Interwar modernism and the liberal world order : offices, institutions, and aesthetics after 1919 / Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University, South Carolina.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hankins, Gabriel, 1981- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Literature)--History--20th century.

Modernism (Literature).

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

English literature.

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

American literature.

Liberalism--History--20th century.

Liberalism.

Liberalism in literature.

Politics and literature.

Literature and society--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

History.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

vii, 221 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Summary:

"This book is about modernism's role in the reconstruction of the liberal world after 1919. Once we knew how literary modernists saw that liberal world: as the Enemy. When T. S. Eliot calls interwar Britain "worm-eaten with Liberalism," when Ezra Pound remarks in Guide to Kulchur that "liberalism is a running sore," when even W. H. Auden proclaims the failure of interwar liberal political institutions, they spoke for a modernist consensus: interwar liberal world order, with its commitments to progressive democratic reform, promise of rational relations between nations, and hopes for a cosmopolitan perpetual peace, merely veiled the rot of the old bourgeois order. Scholars thus traditionally understood the modernist relationship to liberal interwar government as either a directly antagonistic anti-liberalism or a displaced cultural agonism." -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: modernism against the liberal world

The queer modernist origins of interwar liberal order

Friends and enemies: liberal order in Woolf, Wells, and Woolf

The artist as clerk: debt, paperwork, and liberal order in T. S. Eliot

Typewriter fiction at the Secretariat

Black modernist internationalisms between the wars: René Maran, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay

Coda: brief history of an antipathy: liberal order and modernist criticism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 170-218) and index.

ISBN:

9781108494564

1108494560

9781108731782

1108731783

OCLC:

1090911612