The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel

This 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.

Morag Shiach (Edited by)

9780521670746, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 April 2007

274 pages
22.4 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. In this 2007 Companion leading critics explore the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels, but also demonstrate how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult. No one technique or style defines a novel as modernist. Instead, these essays explain the formal innovations, stylistic preferences and thematic concerns which unite modernist fiction. They also show how modernist novels relate to other forms of art, and to the social and cultural context from which they emerged. Alongside chapters on prominent novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as lesser-known authors such as Dorothy Richardson and Djuna Barnes, themes such as genre and geography, time and consciousness are discussed in detail. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this is the most accessible and informative overview of the genre available.

Chronology
Reading the modernist novel: an introduction Morag Shiach
1. Modernists on the art of fiction Jeff Wallace
2. Early modernism Peter Brooker
3. Remembrance and tense past Ann Banfield
4. Consciousness as a stream Anne Fernihough
5. The legacies of modernism Laura Marcus
6. James Joyce and the languages of modernism Katherine Mullin
7. Tradition and revelation: moments of being in Virginia Woolf's major novels Meg Jensen
8. Wyndham Lewis and modernist satire Rebecca Beasley
9. D. H. Lawrence, organicism and the modernist novel Hugh Stevens
10. Joseph Conrad's half-written fictions Jeremy Hawthorn
11. Djuna Barnes: melancholic modernism Deborah Parsons
12. William Faulkner: an impossibly comprehensive expressivity Catherine Gunther Kodat
13. Writing lives: Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein Howard Finn
14. CLR James, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer: the 'black Atlantic' and the modernist novel Anna Snaith
15. Situating Samuel Beckett Lois Oppenheim
Further reading.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]