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Overview
This short introduction to modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature. It provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary modernism, considering both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention. Author David Ayers shows that, however diverse modernist texts are, they are linked by concerns about social modernization and the role of art and the artist. He also demonstrates that German Marxism and French deconst ruction have been crucial in realizing the full complexity of modernism. Ayers's arguments are illustrated with reference to the works of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, H. D., Nancy Cunard, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, among others.Synopsis
This short introduction to Modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature.
- Provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary Modernism.
- Covers both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention.
- Includes detailed discussion of major authors, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and H.D.
Editorials
From the Publisher
‘David Ayers provides the reader with a series of interlacing readings – all of them original and provocative – of some major texts of Anglo-American modernism. Ayers’s central theme is the relation of the linguistic to the social in all its complex “modernist” manifestations. The theories of Benjamin and Adorno, as well as of Derrida, provide an important base for understanding the great poetries and fictions of the period. But Modernism is first and foremost a book of close and acute readings of specific poems and novels – a book at once richly textured and yet also enjoyable to read.’
Marjorie Perloff