Modernism
A Cultural History
PTLC - Polity Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature
1. Edition April 2005
216 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary
modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this
innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks
to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres
but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the
'modern' is implicated and debated, and which inform
its representational modes.
Modernism: A Cultural History explores modernism's struggle with
a split temporality in which the old and the emerging new struggle,
and in which, with the horror of the Great War, notions of a
traumatic or 'frozen' time emerge. It considers such
topics as modernism, market culture and obscurity; the culture of
science and technology; politics, economics, eugenics, and
sexology; primitivism and race; cinema and sound recording; gender
and modernism; and the study of consciousness and the senses. It
portrays modernism less as a movement in revolt from the modern
world than as attempting to engage with that world: the cry of
'reform!' which characterizes much of
post-enlightenment thought is used to describe modernist
writers' engagement with politics or bodies as well as with
inherited style. In this wide-ranging study, a parade of writers
- from the canonical like Pound, Eliot and Woolf to less
well-known figures like Mary Butts, Muriel Rukeyser and Sterling
Brown - are considered, and literary movements like Imagism,
Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance are drawn into the
debate.
Students and scholars alike, of Modernism and Twentieth Century
Literature, will find the breadth, clarity and fresh approach of
this text invaluable.
1 Modernity, Modernism and Time.
2 Mapping Modernism.
3 Modernism, Mass Culture and the Market.
4 Reform! Bodies, Selves, Politics, Aesthetics.
5 The Self and the Senses.
6 The Vibrating Universe: Science, Spiritualism, Technology.
7 Modernism's Others: Race and Empire.
References and Further Reading.
Index
on issues as various as history, time, psychoanalysis, trauma, war,
nationality, economics, politics, gender, canonicity, mass culture,
advertising, social reform, sexology, the occult and spiritualism,
eugenics, subjectivity, technology (especially photography, cinema,
and radio), race, and imperialism."
-- Andrzej Gasiorek and Peter Boxall, The Year's Work in
Critical and Cultural Theory
"Typically wide-ranging and consummately synthesized, this is
the most stimulating, illuminating and pacey account of modernist
culture I have read. Armstrong is one of the foremost authorities
in his field and his book is certain to become a critical
touchstone for students and experts alike."
-- David Bradshaw, Oxford University
"Tim Amstrong's Modernism: A Cultural History is a
comprehensive and yet original introduction to the culture of
modernism, a team Armstrong defines far more widely than previous
writers. This book covers a wider range of non-literary topics than
any other introduction to modernism, taking in mass culture,
psychology, the sciences, technology, race and empire, among many
others. But it also includes well-informed and persuasive
discussions of a host of literary figures usually ignored in
histories of the modern movement. In its sheer inclusiveness,
Modernism: A Cultural History expands and alters our notion
of what the term 'modernism' can mean."
-- Professor Michael North, UCLA
