Modernist Commitments

Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.

Modernism has long been characterized as more concerned with aesthetics than politics, but Jessica Berman argues that modernist narrative bridges the gap between ethics and politics, connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities—ideas about what we ought to be and do—to active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges the divisions usually drawn between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation.

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid twentieth-century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work, and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels of this period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, and also for many lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White. The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship as it features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course of England's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by English literary modernism.

Explores the crucial role played by the city in the construction of modernismThis innovative book examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Focusing on how literary outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect and literary geography. Particular attention is given to the transnational qualities of modernist writing by examining writers whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles or strangers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Blaise Cendrars, Bryher, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirrlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Stephen Spender.Key FeaturesThe first book in modernist studies to bring detailed discussion of these four cities togetherBreaks new ground in being the first book to bring affect theory and literary geography together in order to analyse modernismAn extensive range of authors is analysed, from the canonical to the previously marginalSituates the literary and filmic texts within the context of urban spaces and cultural institutions

Bringing together 17 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: · Feminism, gender, and sexuality · Empire and race · Print and media cultures · Theories and history of modernism Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and intellectual contexts, with guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz.

Not a method of turning your degree back in and having your loans forgiven, but an argument that by becoming vocational schools measured by reduced cost and efficient production, colleges and universities are neglecting their essential purpose. The reason for college education, says Allan, is to provide an environment within which students can absorb the moral practices that determine how they can acquire and evaluate knowledge, best conduct their lives, and become responsible adults. He maintains that such learning requires imagination, dialogue, conversation, and cultured intercourse. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The essays in Modernism and Colonialism offer revisionary accounts of major British and Irish literary modernists relation to colonialism.