This book delineates the unique role of Arnold Bennett in the transformation of the British novel from the aesthetic, psychological, and sociopolitical assumptions of modernity to those of modernism. Early in his career, Bennett believed that the rejection of inherited traditions and authorities that was promulgated by such champions of modernity as Darwin, Marx, and even Herbert Spencer, would culminate in an assertion of personal autonomy. Bennett eventually assimilated the modernist critique of modernity, which discovered (with the help of Freud and the First World War) an intractable human irrationality that expressed itself in the most apparently reasonable schemes for human improvement.
A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.
The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and the ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This exciting new volume provides a freshly inclusive account of literature in England in the period before, during, and after the First World War. Chris Baldick places the modernist achievements of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce within the rich context of non-modernist writings across all major genres, allowing 'high' literary art to be read against the background of 'low' entertainment. Looking well beyond the modernist vanguard, Baldick highlights the survival and renewal of realist traditions in these decades of post-Victorian disillusionment. Ranging widely across psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, and children's books, The Modern Movement provides a unique survey of the literature of this turbulent time.
This book considers the complex ways in which the hotel functions to express the shifting experiences of modernity in the works of such authors as Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and Elizabeth Bowen. The text contributes to the critical debates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature concerning space, movement, and mobility, arguing that the hotel reconfigures boundaries of modernist, middlebrow, and popular fiction. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical perspectives, the book provides a critical and cultural history of the hotel in British literature, charting its changing nature and usage from the mid-nineteenth century up until the interwar period.
We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890-1939 challenges the critical practice of privileging modernism. In so doing, the volume makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates about re-visioning literary modernism, questioning its canon, and challenging its aesthetic parameters. By utilizing the term "modernity" rather than "modernism", the 16 essays housed in this volume foreground the writers who have been marginalised by both their contemporary modernist writers and literary scholars, while exploring the way in which these authors responded to the tensions,
Ford Madox Ford is a major modernist writer, yet many of his works do not conform to our assumptions about modernism. Examining ways in which he, alongside other 'misfit moderns', undermines 'stabilities' we expect from novels and memoirs, this book poses questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity.
From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl
Between 1880 and 1914, England saw the emergence of an unprecedented range of new literary forms from Modernism to the popular thriller. Not coincidentally, this period also marked the first overt references to an art/market divide through which books took on new significance as markers of taste and class. Though this division has received considerable attention relative to the narrative structures of the period's texts, little attention has been paid to the institutions and ideologies that largely determined a text's accessibility and circulated format and thus its mode of address to specific readerships. Hammond addresses this gap in scholarship, asking the following key questions: How did publishing and distribution practices influence reader choice? Who decided whether or not a book was a 'classic'? In a patriarchal, class-bound literary field, how were the symbolic positions of 'author' and 'reader' affected by the increasing numbers of women who not only bought and borrowed, but also wrote novels? Using hitherto unexamined archive material and focussing in detail on the working practices of publishers and distributors such as Oxford University Press and W.H. Smith and Sons, Hammond combines the methodologies of sociology, literary studies and book history to make an original and important contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics and rhetorics of the fin-de-siècle literary field in England.
This is the first systematic study to trace the way representations of 'Germanness' in modernist British literature from 1890 to 1950 contributed to the development of English identity. Petra Rau examines the shift in attitudes towards Germany and Germans, from suspicious competitiveness in the late Victorian period to the aggressive hostility of the First World War and the curious inconsistencies of the 1930s and 1940s. These shifts were no simple response to political change but the result of an anxious negotiation of modernity in which specific aspects of Englishness were projected onto representations of Germans and Germany in English literature and culture. While this incisive argument clarifies and deepens our understanding of cultural and national politics in the first half of the twentieth century, it also complicates current debates surrounding race and 'otherness' in cultural studies. Authors discussed include major figures such as Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster and Bowen, as well as popular or less familiar writers such as Saki, Graham Greene, and Stevie Smith. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, Rau's study will not only be an important book for scholars but will serve as a valuable guide to undergraduates working in modernism, literary history, and European cultural relations.
Freewomen and Supermen adds to the comparatively recent body of research which has sought to re-evaluate the literature and culture of the 'long' Edwardian period (1900-1914). It singles out the editors of two of the most important magazines for the history of modernism, Dora Marsden, editor of the Freewoman (later renamed the New Freewoman and then the Egoist) and A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age. Together with other editors such as Emma Goldman in America, Marsden and Orage fostered an optimistic, colourful, aube-de-siècle culture to rival the fin-de-siècle culture of the preceding decade. Their magazines were interdisciplinary in approach, with articles on literature and philosophy appearing alongside discussions of such matters as anarchism, eugenics, suffragism, suburban architecture, vegetarianism, and the 'intermediate sex'. Anne Fernihough argues that the often extreme positions adopted amongst 1900s radicals on both sides of the Atlantic were a response to a period of political turmoil and startling demographic and technological change. Their radicalism impacted in its turn on a wide range of literary forms, contents and theories, and continued to so beyond the First World War and into the 'high modernist' period. The book discusses both British and American writers across different genres, including Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Upton Sinclair, Rebecca West, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Tressell, and Gertrude Stein. Other cultural figures discussed include the sexologists Otto Weininger and Edward Carpenter, and the diet-reformer, Horace Fletcher. The film and television industries have often capitalised on a nostalgic vision of the Edwardian, but Freewomen and Supermen emphasises the more embattled aspects of Edwardian culture such as anarchism, suffragism, eugenics and food-reform, and shows how Edwardian radical thought was to play a crucial role in the development of literary modernism.
