Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text

by Richard Lehan

Overview

Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms, including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots, and B ergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations.
In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. With critical discussions on a wide variety of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works -- including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling -- Lehan examines the large-scale changes that came as critical authority moved from one generation to another. Both popular culture and literary criticism -- especially "critical theory" -- acted as key agents of change, and structuralism, poststructuralism, and concerns with gender and race also greatly influenced the movement. Along with a process of decline and a nihilism that emerged from the modernist movement, these changes created a new literary reality and with it a new textuality.
Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure not as individual pieces but as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. Lehan's analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807143896
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	01/09/2012
Series:	Southern Messenger Poets
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Richard Lehan is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright award, he is the author of nine other books, including The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History and Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

I Modernisms

1 Modernism and Its Transformations 3

2 "Perspectivism" 21

3 The Modernist Experience 34

II Early Modernism

4 The Inward Turn 47

5 Decadence/Aestheticism 61

III The Realms of the Text

6 Myth 75

7 Symbol 91

8 Structure 100

IV Time and Space

9 Time/History 119

10 Spatial Form 145

V From Romance to Nihilism

11 From Romance to Realism 161

12 Authenticity in a Counterfeit Culture 178

13 Neorealism and Beyond 193

VI Postmodernism and Mass Culture

14 Gender and Race 207

15 Mass Culture 215

16 Alone in the Crowd 236

17 Postmodernism 248

Coda 263

Appendixes

1 A Chronology of Literary Modernism 269

2 From Empire to War: A Retrospective of Literary Modernism 275

3 Bibliographical Essay 284

Notes 303

Selected Bibliography 313

Index 321