Modernism And Market Fantasy

Examining work from Ford and Conrad's pre-war impressionism through Rhys's fiction of the late 1930s, the author shows how modernist innovation engages with transformations in early twentieth-century capitalism and tracks the ways in which modernist fiction reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.

Speculative modernists--that is, British and American writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror during the late 19th and early 20th centuries--successfully grappled with the same forces that would drive their better-known literary counterparts to existential despair. Building on the ideas of the 19th-century Gothic and utopian movements, these speculative writers anticipated literary Modernism and blazed alternative literary trails in science, religion, ecology and sociology. Such authors as H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft gained widespread recognition--budding from them, other speculative authors published fascinating tales of individuals trapped in dystopias, of anti-society attitudes, post-apocalyptic worlds and the rapidly expanding knowledge of the limitless universe. This book documents the Gothic and utopian roots of speculative fiction and explores how these authors played a crucial role in shaping the culture of the new century with their darker, more evolved themes.

The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s.

Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterising techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging 2004 study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein and Barnes.

Modernist Goods examines such writers as Yeats, Conrad, Eliot, Woolf, Beckett, H.D., and Joyce to uncover what the author views as their displaced aboriginality and to investigate the relationship between literary modernism and aboriginal modernity.

In describing the canon-building of modern dealerships, Jensen considers the new "ideological dealer" and explores the commercial construction of artistic identity through such rhetorical concepts as temperament and "independent art" and through such institutional structures as the retrospective.