Great War and the Language of Modernism
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, Incorporated |
| ISBN-13 | 9780195178180 |
| Open Library | OL8324333W |
| Total publications | 7 |
| Coverage period | 2004 - 2004 |
| Language | EN |
| Cited by | 13 |
| h-index | 1 |
| i10-index | 1 |
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import
Pound's Savage Ratios
This chapter follows the development of Ezra Pound's modernist poetry as it responds to the culture of Great War Britain. As an American in London, Pound is alert to the postures of the partisan press of Liberal England, and as a former colonial, he animates powerfully to the self-contradictory language of the former imperial power. His response to the verbal culture of war-time journalism informs the multi-part review he serialized through 1917 …
Epilogue
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in…
Prologue
The Prologue presents the need for a historically informed reading of the modernist literature prompted by the Great War of 1914-1918. The prominence of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory has allowed critical attention to be focused on the combat writing of the war. But the proper contemporary context for reading and understanding the modernist literature of the war, which was prompted by the civilian circumstances of urban London and…
Mr. Eliot's Wartime Services
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language…
Woolf, Among the Modernists
This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with …
Liberal Measures
The Great War and the Language of Modernism
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Publ…
The Great War and the Language of Modernism
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Publ…
Pound's Savage Ratios
This chapter follows the development of Ezra Pound's modernist poetry as it responds to the culture of Great War Britain. As an American in London, Pound is alert to the postures of the partisan press of Liberal England, and as a former colonial, he animates powerfully to the self-contradictory language of the former imperial power. His response to the verbal culture of war-time journalism informs the multi-part review he serialized through 1917 …
Epilogue
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in…
Prologue
The Prologue presents the need for a historically informed reading of the modernist literature prompted by the Great War of 1914-1918. The prominence of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory has allowed critical attention to be focused on the combat writing of the war. But the proper contemporary context for reading and understanding the modernist literature of the war, which was prompted by the civilian circumstances of urban London and…
Mr. Eliot's Wartime Services
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language…
Woolf, Among the Modernists
This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with …
Liberal Measures
The Great War and the Language of Modernism
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Publ…