Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9782367814094
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays means to explore the interaction between autonomy and commitment in an attempt at revisiting and possibly, revising conventional literary history. Until recently, literary history has indeed tended to present twentieth century British literature as either autonomous or committed, but such a position certainly needs qualification. By addressing the joint issues of autonomy and commitment and basing their arguments on such theoretical writings as those of Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Rancière or Attridge, the essays presented here come to question the canonical definitions of modernism as experimental literature, the literature of the 1940s and 1950s as committed and post-modern fiction as self-reflexive and autonomous. Through reflections on experimentation and ideology, narcissism and metafiction, aestheticism and militancy, abstraction and ethical involvement, they flesh out the very definitions of autonomy and commitment, confront the two notions and relentlessly test their interaction, thus bringing out the complexities and subtleties of the various moments and movements that make up the literary landscape of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Autonomy Versus Commitment: Eliot, Adorno, Bakhtin and Foreign Words
• The Politics of the (In)audible/ (In)visible in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884)
• Autonomy and Commitment. A. Huxley, J. Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence
• Privilege and Allegiance in Literature: Joyce the Satirist
• Ezra Pound: Fascist Modernism as Committed Literature?
• Autonomy and Commitment and the Woman Modernist: The Example of Mina Loy
• Criticism, New Criticism and Virginia Woolf’s Critical Commitment
• An Impossible Immunity: Virginia Woolf’s Internal Resistance to Nazism in her Diaries
• Autonomy as Commitment in Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories
• The Modernists’ Commitment to the Instant Moment
• Commitment and the Still Centre: Rosamond Lehmann’s Political and Literary War Writings
• ‘Not Waving but Drowning.’ An Agnostic Commitment to Autonomy. The Freedom of Uncertainty in Stevie Smith’s Poetry
• Autonomy and Commitment in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory
• ‘How Can I Be Escaping From Myself When I Am Without a Place On Earth?’: Autonomy and Commitment in Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano
• Existential Psychodynamics in John Fowles’s The Magus
• In Thy Autonomy Is Thy Commitment: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit
• Twentieth-Century Linguistic Dystopias: A Continuum between Commitment and Autonomy
• Committed Autonomy: Emma Tennant’s Faustine and Two Women of London
• ‘Don’t join the dots...’: Reading the Interplay of Autonomy and Commitment in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow
• Pullman’s His Dark Material, a Paradoxical Equilibrium between Responsibility and Autonomy
• A Question of Justice: Hilary Mantel’s Experiment in Love
• James Kelman and the Politics of the Voice
• ‘The loop became a Möbius strip’: Autonomy and Commitment in Will Self’s Work
• Zadie Smith’s Autonomous Writing Commitments to E.M. Forster
• Cloud Atlas, A Novel Questioning Mitchell’s Avowed Lack of Commitment to the Real World
• Notes on contributors