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The period 1890 to 1950 is remarkable for radical innovation and literary development. This volume looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history. Combining textual analysis with key critical approaches, the book considers central texts such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lawrence’s Women in Love alongside wider debates on “Literature and War”, “Modernism, Music and the Visual Arts” and “Modernism and its Critics”.
List of contents
Part One: Introduction
Part Two: A Cultural Overview
Part Three: Texts, Writers and Contexts
- Modernist poetry - French Origins, English Settings: Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the Georgians
o Extended commentary: Imagism
- Modernist poetry - America, Ireland and England: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Yeats and Eliot
o Extended commentary: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
· The Modernist novel and tradition: Flaubert, Mann, Kafka and Joyce
- Extended commentary: Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
· The Modernist novel II: Saki, Woolf and Lawrence
- Extended commentary: Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
- The Modernist play I - Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello and Beckett
- Extended commentary: Beckett,Endgame (1957)
- The Modernist play II - Conrad, Brecht and Artaud
o Extended commentary: Brecht, Baal (1923)
Part Four: Critical theories and Debates
Literature and War
Modernist Print Culture
Modernism, Music the Visual Arts
Modernism and its Critics
Part Five: Resources
Timeline
Further reading
Index
About the author
Dr Gary Day is Principal Lecturer and English Course leader for the MA in Independent Study at the University of De Montfort. He has a wide range of literary interests, including modern literature and drama, and the history of criticism. He is also widely published, with his most recent work, Literary Criticism: A New History (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), described as 'exuberantly readable ... a book that will appeal to students and scholars alike'. He is also the author of Class (Routledge 2001) described by Terry Eagleton as 'a signal achievement'. In addition to being the author of several other books and of many chapters, essays and articles he has also edited Palgrave's New Casebook on The Rainbow and Women in Love (Macmillan, 2004), British Poetry 1990-1950 (Macmillan, 1995), and Literature and Culture in Modern Britain Volumes 2 and 3 (Longman, 1997, 1999). He is a reviewer for, amongst others, THES, the Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies and the TLS. Gary Day is joint editor with Jack Lynch of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Eighteenth Century Literature.
Summary
The period 1890 to 1950 is remarkable for radical innovation and literary development. This volume looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history. Combining textual analysis with key critical approaches, the book considers central texts such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lawrence’s Women in Love alongside wider debates on “Literature and War”, “Modernism, Music and the Visual Arts” and “Modernism and its Critics”.
