Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature PDF Author: John Whittier-Ferguson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940s - writings composed by authors self-consciously entering middle to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry from 1938, as '1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit'. This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing is at times horrifying and objectionable and at others deeply moving, different from the earlier works which first won these writers their fame.

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature PDF Author: John Whittier-Ferguson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940s - writings composed by authors self-consciously entering middle to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry from 1938, as '1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit'. This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing is at times horrifying and objectionable and at others deeply moving, different from the earlier works which first won these writers their fame.

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature PDF Author: John Whittier-Ferguson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316073421
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940 - writing composed by authors self-consciously entering middle- to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry of 1938, as "1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit." This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing proves at times horrifying or objectionable, at others deeply moving and different from the work produced by these writers when they were creating the texts for which they became famous. John Whittier-Ferguson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (Oxford University Press, 1996) and the editor, with A. Walton Litz and Richard Ellmann, of James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings (Faber & Faber, 1991)"--

Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel

Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel PDF Author: Julia Jordan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
In the decades following the immediately postwar period in Britain, a loose grouping of experimental writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but for the broader movement of the novel through the century. This volume takes some of the claims made about experimental fiction--that it is unreadable, nonlinear, elliptical, errant, plotless--and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period's investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique: attempting to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts--error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident--all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Asking what are the wider political, ethical, and philosophical correlates of this incommensurability, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel reads experimental literature in this light, as suffused with anxiety about its adequacy in the light of its status as necessarily imitative and derivative, and therefore redolent of the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more generally.

A Curious Peril

A Curious Peril PDF Author: Lara Vetter
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title A Curious Peril examines the prose penned by modernist writer H.D. in the aftermath of World War II, a little-known body of work that has been neglected by scholars, and argues that the trauma H.D. experienced in London during the war profoundly changed her writing. Lara Vetter reveals a shift in these writings from classical "escapist" settings to politically aware explorations of gender, spirituality, nation, and imperialism. Impelled by the shocking political crises of the early 1940s, and increasingly sensitive to imperialist logics, H.D. began to write about the history of modern Europe using innovative forms and genres. She directed her well-known interest in mysticism and otherworldly themes toward the material world of empire-building and perpetual war. Vetter contends that H.D.'s postwar work is essential to understanding the writer's entire career, marking her entrance into late modernism and even foretelling crucial aspects of postmodernism.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual PDF Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802074325
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, or editor. John D. Morgenstern, General Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Ronald Bush, University of Oxford David E. Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago Anthony Cuda, University of North Carolina–Greensboro Robert Crawford, University of St Andrews Frances Dickey, University of Missouri John Haffenden, University of Sheffield Benjamin G. Lockerd, Grand Valley State University Gail McDonald, Goldsmiths, University of London Gabrielle McIntire, Queen’s University Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Christopher Ricks, Boston University Ronald Schuchard, Emory University Vincent Sherry, Washington University at St. Louis

Modernism, War, and Violence

Modernism, War, and Violence PDF Author: Marina MacKay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472590082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.

The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s

The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s PDF Author: James Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108574793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The 1930s is frequently seen as a unique moment in British literary history, a decade where writing was shaped by an intense series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks. Yet what is contained under the rubric of 1930s writing has been the subject of competing claims, and therefore this Companion offers the reader an incisive survey covering the decade's literature and its status in critical debates. Across the chapters, sustained attention is given to writers of growing scholarly interest, to pivotal authors of the period, such as Auden, Orwell, and Woolf, to the development of key literary forms and themes, and to the relationship between this literature and the decade's pressing social and political contexts. Through this, the reader will gain new insight into 1930s literary history, and an understanding of many of the critical debates that have marked the study of this unique literary era.

Eliot Now

Eliot Now PDF Author: Megan Quigley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350173932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Over a dozen new volumes of T. S. Eliot's poetry, prose, and letters have been published in the past decade. This collection presents unabashedly fresh approaches to Eliot, while simultaneously guiding readers through the new materials that are available for the first time outside of restricted archives. Eliot, the figurehead of literary modernism, continues to be someone whom critics love to hate (Misogynist! Reactionary! Anti-Semite!) and readers love to devour (Profound! Revolutionary! Resonant!). Why does one artist elicit such different responses? Eliot Now collects new and established voices in Eliot studies, integrating contemporary critical approaches with careful attention to the newly published materials. Whether grappling with the controversial new two-volume Poems, narrating the experience of opening Eliot's letters in the Emily Hale papers (until 2020 the “most famous sealed archive in the world”), or rereading his works through ecocritical or trans studies lenses, Eliot Now shows how this most effusively celebrated and heatedly criticized 20th-century writer continues to change the way we read literature in the 21st century. The collection concludes with six award-winning contemporary poets considering the influence of The Waste Land on poetry today.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual PDF Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 194295428X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual strives to be the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot's life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot's work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, or foremost exemplar of literary modernism. John D. Morgenstern, General Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Ronald Bush, University of Oxford David Chinitz, University of Loyola, Chicago Anthony Cuda, University of North Carolina-Greensboro Robert Crawford, University of St Andrews Frances Dickey, University of Missouri John Haffenden, University of Sheffield Benjamin G. Lockerd, Grand Valley State University Gail McDonald, Goldsmiths, University of London Gabrielle McIntire, Queen's University Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Christopher Ricks, Boston University Ronald Schuchard, Emory University Vincent Sherry, Washington University at St. Louis

Freedom Is Not Enough

Freedom Is Not Enough PDF Author: Patrick R. Query
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438499787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
How does literature from the past speak to the present? What can we, as readers committed to combatting oppression, learn from figures whose writing we love but some of whose beliefs we may oppose? Quite a lot, according to Patrick R. Query. To make this case, Query turns to a writer and critic as canonical as he is controversial—T. S. Eliot. Passionately argued and eminently readable, Freedom Is Not Enough shows how Eliot makes a surprising yet vital ally in the struggle to fill the world with more freedom, equality, and human dignity. Without ignoring or downplaying the bigotry and elitism that are ineluctable parts of Eliot's legacy, Query argues that we need today what Eliot has to teach us: about migration, peace, friendship, radicalism, anti-fascism, liberation, resistance, and hope. Drawing on the full scope of Eliot's oeuvre—from his most well-known poetry and prose to newly available archival materials—Freedom Is Not Enough demonstrates how to use Eliot and literature more broadly to confront the forces conspiring to turn our world into a waste land.