Modernism

The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the &#8216;modern&#8217; is implicated and debated, and which inform its representational modes. <p>Modernism: A Cultural History explores modernism's struggle with a split temporality in which the old and the emerging new struggle, and in which, with the horror of the Great War, notions of a traumatic or &#8216;frozen&#8217; time emerge. It considers such topics as modernism, market culture and obscurity; the culture of science and technology; politics, economics, eugenics, and sexology; primitivism and race; cinema and sound recording; gender and modernism; and the study of consciousness and the senses. It portrays modernism less as a movement in revolt from the modern world than as attempting to engage with that world: the cry of &#8216;reform!&#8217; which characterizes much of post-enlightenment thought is used to describe modernist writers&#8217; engagement with politics or bodies as well as with inherited style. In this wide-ranging study, a parade of writers &#8211; from the canonical like Pound, Eliot and Woolf to less well-known figures like Mary Butts, Muriel Rukeyser and Sterling Brown &#8211; are considered, and literary movements like Imagism, Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance are drawn into the debate. <p>Students and scholars alike, of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, will find the breadth, clarity and fresh approach of this text invaluable.