Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

by Paul Sheehan

• ISBN13: 9780521814577
• ISBN10: 052181457X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine Modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan, Modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key Modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how Modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. Sheehan examines the development of narrative during the Modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. Sheehan reveals the crucial link between the Modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of interest to scholars of Modernism and literary theory.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: The anthropometric turn	1	(23)
Narrating the animal, amputating the soul	24	(32)
Conrad and technology: homo ex machina	56
The Lawrentian transcendent: after the fall	87	(113)
Woolf's luminance: time out of mind	121	(29)
Doubting Beckett: voices descant, stories still	150	(30)
Conclusion: Humanness unbound	180	(13)
Notes	193	(24)
Bibliography	217	(14)
Index	231