Lateness and modern European literature / Ben Hutchinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hutchinson, Ben, 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European literature--19th century--History and criticism.

European literature.

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

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 392 pages ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts ro assert successive styles of writing as 'new' in this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors-from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno-he combines close readings with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modem European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity. Book jacket.

Contents:

I From Late to Post-Romanticism

1 The Spirit of the Age 31

2 'A Book Read to its End': The Post-Napoleonic Consciousness 36

3 Late Romanticism and 'Lastness' 43

4 French Romanticism and the Spirit of the Past 62

5 Epigonentum in Germany of the 1830s 95

II Decadence

6 Modes of Falling: Romantic Decadence in the 1830s 137

7 'Ageing Passions': 1850s-60s 147

8 French Models of Lateness in the 1880s 155

9 English Decadence: 'Late-Learning5 in a French School 176

10 Friedrich Nietzsche and the 'Latecomers' of Modernity 198

11 'Fin de Steele and No End': The Austrian Art of Being Late 214

III Modernism

12 Lateness as 'Embarrassment5: Paul Valery 239

13 Lateness as 'Decline': Oswald Spengler, Nicholas Berdyaev, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen 250

14 Lateness as a European Language': Theodor W. Adorno and Late Style 257

15 Lateness as 'Hollowing Out': Thomas Mann, Ernst Bloch, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence 274

16 Lateness as 'Myth': T.S. Eliot, Eugène Tolas, Gottfried Benn, Hermann Broch 288

17 Lateness as 'Eschatology': Futurism, Expressionism, Decadent Modernism 307.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-365) and index.

ISBN:

0198767692

9780198767695

OCLC:

936143223