Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century.

Paul Sheehan (Author)

9781107036833, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2013

238 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

Introduction: modernism's blasted history
Part I. Decadence Rising: The Violence of Aestheticism: 1. Revolution of the senses
2. Victorian sexual aesthetics
3. Culture, corruption, criminality
4. A malady of dreaming: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Part II. Modernism's Breach: The Violence of Aesthetics: 5. Prologue: transgression displaced
6. No dreaming pale flowers
7. Modernist sexual politics
8. Maximum energy (like a hurricane)
9. Forbidden planet: Heart of Darkness
Epilogue: traumas of the world
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]