Childs - Modernist Literature: A Guide for the Perplexed

MODERNIST LITERATURE:
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

The Guides For The Perplexed Series

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MODERNIST LITERATURE:
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

PETER CHILDS

Continuum International Publishing Group

www.continuumbooks.com

Peter Childs 2011

Peter Childs has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781441190031

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

TIMELINE
(COMPILED BY CLAIRE SMITH)

INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE 1900s

In his essay When Was Modernism? Raymond Williams observed that the answer to this question is a matter of selective tradition (Williams: 31). Most discussions of modernism in English concentrate on the first decades of the twentieth century, as will the present study. However, in the Conclusion I will look at Anglophone modernism after 1930 and beyond Anglo-America, and in this Introduction I identify some of the writers, ideas and practices that paved the way for writers commonly identified as modernists and who also have a part to play in most outlines of what modernism was.

While modernism is associated with the twentieth century in Anglophone countries, its main roots lie in the nineteenth century and others stretch farther back. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, there are also many constructions and opinions of different modernisms that intercede between a reader and the texts that have had the label modernist attached to them. Literary modernism arose as a convenient term to encompass a number of both interlinked and discrete avant-garde works that were attempting to move against a dominant current, to write against a grain of thought, practice, or formal convention that seemed limiting in literature or life. Modernism can therefore be thought of as an impulse to reshape literature and expand the borders of the possible in written language, to break out of prisons of referentiality constructed by writing traditions of the past. It is also a term that has hardened around certain writers and texts who aspired to this agenda of remaking, and who have been studied, taught, or presented together for the purposes of writing literary history.