modernist literature and some of the first doctrines of literary criticism.

Modernist Literature

Modernist Literature PDF Author: Mary Ann Gillies
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748631615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This engaging textbook provides a critical assessment of British modernist literature produced between 1900 and 1945.Each chapter focuses on a single decade, a distinct genre and a specific theme: the 1900s - the short story - gender and sexuality; the 1910s - poetry - war, technology and propaganda; the 1920s - the novel - new modes of literary expression; the 1930s - the documentary - political engagement. A final chapter covers the 1940s and beyond looking at new literary and artistic movements and 'other' modernisms. Covering canonical texts and lesser-known works, Modernist Literature introduces students to current debates in Modernism and a range of literature in its historical and aesthetic contexts.Features:*Examines four distinct genres - the short story, poetry, novel and documentary - decade-by-decade.*Combines close readings with cultural and political analyses of British modernism.*Includes a Chronology and Further Readings with each chapter.

Early Modernism

Early Modernism PDF Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198182528
Category : Arts, European
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.