Explores the crucial role played by the city in the construction of modernismThis innovative book examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Focusing on how literary outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect and literary geography. Particular attention is given to the transnational qualities of modernist writing by examining writers whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles or strangers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Blaise Cendrars, Bryher, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirrlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Stephen Spender.Key FeaturesThe first book in modernist studies to bring detailed discussion of these four cities togetherBreaks new ground in being the first book to bring affect theory and literary geography together in order to analyse modernismAn extensive range of authors is analysed, from the canonical to the previously marginalSituates the literary and filmic texts within the context of urban spaces and cultural institutions

This book addresses an under-researched area of modernist studies, reconsidering modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of the humanities' turn to affect.

This book uses the discipline-specific, computational methods of the digital humanities to explore a constellation of rigorous case studies of modernist literature. From data mining and visualization to mapping and tool building and beyond, the digital humanities offer new ways for scholars to questions of literature and culture. With the publication of a variety of volumes that define and debate the digital humanities, we now have the opportunity to focus attention on specific periods and movements in literary history. Each of the case studies in this book emphasizes literary interpretation and engages with histories of textuality and new media, rather than dwelling on technical minutiae. Reading Modernism with Machines thereby intervenes critically in ongoing debates within modernist studies, while also exploring exciting new directions for the digital humanities—ultimately reflecting on the conjunctions and disjunctions between the technological cultures of the modernist era and our own digital present.

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature. Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research data Adopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collection Explores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticians Reveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. This book presents case studies of audience responses to "The Piano", "Kiss of the Spider Woman", and "Northern Exposure". It argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement.

Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism explores the multi-faceted and formative impact of Gilles Deleuze on the development and our understanding of modernist thought in its philosophical, literary, and more broadly cultural manifestations. Gilles Deleuze himself rethought philosophical history with a series of books and essays on individual philosophers such as Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Bergson and authors such as Proust, Kafka, Beckett and Woolf, on the one hand, and Bacon, Messiaen, and Pollock, among others, in other arts. This volume acknowledges Deleuze's profound impact on a century of art and thought and the origin of that impact in his own understanding of modernism. Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism begins by "conceptualizing" Deleuze by offering close readings of some of his most important works. The contributors offer new readings that illuminate the context of Deleuze's work, either by reading one of Deleuze's texts against or in the context of his entire body of work or by challenging Deleuze's readings of other philosophers. A central section on Deleuze and his aesthetics maps the relationships between Deleuze's thought and modernist literature. The volume's final section features an extended glossary of Deleuze's key terms, with each definition having its own expert contributor.

During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking. The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period--from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness--the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.