The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

The Quest to Fail

Jonathan Ullyot

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107131484
• eBook ISBN: 9781316464328
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jonathan Ullyot's The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than adapt the story of the Grail, modernist writers intentionally failed to make the Grail myth cohere, thus critiquing the way a literary work establishes its authority by alluding to previous traditions. While the quest to fail is a modernist ethic often misconceived as a pessimistic response to the collapse of traditional humanism, the modernist writings of Eliot, Kafka, and Céline posit that the possibility of redemption presents itself only when hope has finally been abandoned.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Failure aesthetics and the modernist quest narrative
• Chapter 1 The Golden Bowl and the Holy Grail
• Chapter 2 Jessie Weston and the Mythical Method of The Waste Land
• Chapter 3 Kafka’s Grail Castle
• Chapter 4 Céline’s Knight of the Apocalypse
• Chapter 5 Molloy or Le Conte du Graal
• Conclusion Reading Failure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index