Modernist Literature

Postmodernist reactions against Modernism have tended to equate it with fascism, totalitarianism and a reactionary cultural elite. This bold and unusual guide approaches the issue from a new angle, considering the difficulty of 'high' Modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and James as constituting an important challenge to automatic, learned, and vicarious habits of interpretation. The author argues that such habits produce boredom in the reader, but more importantly, they make it more difficult for ordinary people to recognize and resist the exercise of inhumane authority. This provocative account starts with a retrospect from the Holocaust that contextualises issues of racial and sexual diversity. It enlists insights from psychology, sociology, and history to create a new frame for Modernist experimentation, one that includes such contemporary movements as women's suffrage, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the emancipation of the Irish and the emergence of the New Negro in America. Works of "high" and "low" modernism - such as the stories of Joyce and those of Arthur Conan Doyle - are seen as responding to the same impulse, the drive to develop interpretive autonomy, producing freedoms that prompted highly repressive reactions in the thirties and forties in Germany, Spain and Russia.