The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel

by Edited by Morag Shiach

• ISBN13: 9780521670746
• ISBN10: 0521670748
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The novel is modernism’s most vital and experimental genre. In this Companion leading critics explore the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels, but also demonstrate how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult. No one technique or style defines a novel as modernist. Instead, these essays explain the formal innovations, stylistic preferences and thematic concerns which unite modernist fiction. They also show how modernist novels relate to other forms of art, and to the social and cultural context from which they emerged. Alongside chapters on prominent novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as lesser-known authors such as Dorothy Richardson and Djuna Barnes, themes such as genre and geography, time and consciousness are discussed in detail. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this is the most accessible and informative overview of the genre available.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. x
Chronology	p. xi
Historical and Critical Questions
Reading the modernist novel: an introduction	p. 1
Modernists on the art of fiction	p. 15
Early modernism	p. 32
Remembrance and tense past	p. 48
Consciousness as a stream	p. 65
The legacies of modernism	p. 82
Key Novelists
James Joyce and the languages of modernism	p. 99
Tradition and revelation: moments of being in Virginia Woolf's major novels	p. 112
Wyndham Lewis and modernist satire	p. 126
D. H. Lawrence: organicism and the modernist novel	p. 137
Joseph Conrad's half-written fictions	p. 151
Djuna Barnes: melancholic modernism	p. 165
William Faulkner: an impossibly comprehensive expressivity	p. 178
Writing lives: Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein	p. 191
C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer: the 'black Atlantic' and the modernist novel	p. 206
Situating Samuel Beckett	p. 224
Further reading	p. 238
Index	p. 243
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