The Late Modernist Novel
A Critique of Global Narrative Reason

This study shows how the late modernist novel incorporated empirical structures as theme and form to expand the genre beyond the nation-state.

Seo Hee Im (Author)

9781009168380, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 June 2022

280 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

The Late Modernist Novel explores how the novel reinvented itself for a Modernist age, a world riven by war and capitalist expansion. Seo Hee Im argues that the Anglophone novel first had to disassociate itself from the modern nation-state and, by extension, national history, which had anchored the genre from its very inception. Existing studies of modernism show how the novel responded to the crisis in the national idea. Polyglot high modernists experimented with cosmopolitanism and multilingualism on the level of style, while the late modernists retreated to a literary nativism. This book explores a younger generation of writers that incorporated empirical structures as theme and form to expand the genre beyond the nation-state.

Introduction: Constructing totality
1. Conrad, Faulkner, and Gothic incalculability
2. Beckett's hoarding
3. Nabokov's supranational metonymy
4. Dick's cosmological codex
Epilogue: Reading totality.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]