Modernism

An engaging, approachable introduction to literary modernism

Modernism represented an astonishing outbreak of cultural innovation, spanning artforms and nations. It was centred around feelings of growing alienation in an industrial world, and a desire to change how people live together in society. Art, architecture, literature, and music all underwent a radical revolution.

Although it was confined to small coteries of artists and lasted no more than thirty years, its techniques were appropriated by mass culture and became familiar to millions of citizens who have never heard of Paul Klee or Gertrude Stein. It represents one of the most productive moments in art since the Renaissance, which in its scope, originality, and imaginative audacity has never been equalled.

Terry Eagleton presents a compelling and entertaining guide to modernism. From Ezra Pound to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce to H.D., Eagleton explores the literature and ideas of prominent modernists, emphasising the profound impact they had on subsequent generations.

“A finely judged, beautifully articulated, typically witty, and consistently surprising account of literary modernism written by one of contemporary criticism’s most trailblazing thinkers.”—Nathan Waddell, author of A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell

“To read Terry Eagleton on modernism is to be in such good and gentle company as almost to feel you are encountering one of modernism’s own most compelling figures, a figure to whom Eagleton himself in passing refers – namely, the one who, in The Waste Land, is said to be always ‘walking beside you.’”—John Schad, author of Paris Bride: A Modernist Life

“Through its deft and vivid account, Eagleton’s Modernism brilliantly interweaves literature with its political, economic and philosophical hinterland as it measures modernism against alternative avant-gardes. The book is written and shaped to make the period startlingly fresh for all readers.”—Steven Matthews, author of On Magnetism

“This is the sort of light-footed dash through the meanings of modernism that is only available to those with decades of scholarly experience. . . . A vital account of the crises to which modernism responded, its own exhaustion and disillusionment, and its cementing in contemporary teaching and the wider imagination.”—Abbie Garrington, author of Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing

Terry Eagleton has been the Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and is the author of more than fifty books in the fields of literary theory, postmodernism, politics, ideology, and religion.

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