Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism


Book Description

A study of four modernist writers and their relationship to their critics and era.




Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle


Book Description

In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.




The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance


Book Description

Examines the response of American leftist writers from the 1930s to the rise of mass culture, and to the continued propagation of the values of consumerism during the Depression. It traces in the work of Kenneth Fearing and Nathaniel West certain theoretical positions associated with the Frankfurt school (especially Walter Benjamin) and with contemporary theorists of postmodernism.




Different Dispatches


Book Description

In "Different Dispatches", David Humphries brings together in a new way a diverse group of well-known American writers of the inter-war period including: Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemmingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee and Robert Penn Warren. He demonstrates how these writers engage journalism in creating innovative texts that address mass culture as well as underlying cultural conditions. The book will be of interest to readers approaching these well-known authors for the first time or for scholars grappling with larger issues of cultural production and reception.




Modernism


Book Description

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.




Modernism, Satire and the Novel


Book Description

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.




Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity


Book Description

In this 2005 book, Jaffe examines the interactions of modernist literary fame and celebrity culture in the early twentieth century.




Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour


Book Description

Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person--through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors--Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden--on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience--elite, popular, and everything in between.




Modernism


Book Description

This guide helps readers to engage with the major critical debates surrounding literary modernism. A judicious selection of key critical works on literary modernism Presents a critical history from the earliest reviews to the most recent theoretical assessments Shows how modernist writers understood and constructed modernism. Shows how succeeding generations have developed those constructions and brought new interpretations to bear on the subject Discusses how modernism relates to modernity and odernization, and to other literary and cultural movements Texts have been selected for their relevance to the questions surrounding modernism, and for their accessibility to readers with a limited knowledge of the modernist canon Includes a glossary and an annotated bibliography.




Paranoid Modernism


Book Description

The early twentieth century notoriously saw an unprecedented wave of experiment in the arts. So intense was this activity that one can without exaggeration speak of a will to experiment (to 'make it new'). Where did that will to experiment come from? Why did it so insistently take the forms ittook? Looking specifically at Modernism in England, David Trotter seeks answers in the careers of three novelists writing in the first decades of the century: Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. The context he proposes for their work is that of contemporary understandings of thefunction and value of expertise, and of the dilemmas peculiar to those possessing it. There is a certain madness about the expert's pursuit of expertise, and about his or her disappointment if expertise fails to yield adequate social recognition. The early psychiatric literature identified thismadness as paranoia, and the textbooks and case-histories find an uncanny echo in Modernist fiction. In the obstinacy of their will to experiment, Ford, Lawrence, and Lewis wrote about, and lived, paranoia. To understand that obstinacy in its professional and psychiatric contexts is to approach froma new and unexpected angle the preoccupations with gender and with the politics of culture which currently characterize the study of Modernism. The energies it shook loose in their writing are energies which, evading absorption into the 'postmodern', continue to shape Western society and culture tothis day.