This book examines the problems faced by innovative writers working in a late modernist era dominated by Joyce, Eliot and Pound.

This account of modernism and its place in public culture looks at where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. The individual tales of figures like Joyce, Pound, Marinetti and Eliot provide perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself.

DIVArgues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of s/div

In Markets Against Modernity, economist Ryan Murphy documents a clear continuity between the systematic errors people make in their personal lives and the gaps between public opinion and informed opinion. These errors cluster around specific divergences between how the modern world’s institutions function—including global markets, pluralistic democracy, and even science itself—and how evolution trained our brains to understand the nature of economic relationships, social relationships, and humanity’s relationship to the physical world. Murphy calls these systematic divergences Ecological Irrationality. Exploring them leads him to even more prickly questions—and to conclusions that may challenge the beliefs of those who understand that, for instance, modern vaccines are safe and effective. Do we actually want a less cohesive society? Is doing a task yourself financially prudent? And if we recognize an expert consensus, is there even a way to implement it and achieve the desired effects?

Examining work from Ford and Conrad's pre-war impressionism through Rhys's fiction of the late 1930s, the author shows how modernist innovation engages with transformations in early twentieth-century capitalism and tracks the ways in which modernist fiction reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Publisher Description

What exactly is “modernism”? And how and why has its definition changed over time? Modernism: Evolution of an Idea is the first book to trace the development of the term “modernism” from cultural debates in the early twentieth century to the dynamic contemporary field of modernist studies. Rather than assuming and recounting the contributions of modernism's chief literary and artistic figures, this book focuses on critical formulations and reception through topics such as: - The evolution of “modernism” from a pejorative term in intellectual arguments, through its condemnation by Pope Pius X in 1907, and on to its subsequent centrality to definitions of new art by T. S. Eliot, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, F. R. Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Clement Greenberg - New Criticism and its legacies in the formation of the modernist canon in anthologies, classrooms, and literary histories - The shifting conceptions of modernism during the rise of gender and race studies, French theory, Marxist criticism, postmodernism, and more - The New Modernist Studies and its contemporary engagements with the politics, institutions, and many cultures of modernism internationally With a glossary of key terms and movements and a capacious critical bibliography, this is an essential survey for students and scholars working in modernist studies at all levels.

An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity's economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.

Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.