The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading - Couverture souple

Pender, Elizabeth

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1474461492 ISBN 13 : 9781474461498

Editeur : Edinburgh University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Considers relationships between modernist literature and literary criticism and argues that new modernist fiction can bring with it new modes of reading

• Considers how close reading may change as the study of modernism changes to include recently recovered fiction
• Asks what reading meant for selected critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960
• Offers readings of three new modernist novels: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loy’s Insel
• Considers key cultural moments of the novels' composition and reception
• Extends the questions about reading raised by these novels to Samuel Beckett’s Comment c’est / How It Is and Jean Rhys’s short stories

Since the late twentieth century, new understandings of modernism have come with new attention to a range of writers. Yet if the academic study of modernism took shape around an older, narrower selection of writers and works, how can its modes of reading be relevant to newly recovered modernist writing? This book considers how close reading may change as the subjects of literary study change. Elizabeth Pender asks what reading meant for critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loy’s Insel tend to resist some of the strategies of reading that helped construct a narrowed modernist canon at mid-century, such as the pursuit of coherence. These novels offer new thinking about the temporality of reading, style, and the ethics of narration. Reading these novels now suggests that other new modernist fiction, too, may require revisions to vocabularies with which modernist literature has sometimes been read.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Elizabeth Pender has taught English Literature at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge and has published articles in Modernism/modernity and Critical Quarterly. The collection Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (2019) was co-edited with Cathryn Setz.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Edinburgh University Press
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1474461492
• ISBN 13: 9781474461498
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible