Late Modernism: British Literature at Midcentury (original) (raw)
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2015
The large body of critical work centred on modernism and postmodernism, which has seen the light of day in the twentieth century and the first years of the twentieth first, is simply impressive. What partly accounts for such extensive and ever proliferating critical responses to the two (cultural and aesthetic) movements may be connected, on one level at least, to the lack of consensus and the intense debate carried out among commentators with regard to their meaning and politics. As terms, modernism and postmodernism have infiltrated the professional idioms of a variety of disciplinary fields, from literature, art and philosophy to architecture, film and cultural analysis. They are, however, often interpreted multiply in their various contexts, decoded as they are in ways that address very specific, field-bound issues and problems. What is more, their definitional limits are further stretched by the ongoing revision to which they have been subjected since at least the 1970s, as new...
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 (2000): 281-85
Boox RBwnws 281 disingenuous and defensive. Though he describes Foucault's work as brilliant at one point (170, n. 89), he merely mentions it in passing; Baudrillard's work is dismissed in a note simply as "caricature" (155 n. 38); Said's critique of the appropriative effect of nineteenth-century Egyptology is described as "daft" (I41 n. 10); and Adorno is invoked simply a "colour of the month" (23). Had Sparshott engaged this critical tradition more seriously, his analysis of empire as an information system might have been situated more clearly in contemporary debates on that topic, and, more importantly, the potential force of his connections among aesthetics, axiology, and social practice may have emerged more clearly for a wider range of readers.
Modernist Text in Literary of England in the 1920s
Experimentation in the field of literary text by the authors of modernist literature is explained by the rethinking of the canonical status of the established components of the former artistic paradigm, which stimulated the renewal of artistic forms of the early twentieth century. Taking into account the heterogeneity of the system of modernism, our work notes that modernist innovation was not so much the purposeful destruction of established forms, but also reconstruction, building new connections between elements of the artistic system. Literary experiments of modernism concerned primarily the form of a work of art. The defining principles of the poetics of modernist writers were the original modeling of the temporality of their works, the interaction of different types of art and genre decanonization. English modernism appeared against the background of Victorian literature, and, accordingly, rethought its traditional forms (style, genre, composition, pictorial and expressive means, etc.), and, despite the anti-Victorian performances of modernist artists, in comparison with other national models modernism remained the least radical. The modernist text as a kind of literary text itself must be considered in the context of the historical era that gave birth to it. This era attributed to him certain features, characteristics, signs. During the development of this historical and artistic era, an invariant was formed, that is, an example of a modernist text, which has a number of certain fixed artistic features. Let us first consider modernism as an artistic movement and a historical era, and then the formation of the basic principles of a modernist text in the context of the development of modernist literature.
A recent revisionary focus for the so-called new modernist studies has been the relationship between high modernism and formal preoccupations of interwar novelists who followed in its wake. This essay, contributing to this ongoing work about the distinctive innovations of late-modernist writing, considers British women writers who extended the heritage of the regional novel while accommodating the ambitions of modernist experimentalism. Although assumptions about the retrogressive nature of fiction from the 1930s and 40s -including its relegation of stylistic virtuosity in favor of social commentary, its supposed affinity with Victorian classic realism, and its concomitant resistance to subjectivity-centered techniques of interiority and indirectness -have come under scrutiny by reassessments of the period, what is less well recognized, let alone analyzed, is the extent to which such different writers as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, and Rosamond Lehmann capitalized on the advancements of their modernist-Impressionist precursors to develop new modes for engagement with provincial environments.
Introduction: The Contemporaneity of Modernism
The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture , 2016
At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and trans- form each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neoliberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism’s afterlives and reverberations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, tele- vision, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.
English Studies
In academic work on modern British poetry, there is a tacit assumption that any poet belonging to the first rank must needs be a "Modernist". Consequently, scholars and critics are keen to have poets they admire fit in under the "Modernism" umbrella. That desire has led to an extension of the conceptalways notoriously hard to defineto the point of meaninglessness. Proceeding from a conviction that modernity affected every poet in the early twentieth century, and that no tenable line of demarcation between different "schools" survives careful scrutiny of what people actually wrote, Marianne Thormählen proposes that "Modernism" in the context of British poetry be employed as a designation for the period from 1910 to 1939. Used as a chronological term, the concept would no longer carry a presumption of quality (or a lack of it). Hitherto neglected good poetry from the period would stand to gain the attention it deserves, as academics abandon the literary quarrels of a bygone age in order to focus on why and how poetry matters.
Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920
Despite sustained scholarly interest in the politics of modernism, astonishingly little attention has been paid to its relationship to Conservatism. Yet modernist writing was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology from when it emerged in the Edwardian era. By investigating the many intersections between Anglophone modernism and Tory politics, Conservative Modernists offers new ways to read major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. It also highlights the contribution to modernism of lesser-known writers, including Edward Storer, J. M. Kennedy, and A. M. Ludovici. These are the figures to whom it most frequently returns, but, cutting through disciplinary delineations, the book simultaneously reveals the input to modernism of a broad range of political writers, philosophers, art historians, and crowd psychologists: from Pascal, Burke, and Disraeli, to Nietzsche, Le Bon, Wallas, Worringer, Ribot, Bergson, and Scheler. Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/conservative-modernists-literature-and-tory-politics-britain-19001920#kfO4Ca1gbgl8qDOh.99