Modernism

by Michael Levenson

• ISBN13: 9780300111736
• ISBN10: 0300111738
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2011-10-25
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters.

Author Biography

Michael Levenson is William B. Christian Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory, University of Virginia. His publications on Modernism span some twenty years and include Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the spectacle of modernism	p. 1
the avant-garde in modernism	p. 12
narrating modernity: the novel after flaubert	p. 55
the modernist lyric "i": from baudelaire to eliot	p. 106
drama as politics, drama as ritual	p. 169
modernism in and out of war	p. 219
the ends of modernism	p. 267
Notes	p. 283
Illustration Credits	p. 305
Index	p. 307
Illustrations Follow Pages 54 And 218
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