The Late Modernist Novel

A Critique of Global Narrative Reason

Seo Hee Im

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781009168380
• eBook ISBN: 9781009207539
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Late Modernist Novel explores how the novel reinvented itself for a Modernist age, a world riven by war and capitalist expansion. Seo Hee Im argues that the Anglophone novel first had to disassociate itself from the modern nation-state and, by extension, national history, which had anchored the genre from its very inception. Existing studies of modernism show how the novel responded to the crisis in the national idea. Polyglot high modernists experimented with cosmopolitanism and multilingualism on the level of style, while the late modernists retreated to a literary nativism. This book explores a younger generation of writers that incorporated empirical structures as theme and form to expand the genre beyond the nation-state.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Constructing Totality
• Chapter 1 Conrad, Faulkner, and Gothic Incalculability
• Chapter 2 Beckett’s Hoarding
• Chapter 3 Nabokov’s Supranational Metonymy
• Chapter 4 Dick’s Cosmological Codex
• Epilogue: Reading Totality
• Bibliography
• Index