Modern Political Aesthetics From Romantic To Modernist Fiction

In this new research monograph, Tudor Balinsteanu draws on concepts of dance to demonstrate how the nonhuman is dealt with in terms of practical politics, that is, choreographies of social performance which emerge at the intersection of literature, art, and embodied life. Drawing on a number of influential texts by William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce, this truly interdisciplinary monograph explores the relations between the human and the nonhuman across centuries of literature and as demonstrated in philosophical concepts and social experiments.

In this new research monograph, Tudor Balinsteanu draws on concepts of dance to demonstrate how the nonhuman is dealt with in terms of practical politics, that is, choreographies of social performance which emerge at the intersection of literature, art, and embodied life. Drawing on a number of influential texts by William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce, this truly interdisciplinary monograph explores the relations between the human and the nonhuman across centuries of literature and as demonstrated in philosophical concepts and social experiments.

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.

European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism is an anthology of key theoretical writings by the major representatives of the schools and movements of recent European literature. Each chapter is devoted to one particular school of movement from within the broad body of literature, from romanticism, realism and modernism though to the literature of political engagement of the 1920s and 1930s, and the more recent initiative of postmodernism. These texts are approached both on their own terms as individual formulations of the goals and procedures (literary, aesthetic and political) that characterized the work of these writers, and as key documents of the literary school or movement to which these writers belonged.

"Lewis's political writings present ambiguities: his stated belief in the autonomy of art from life is contradicted by other statements he made and by his critical analyses of writers; and his political writings blur any a priori generic distinction between art and non-art. Given this blurring between art and life, artistic genre and non-artistic genre, Quema claims that Lewis's political texts present characteristics usually attributed to avant-gardism. However, this radicalism has to be balanced against Lewis's conservatism. Thus his political writings can be read as allegories with two pragmatic aims: to organize the life of the polis from an artistic standpoint and to persuade the reader to adhere to authoritarian politics."--BOOK JACKET.

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

"If readers of Sara Tanderup Linkis’ "Something to hold on to ..." open the book in the expectation of entering a niche of literature and literary studies, they will leave it after having encountered a new highway in literature. Here, the traditional theme of memory and the most recent use of digital media merge into a new understanding of the role of the book in the contemporary media landscape and of vicissitudes of memorial processes literature, which also offers a broader perspective on literature in human history. Spurred by Sara Tanderup Linkis’ sharp eye the readings of texts are lucid, engaging and offers so many ideas that teachers will renew their curricula, and readers will open the internet for more or rush to the library." — Svend Erik Larsen, professor emeritus Memory, Intermediality, and Literature investigates how selected literary works use intermedial strategies to represent and perform cultural memory. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of cultural memory studies, this engaging, reader-friendly monograph examines new materialism and intermediality studies, analyzying works by Alexander Kluge, W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anne Carson, Mette Hegnhøj, William Joyce, J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The works emerge out of different traditions and genres, ranging from neo-avant-garde montages through photo-novels and book objects to apps and children’s stories. In this new monograph, Sara Tanderup Linkis presents an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, reading the works together, across genres and decades, and combining the perspectives of memory studies and materialist and media-oriented analysis. This approach makes it possible to argue that the works not only use intermedial strategies to represent memory, but also to remember literature, reflecting on the changing status and function of literature as a mediator of cultural memory in the age of new media. Thus, the works may be read as reactions to modern media culture, suggesting the ways in which literature and memory are affected by new media and technologies – photography and television as well as iPads and social media.