Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics
Author: Sue Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135027576X

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism
Author: Rachel Carroll
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000991458

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

Great War Modernists

Great War Modernists
Author: Lee M. Jenkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135028534X

Taking 44 Mecklenburgh Square as the focal point and springboard for a critical group study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of modernist biofiction and poetry to the literature of the First World War. A group that Perdita Schaffner described as 'another Bloomsbury set', the Mecklenburgh Square writers, like the Bloomsbury Group proper, 'lived in squares' and 'loved in triangles', in Dorothy Parker's famous formulation. Geographically adjacent, these sets intersected socially and, at points, in their aesthetics: both practiced innovative forms of what may broadly be defined as 'life writing'. But, demarcating the Mecklenburgh Square writers from the Bloomsbury Set, the former had its origins in the transatlantic avant-garde: Lawrence. H.D., Aldington (and John Cournos) were all associated with Imagism, the poetic movement which instantiated Anglo-American modernism. Considered as a pro-tem collective, these four poets, all of whom were also novelists and translators, contest the binaries that still obtain between modernist and First World War writing. This group study of Lawrence, H.D., Aldington and Cournos tracks the transition of Imagism from a pre-war mode to a war poetics which includes but is not confined to the trench lyric and it traces, in the transtextual relations between the Mecklenburgh Square novels, the traumatic imprint of the war on modernist life writing.

Modernism in Wonderland

Modernism in Wonderland
Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135024872X

Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture

Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture
Author: Amanda Sigler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350235423

Exploring the collaborative, consumer-oriented Modernism that developed out of both planned and fortuitous groupings in periodicals, this book traces the serialization and advertisement of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw in Collier's (1898), Rudyard Kipling's Kim in McClure's and Cassell's (1900-1901), James Joyce's Ulysses in the Little Review (1918-1920), and Virginia Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” in the Dial (1923). These periodicals-whether mass-market journals or literary magazines-adjust our perceptions of authors elsewhere known to be “in charge” and reveal the central role that compromise and chance played in the emergence of Modernism. Bringing to light new research from multiple archives, Sigler pieces together original records of journals' advertising strategies, previously unpublished editorial correspondence, and long-buried letters to unearth the forgotten stories behind the texts we think we know so well.

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
Author: Michael Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 558
Release: 1998
Genre: Art
ISBN:

This major reference work surveys how philosophers, art historians, and others reflect critically on art and culture. It presents articles on the history of Western and non-Western aesthetics along with accounts of the contemporary debates.

Victorian Modernism

Victorian Modernism
Author: Jessica R. Feldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2009-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 052112090X

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. Examining the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist,)and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations.

The Cambridge History of Modernism

The Cambridge History of Modernism
Author: Vincent Sherry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1579
Release: 2017-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316720535

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

Summer Will Show

Summer Will Show
Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590174062

In revolutionary Paris, a disaffected Victorian wife becomes enraptured by her husband’s mistress—a “brilliantly entertaining” historical fiction novel that was “far ahead of its time” (Guardian). “One of the great under-read British novelists of the 20th century . . . my favorite of her novels.” —Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

The Walker

The Walker
Author: Matthew Beaumont
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1788738942

From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian). There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century. From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?