DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

Paul Sheehan author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:24th Nov '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism cover

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

"... a brilliant study that sheds considerable light on the antihumanist and counterhumanist tendencies in literature, philosophy, and critical theory over the past 150 years." Modern Fiction Studies
"...very interesting and persuasive..." Modern Philology

ISBN: 9780521099127

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: 380g

256 pages