Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with the novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but the following generations of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. Literary Modernism and Beyond tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations. In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. His discussions of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works include Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling, and reveal the sweeping changes that came about as critical authority moved from one generation to the next. Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. This analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself. Excerpted from Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text by Richard Lehan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
