The Nets of Modernism
Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud

An important contribution to literary criticism by one of the foremost modernist scholars working today, first published in 2010.

Maud Ellmann (Author)

9780521681094, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 September 2010

250 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.41 kg

'This intellectually adventurous, vividly written study conveys powerful new ways to see psychoanalytic criticism and modernist fiction.' James Joyce Literary Supplement

One of the finest literary critics of her generation, Maud Ellmann synthesises her work on modernism, psychoanalysis and Irish literature in this important new book. In sinuous readings of Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, she examines the interconnections between developing technological networks in modernity and the structures of modernist fiction, linking both to Freudian psychoanalysis. The Nets of Modernism examines the significance of images of bodily violation and exchange - scar, bite, wound, and their psychic equivalents - showing how these images correspond to 'vampirism' and related obsessions in early twentieth-century culture. Subtle, original and a pleasure to read, this 2010 book offers a fresh perspective on the inter-implications of Freudian psychoanalysis and Anglophone modernism that will influence the field for years to come.

1. Introduction: what hole?
2. The modernist rat
3. Strandentwining cables: Henry James's The Ambassadors
4. The Woolf woman
5. The darkened blind: Joyce, Gide, Larson and the modernist short story
6. The name and the scar: identity in The Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
7. Skinscapes in Ulysses
Afterword
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]