Modernism, Satire and the Novel (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781107008496)

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

Author: Jonathan Daniel Greenberg
ISBN-10: 1107008492
ISBN-13: 9781107008496
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/15/2011
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2012