Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9782367814117
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume comes as a sequel to a previous publication, Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature, which explored the paradoxical connections between impersonality and emotion, two notions central to modernist as well as to later British literature. Through the double prism of impersonality and emotion, the first set of articles presented here bring to light if not the tenets of Modernism, at least some of the aesthetic principles of representative artists of the time and, from Beardsley to Hitchcock through Windham Lewis, Gaudier Brzeska and Epstein, browses through various forms like drawing, architecture, film and the radio play. The second half of he volume concentrates on the post-war period, addressing the vexed question of the relationships between impersonality and emotion in film (Antonioni), drama (Bond), photography (Brandt, Almond), painting (School of London), architecture, and other types of contemporary manifestations and installations practiced by the Young British Artists and their contemporaries (Hirst, Taylor-Wood, Floyer, Whiteread, Opie among others). The twenty two articles in this collection unearth lines of force that run all the way from romanticism to postmodernism. While stressing the unexpected perenniality of the impersonal, they give the lie to Fredric Jameson's famous vision of contemporary literature as characterised by a 'waning of affect'.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Impersonal disinterestedness: Leavis and Eliot
• ‘The Perfection of Nobody’s Style’: Impersonality and Emotion in Pater’s Prosper Mérimée
• Impersonality and Emotion in James Joyce’s Aesthetics and Fiction
• Emotion vs. Impersonality. Action/Reaction in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
• Emotion and the Immemorial
• Radical Impersonality: From Aesthetics to Politics in the Work of Virginia Woolf
• Impersonality and the Damned Egotistical Self: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
• ‘“I Don’t Read Novels... I Know What’s in’em”’: Impersonality, Impressionism and Responsibility in Parade’s End
• Less Love and More Feeling: Radical Personality in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Impersonal Theory of Art’
• Against Emotion in Literature: The Case of Evelyn Waugh
• The Motions of Emotions in the Poetry and Prose of George Mackay Brown
• Romanticism as a Mode within which to Work: Impersonality and Emotion in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Peter Riley’s Distant Points
• Finding One’s Way through ‘the List of Viable Selves’ or Lawrence Durrell’s Lesson in Detachment from ‘the Most Fragile of Illusions’
• Cerebral Analysis of Rational and Emotional Traces in Literature
• Elaborated upon with Due Art: Reading to Type in Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat
• Impersonality and Emotion in Suburbia: From Greene’s Catholic Sublime to Swift’s Negative Sublime
• Eliot in Reverse: Postmodern Sentimentality in Graham Swift’s Ever After
• Emotion as Ethical Event and Revision of Romance as Catharsis: the Fiction of Anita Brookner
• Peter Ackroyd’s English Tradition: from Plethoric Impersonality to the Creation of Emotion
• Peter Ackroyd, Kitsch and the Logic of Impersonal Imitation
• Ceci n’est pas une émotion: Sentimental and Sympathetic Response to the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Brechtian Emotions of Caryl Churchill: Examining Mad Forest
• Inevitable Yet Impossible Impersonality: Martin Amis’s The Information
• Freezing Emotion: the Impersonality of ‘Photographic Writing’ in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room
• Jeanette Winterson’s Cogito—ʻAmo Ergo Sum’—or Impersonality and Emotion Redefined
• Notes on contributors