Literary modernism and beyond : the extended vision and the realms of the text /

This encyclopedic analysis of modernist writing traces the cultural forces that shaped modernist thinking. Lehan (emer., UCLA) divides the work into six sections, beginning with an overview and then moving discursively from early modernism to postmodernism. The book ends with three appendixes: a chronology, an essay connecting war and modernism, and a succinct bibliographic essay surveying modernist criticism. Recognizing that modernist writers shared traits, the author analyzes works by such artists as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Wallace Stevens, showing that these writers explored common themes (human consciousness, identity, subjectivity) and experimented with common literary elements (myth, symbol, structure, time, language). Like Frederic Jameson, Lehan sets modernism within an evolving historical process influenced by various discourses: economic, scientific, political, archaeologic, and linguistic. Beginning with the ideas of Nietzsche and Bergson, the book traces the evolution of modernism through structuralism, new criticism, postmodernism, and beyond. Neither reductively accepting modernism as a homogeneous movement with a single approach nor dismissing modernism as a meaningless concept applied to unlike literary works, this ambitious work subtly defines it. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. All Readers. R. Mulligan Christopher Newport University