Literary Modernism and Beyond

by Lehan, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780807133880
• ISBN10: 0807133884
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-15
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms, including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots, and Bergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations. In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the originary vision of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. With critical discussions on a wide variety of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works--including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling--Lehan examines the large-scale changes that came as critical authority moved from one generation to another. Both popular culture and literary criticism--especially critical theory--acted as key agents of change, and structuralism, poststructuralism, and concerns with gender and race also greatly influenced the movement. Along with a process of decline and nihilism that emerged from the modernist movement, these changes created a new literary reality and with it a new textuality. Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure not as individual pieces but as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. This analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Modernisms
Modernism and Its Transformations	p. 3
"Perspectivism"	p. 21
The Modernist Experience	p. 34
Early Modernism
The Inward Turn	p. 47
Decadence/Aestheticism	p. 61
The Realms of the Text
Myth	p. 75
Symbol	p. 91
Structure	p. 100
Time and Space
Time/History	p. 119
Spatial Form	p. 145
From Romance to Nihilism
From Romance to Realism	p. 161
Authenticity in a Counterfeit Culture	p. 178
Neorealism and Beyond	p. 193
Postmodernism and Mass Culture
Gender and Race	p. 207
Mass Culture	p. 215
Alone in the Crowd	p. 236
Postmodernism	p. 248
Coda	p. 263
Appendixes
A Chronology of Literary Modernism	p. 269
From Empire to War: A Retrospective of Literary Modernism	p. 275
Bibliographical Essay	p. 284
Notes	p. 303
Selected Bibliography	p. 313
Index	p. 321
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with the novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but the following generations of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. Literary Modernism and Beyond tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations. In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. His discussions of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works include Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling, and reveal the sweeping changes that came about as critical authority moved from one generation to the next. Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. This analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.