Modernism, Satire and the Novel

Through satire, modernist literature cultivated sophisticated, ironic and cruel attitudes towards suffering which dramatically changed our understanding of emotion.

This groundbreaking study recognises the importance of satire and the grotesque to modernist fiction. It brings together the burgeoning field of modernist studies with new theories of emotion to illuminate why comic and satiric strategies for handling problems of feeling and representation have proved so effective in modern times.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.