Modernist Fiction and Vagueness

Philosophy, Form, and Language

Megan Quigley

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107089594
• eBook ISBN: 9781316191927
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness marries the artistic and philosophical versions of vagueness, linking the development of literary modernism to changes in philosophy. This book argues that the problem of vagueness - language's unavoidable imprecision - led to transformations in both fiction and philosophy in the early twentieth century. Both twentieth-century philosophers and their literary counterparts (including James, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce) were fascinated by the vagueness of words and the dream of creating a perfectly precise language. Building on recent interest in the connections between analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness demonstrates that vagueness should be read not as an artistic problem but as a defining quality of modernist fiction.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Linguistic Turns and Literary Modernism
• Chapter 1 "The Re-instatement of the Vague": The James Brothers and Charles S. Peirce
• Chapter 2 When in December 1910?: Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and the Question of Vagueness
• Chapter 3 A Dream of International Precision: James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and C. K. Ogden
• Chapter 4 Conclusion: To Criticize the Criticism: T. S. Eliot and the Eradication of Vagueness
• Notes
• Index