Read more
"A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England from the 1890s to the Second World War"--
List of contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations xiv
Introduction: Locating Modernism 1
1 Early Modernism 44
The New Woman 44
Literary Impressionism 54
Debating Imperialism 70
Early Modernist Drama 91
Edward Gordon Craig and W. B. Yeats 100
The Modern Metropolis 107
Ford Madox Ford and The English Review 118
2 'One Big Bloodless Brawl': Modernist Literature, 1910-1914 136
Introduction 136
Exploring the Machine Age 141
Poetry and the Renovation of Language 157
Imagism 166
Ford, Flint, and Eliot 176
Dubliners 184
Suffragettes, Feminists, and Egoists 189
Blast and Vorticism 203
3 Modernism During Wartime 231
Introduction 231
Pacifism, Nationalism, and Community 234
Propaganda and Ideology 250
The Good Soldier 271
Portraits of the Male Artist 278
The Politics of Gender 292
4 ' A Haughty and Proud Generation': Modernist Literature, 1918-1930 332
Introduction 332
The Backwashes of War 342
Ulysses 363
The Waste Land 381
Remaking the Novel 395
A Future for the Avant?]Garde? 412
5 Modernism in the 1930s 432
Introduction 432
Modernity and Its Discontents 444
The Situation of Poetry 469
Modernism, Race, and Colonialism 479
The Festival Theatre and Group Theatre 492
Surrealism 504
Pound/Joyce 522
6 Coda: Modernism's Afterlives 554
Index 570
About the author
Andrzej Gasiorek is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of
Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (1995),
Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2003), and
J. G. Ballard (2005) and the co-editor of
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006),
Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (2008),
The Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol. 4:
The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940 (2010),
The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010), and
Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011). He is also co-editor of the journal
Modernist Cultures and editor of the
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.
Summary
A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, focusing on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of modernism during these years.
Report
"Andrzej G¹siorek's A History of Modernist Literature is a major achievement. The author manages never to oversimplify the range of responses of modernism even within the works of individual authors, and he shows magisterial range over both chronology and the various critical currents in modernist studies over the last decades. Form and context are always in dialog here. A History of Modernist Literature is a landmark work. I suspect it will become a standard history of its field, and it demonstrates an impressive blend of synthesis and reconfiguration of often ambiguous and even self-contradictory idea about authors and events of the period."--Scott Klein, Wake Forest University
"This is a very impressive undertaking, both intellectually and in the range of its contents. I can think of no other book that covers this wide terrain so expertly . With verve, clarity and a wealth of evidence, Andrzej Gasiorek guides the reader through a series of complex issues, mapping the field of relationships and positions as he proceeds. The prose style is faultless. The commentary on individual texts, on broader tendencies, and on the character and direction of the period is skilful, scholarly, and of a very high order throughout."--Peter Brooker, University of Nottingham
