The Great War and the language of modernism / Vincent Sherry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sherry, Vincent B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972--Criticism and interpretation.

Pound, Ezra.

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965--Criticism and interpretation.

Eliot, T. S.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941--Criticism and interpretation.

Woolf, Virginia.

World War, 1914-1918--Great Britain--Literature and the war.

World War, 1914-1918.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Americans--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Americans.

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

American poetry.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 395 p. ) ill., ports.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Vincent Sherry reopens long unanswered questions regarding the influence of the 1914 war on the verbal experiments of modernist poetry and fiction. He recovers the political discourses of the British campaign, offering new readings of Woolf, Eliot and Pound.

With the expressions "Lost Generation" and "The Men of 1914," the major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative, historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can be heard to stir in these words? Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

Contents:

Intro

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE

1 Liberal Measures: Prolegomenon to a Poetics of English Modernism

I: Harmonic Politics

II: The Journalistic Turn

III: The Literary State

IV: Critical Poetics

INTERCHAPTER 1: Lessons for the Relative Alien

2 Pound's Savage Ratios

I: Mimicry, with Differences

II: The Student of Contemporary Mentality

III: The Arranger of Inanities

IV: Homage to Sextus Propertius

V: Propoundius: His Aftermath

VI: The Decay of This Generation

INTERCHAPTER 2: Stein

3 Mr. Eliot's Wartime Services

I: Oppositions, Repossessions, Performances

II: English, in French

III: Powers of Four

IV: Sunday Morning Decadence

V: Poetic Modernism

VI: Pound, Eliot, and the Making of The Waste Land: Policing the Voices

INTERCHAPTER 3: Ford

4 Woolf, Among the Modernists

I: Voyaging Out

II: Shorts

III: Jacob's Room

IV: Mrs. Dalloway's Insubordinate Clause

V: Unbracketed

EPILOGUE: A Memory for Modernism, the New Critical Constructions, and This Awful Truth of Pseudotruth

NOTES

INDEX.

Notes:

Formerly CIP.

Originally published: 2003.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-280-45229-3

9786610452293

0-19-802620-X

0-19-518055-0

OCLC:

57404619