Berman traces the conceptual lineage of modernism, examining its evolution in Western art and literature through empiricism, idealism, and romanticism. Using modernist literary and visual movements as examples, Berman demonstrates how modern social, political, and scientific developments--including capitalism, socialism, humanism, psychoanalysis, fascism, and modernism itself--have altered attitudes toward time, space, self, creativity, the natural world, and community.
More than a century after its beginnings, modernism still has the power to shock, alienate or challenge readers. Modernist art and literature remain thought of as complex and difficult. This introduction explains in a readable, lively style how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres. Pericles Lewis offers students a survey of literature and art in England, Ireland and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also provides an overview of critical thought on modernism and its continuing influence on the arts today, reflecting the interests of current scholarship in the social and cultural contexts of modernism. The comparative perspective on Anglo-American and European modernism shows how European movements have influenced the development of English-language modernism. Illustrated with works of art and featuring suggestions for further study, this is the ideal introduction to understanding and enjoying modernist literature and art.
The modernist period was crucial for American literature as it gave writers the chance to be truly innovative and create their own distinct identity. Starting slightly earlier than many guides to modernism this lucid and comprehensive guide introduces the reader to the essential history of the period including technology, religion, economy, class, gender and immigration. These contexts are woven of into discussions of many significant authors and texts from the period. Wagner-Martin brings her years of writing about American modernism to explicate poetry and drama as well as fiction and life-writing. Among the authors emphasized are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck and countless others. A clear and engaging introduction to an exciting period of literature, this is the ultimate guide for those seeking an overview of American Modernism.
This short introduction to Modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature. Provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary Modernism. Covers both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention. Includes detailed discussion of major authors, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and H.D.
Berman traces the conceptual lineage of modernism, examining its evolution in Western art and literature through empiricism, idealism, and romanticism. Using modernist literary and visual movements as examples, Berman demonstrates how modern social, political, and scientific developments--including capitalism, socialism, humanism, psychoanalysis, fascism, and modernism itself--have altered attitudes toward time, space, self, creativity, the natural world, and community.
In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters. -- Book Description.
This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.
To many writers of the early twentieth century, modernism meant not only the reshaping or abandonment of tradition but also an interest in psychology and in new concepts of space, time, art, and language. Randall Stevenson's important new analysis of the genre presents a lucid, comprehensive introduction to modernist fiction, covering a wide range of writers and works. Drawing on narrative theory and cultural history, Stevenson offers fresh insights into the work of such important modernists as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. In addition he discusses the work of Marcel Proust, an important figure in the development of modernism in Europe. This illuminating book places the new imagination of the modernist age in its historical context and looks at how and why the pressures of early twentieth century life led to the development of this distinctive and influential literary form. This accessible account of modernism, modernity, and the novel will be welcomed by students, scholars, and general readers alike.
The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.
