Waking giants : the presence of the past in modernism / Herbert N. Schneidau.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schneidau, Herbert N.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

United States.

History in literature.

Memory in literature.

Physical Description:

xi, 279 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1991.

Summary:

This is a study of the most paradoxical aspect of modernism, its obsession with the past. Eliot wrote that the artist must be conscious "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." This creed permeated the movement: Modernists believed that the energies of the past could be resurrected in modern works, and that they could be the very force that makes those works modern: the urge of Pound and others to "make it new" stemmed from seeing the past as a source of renewal. Schneidau focuses on separate texts that incorporate these concepts: Joyce's Ulysses, Hardy's poems, Forster's Howards End, Conrad's Secret Agent, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and finally Pound's Cantos. In his discussions, many little-noticed connections are examined, including a transatlantic set: Hardy with Pound, Forster with Fitzgerald, Joyce and Lawrence with Anderson.

Contents:

Introduction/The Persistence of Memory: Joyce's Regress from Mortmain to Atavism 3

1. The Century's Corpse Outleant: Hardy and Modernism 25

2. Safe as Houses: Forster as Cambridge Anthropologist 64

3. The Primal Scene in The Secret Agent: Sex and Violence in the Nightmare Universe 103

4. The Personal Past Recaptured: Anderson & Sons 136

5. Ezra Pound: The Archaeology of the Immanent 202.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195068629

OCLC:

22706695