Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: rethinking modernism, remapping the turn of the twentieth century
- 1 Beatrice Webb and the “serious” artist
- 2 Inventing literary tradition, ghosting Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle
- 3 The Lost Girl, Tarr, and the “moment” of modernism
- 4 Mapping the middlebrow in Edwardian England
- 5 “Life is not composed of watertight compartments”: the New Age's critique of modernist literary specialization
- Conclusion: modernism and English studies in history
- Select bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: modernism and English studies in history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: rethinking modernism, remapping the turn of the twentieth century
- 1 Beatrice Webb and the “serious” artist
- 2 Inventing literary tradition, ghosting Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle
- 3 The Lost Girl, Tarr, and the “moment” of modernism
- 4 Mapping the middlebrow in Edwardian England
- 5 “Life is not composed of watertight compartments”: the New Age's critique of modernist literary specialization
- Conclusion: modernism and English studies in history
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science … The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature.
Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist”In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence – what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationship with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essential values – were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intensive scrutiny.
Terry Eagleton, “The Rise of English”I begin with these epigraphs in order to remind my readers of the backdrop of disciplinary restructuring that has framed this historical recontextualization of the Joyce–Pound–Eliot strand of literary modernism as I review the main objectives of this study. Fascinating work has been done recently on 1922, the ano mirabilis of literary modernism, that challenges us to think more expansively about popular as well as high culture modernisms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 , pp. 173 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002