The Legacies of Modernism
Cambridge University Press, 10/20/2011
EAN 9781107012523, ISBN10: 110701252X
Hardcover, 300 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
An engagement with the continued importance of modernism is vital for building a nuanced account of the development of the novel after 1945. Bringing together internationally distinguished scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, these essays reveal how the most innovative writers working today draw on the legacies of modernist literature. Dynamics of influence and adaptation are traced in dialogues between authors from across the twentieth century: Lawrence and A. S. Byatt, Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, Forster and Zadie Smith. The book sets out new critical and disciplinary foundations for rethinking the very terms we use to map the novel's progression and renewal, enhancing our understanding not only of what modernism was but also what it might still become. With its global reach, The Legacies of Modernism will appeal to scholars working not only in the new modernist studies, but also in postcolonial studies and comparative literature.
Introduction
mapping modernist continuities David James
Part I. Early Legacies
Inheriting Modernism at Mid-Century and Beyond
1. Not what it used to be
nostalgia and the legacies of modernism Randall Stevenson
2. H. E. Bates, regionalism and late modernism Dominic Head
3. Moving beyond modernism in the fiction of B. S. Johnson
charting influences and comparisons Philip Tew
Part II. Modernist Aesthetics in Transition
Character, Perception, Innovation
4. Thinking in literature
modernism and contemporary neuroscience Patricia Waugh
5. Autonomous automata
opacity and the fugitive character in the modernist novel and after Julia Jordan
6. Pseudo-Impressionism? Jesse Matz
7. 'Advancing along the inherited path'
Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and the idea of being traditionally new David James
Part III. Reassessing the Ethics of Modernist Fiction
8. A complex legacy
modernity's uneasy discourse of ethics and responsibility Tim Woods
9. 'A renewed sense of difficulty'
E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on ethics and form Andrzej Gasiorek
10. 'Myths of desire'
D. H. Lawrence, language and ethics in A. S. Byatt's fiction Peter Preston
Part IV. Modernism's Global Afterlives
11. Fictions of global crisis Peter Middleton
12. Representing slums and home
Chris Abani's Graceland Susan Z. Andrade
13. For translation
Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee and transnational comparison Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Epilogue
finding the dreadfully real Adam Thorpe.