Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics PDF Author: Charles Ferrall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521793459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Ferrall offers insights into the relation between modernist aesthetics, technology and politics.

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics PDF Author: Charles Ferrall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521793459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Ferrall offers insights into the relation between modernist aesthetics, technology and politics.

Writing the 1926 General Strike

Writing the 1926 General Strike PDF Author: Charles Ferrall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316241238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

Modernism and Democracy

Modernism and Democracy PDF Author: Rachel Potter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191534374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, in contrast, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalised writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Mina Loy, have been reassessed. Not only has the picture of Anglo-American modernist culture changed significantly, but the understanding of the relationship between modernist writing and politics has also shifted. Rachel Potter here reassess the relationship between modernism and democracy by analysing the wide range of different reactions by modernist writers to the new democracies. She charts the changes in the ideas of democracy as a result of the shift from liberal to mass democracies after the First World War and of women's entrance into the political and cultural spheres. By uncovering hitherto-unanalysed essays by a number of feminist writers she argues that in fact there was a widespread scepticism about the consequences of mass democracy for women's liberation, and that this scepticism was central to the work of women modernist writers.

Automatic

Automatic PDF Author: Timothy Wientzen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144089X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
A fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century politics and the modernist literary period. The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights and expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet writers and cultural critics shared a sense that modern life reduced citizens to automatons capable of interacting with the world in only the most reflexive ways. In Automatic, Timothy Wientzen asks why modernists were deeply anxious about the role of reflexive behaviors—and the susceptibility of bodies to physical stimuli—in the new political structures of the twentieth century. Engaging with historical thinking about human behaviors that fundamentally changed the nature of political and literary practice, Wientzen demonstrates the ways in which a "politics of reflex" came to shape the intellectual and cultural life of the modernist era. Documenting some of the ways that modernist writers and their contemporaries mapped, harnessed, and intervened in a political sphere dominated by conditioned reflexes, Wientzen reads writers like D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett in conversation with fields that include public relations, physiology, sociology, and vitalism. Ultimately, he justifies a reckoning with some of the most enduring preoccupations of modernist studies. Automatic further emphasizes the role of politics and science in the aesthetic projects of modernist writers. At a moment when political enfranchisement and the mass media promised new modes of freedom, agency, and choice, Wientzen argues that the modernist era was beset by apprehension about the conscription of liberty through the conditioning force of everyday life. Analyzing such thinking through a neglected archive about embodiment and reflex reveals modernists responding to the historically novel conditions of political life in the twentieth century—conditions that have become entrenched in the politics of our own century.

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel PDF Author: Pericles Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521661119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This study, first published in 2000, examines the impact of nationalist political thought on the modern novel.

Modernism and Mass Politics

Modernism and Mass Politics PDF Author: Michael Tratner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804725163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a new phenomenon swept politics: the masses. Groups that had struggled as marginal parts of the political system - particularly workers and women - suddenly exploded into vast and seemingly unstoppable movements." "A whole subgenre of sociological-political treatises purporting to analyze the mass mind emerged all over Europe, particularly in England. All these texts drew heavily on the theories put forth in The Crowd, written in 1895 by the French writer Gustave Le Bon and translated into English in 1897. Le Bon developed the idea that when a crowd forms, a whole new kind of mentality, hovering on the borderline of unconsciousness, replaces the conscious personalities of individuals. His descriptions should seem uncanny to literary critics, because they sound as if he were describing modernist literary techniques, such as the focus on images and the "stream of consciousness." Equally important was Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1906), which sought to turn Le Bon's theories into a methodology for producing mass movements by invoking the importance of myth to theories of the mass mind." "Examining in detail the surprising similarities between modernist literature and contemporary theories of the crowd, this work upsets many critical commonplaces concerning the character of literary modernism. Through careful reading of major works of the novelists Joyce and Woolf (traditionally viewed as politically leftist) and the poets Eliot and Yeats (traditionally viewed as politically to the right), it shows that many modernist literary forms in all these authors emerged out of efforts to write in the idiom of the crowd mind. Modernism was not a rejection of mass culture, but rather an effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time - to produce a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called "The Era of the Crowd.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies PDF Author: Rajeev S. Patke
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748682600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Provides a fresh account of modernist writing in a perspective based on the reading strategies developed by postcolonial studiesNeither modernity nor colonalism (and likewise, neither postmodernity nor postcoloniality) can be properly understood without recognition of their intertwined development. This book interprets modernity as an asymmetrically global phenomenon complexly connected to the course of Western imperialism, and demonstrates how the impact of Western modernism produced new developments in writing from all the former colonies of Europe and the US. These developments constitute the afterlife of Western modernism.The various ways in which the aesthetic ideologies and writing strategies of Western modernism have been adapted, transposed and modified by some of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century is demonstrated in the book through a set of case studies, each of which juxtaposes a canonical modernist text with a postcolonial text that shows how modernist modes metamorphosed in interaction with the turbulent and volatile realities of colonies and new nations struggling to arrive at a modernity of their own in contexts marked by colonial histories. Thus Kafka's allegories are juxtaposed with the use of allegory in writers like Salman Rushdie and J.M.Coetzee; the gendered modernity of Virginia Woolf is juxtaposed with the disturbing and powerful fictions of writers such as Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield; the intellectualized and urbanized spirituality of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is re-read in the revisionist contexts created by the brilliant and troubled urban spirituality of writers such as Arun Kolatkar from India and a text such as The Woman Who Had Two Navels, from the Philippines.

Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order

Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order PDF Author: Gabriel Hankins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108494560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Articulates the interwar modernist response to the crisis of liberal world order after 1919.

The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers

The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers PDF Author: Maren Tova Linett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052151505X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A thorough overview of the main genres, important issues, and key figures in women's modernism during the years 1890-1945.

Making Liberalism New

Making Liberalism New PDF Author: Ian Afflerbach
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144092X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association In Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modern American fiction exposed and interrogated central concerns in liberal culture, such as corporate ownership, reproductive rights, color-blind law, the tragic limits of social documentary, and the dangerous allure of a heroic style in political leaders. In response, liberal intellectuals borrowed key values from modernist culture—irony, tragedy, style—to reimagine the meaning and ambitions of American liberalism. Drawing together political theory and literary history, Making Liberalism New argues that the rise of American liberal culture helped direct the priorities of modern literature. At the same time, it explains how the ironies of narrative form offer an ideal medium for readers to examine conceptual problems in liberal thought. These problems—from the abortion debate to the scope of executive power—remain an indelible feature of American politics.