Literary Modernism and Beyond

The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text

Richard Lehan

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780807133880
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807143896
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms, including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots, and B ergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations.
In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. With critical discussions on a wide variety of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works -- including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling -- Lehan examines the large-scale changes that came as critical authority moved from one generation to another. Both popular culture and literary criticism -- especially "critical theory" -- acted as key agents of change, and structuralism, poststructuralism, and concerns with gender and race also greatly influenced the movement. Along with a process of decline and a nihilism that emerged from the modernist movement, these changes created a new literary reality and with it a new textuality.
Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure not as individual pieces but as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. Lehan's analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.

[1]

A CHRONOLOGY OF LITERARY MODERNISM

1853–74	Der Ring des Nibelungen, by Richard Wagner
1857	Les fleurs du mal, by Charles Pierre Baudelaire Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
1862	Salammbo, by Gustave Flaubert
1869	A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
1870–71	France declares war on Prussia on 19 July. On 2 September, France is defeated at Sedan, ending the Second Empire. The Third Republic is proclaimed on 4 September.
1871	The Paris Commune (21–28 May) The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin
1871–93	Rougan-Macquart novels, by Émile Zola
1872	Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
1873	The Renaissance, by Walter Pater
1874	First impressionist exhibition in Paris. Impressionists exhibited their work outside official salons: Monet (1840–1926), Renoir (1841–1919), and Pissarro (1830–1903) worked outdoors, often painting urban settings. Manet (1832–1883), Degas (1834–1917), and Cézanne (1839–1906) joined the group. The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Gustave Flaubert
1877	The American, by Henry James
1878	Life and Habit, by Samuel Butler
1879	“Daisy Miller,” by Henry James Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler
1880	Le roman expérimental, by Émile Zola
1881	Bouvard et Pécuchet, by Charles Flaubert The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
1884	À rebours, by Joris-Karl Huysmans Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
1885	Leopold II, king of Belgium, takes possession of the Congo Marius the Epicurean, by Walter Pater
1886	Van Gogh (1853–1890) and Gauguin (1848–1903) settle in France, marking the rise of expressionism The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, by Henry James Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, introduces the theme of the double She, by Rider Haggard
1890	The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer Principles of Psychology, by William, James The Tragic Muse, by Henry James
1891	The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
1892	“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1893	Degeneration, by Max Nordau
1894	Dreyfus affair divides France
1895	The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells
1896	The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, by Gustave Le Bon The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H. G. Wells Matter and Memory, by Henri Bergson
1898	The Nigger of the Narcissus, by Joseph Conrad
1899	The Awakening, by Kate Chopin The Symbolist Movement in Literature, by Arthur Symons Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen When the Sleeper Wakes, by H. G. Wells. Youth and Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, are published together as a single volume by Blackwells
1900	Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
1902	Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, appears as a single volume The Immoralists, by André Gide The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
1903	The Ambassadors, by Henry James Tonio Kröger, by Thomas Mann The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler
1904	Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad
1905	The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
1906–11	The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein
1907	Creative Evolution, by Henri Bergson The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams Pragmatism, by William James The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
1907–11	Cours de linguistique générale, by Ferdinand de Saussure
1907–19	À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust
1908	Picasso experiments with cubism
1909	Three Lives, by Gertrude Stein
1911	Exhibition of postimpressionist paintings Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
1912	Chance, by Joseph Conrad Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
1913	The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton O Pioneers! by Willa Cather St Petersburg, by Andrei Bely
1914	Assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on 24 June, leading to the outbreak of World War I. On 3 August, the Battle of the Marne. Four years of trench warfare follow. Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein
1914–18	Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, by Thomas Mann
1915	The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence “Sunday Morning,” by Wallace Stevens Victory, by Joseph Conrad
1916	The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
1917	America enters World War I on 2 April. In October, Lenin gets control of industrial and military soviets, an event followed by three years of civil war.
1918	Dada Manifesto, by Tristan Tzara My Antonia, by Willa Cather
1918–22	The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler
1919	Treaty of Versailles ends World War I Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
1920	Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis The Rescue, by Joseph Conrad This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
1921	The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
1922	A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather Ulysses, by James Joyce The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot
1923	Cane, by Jean Toomer Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams Studies in Classic American Literature, by D. H. Lawrence
1924	The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann The Principles of Literary Criticism, by I. A. Richards We, by Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
1924–28	Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
1925	An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser The Counterfeiters, by André Gide Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Dark Laughter, by Sherwood Anderson The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams The Trial,...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• I MODERNISMS
• II EARLY MODERNISM
• III THE REALMS OF THE TEXT
• IV TIME AND SPACE
• V FROM ROMANCE TO NIHILISM
• VI POSTMODERNISM AND MASS CULTURE
• [1] A CHRONOLOGY OF LITERARY MODERNISM
• [2] FROM EMPIRE TO WAR: A RETROSPECTIVE OF LITERARY MODERNISM
• [3] BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX