The Great War and the Language of Modernism - Hardcover
With the expressions "Lost Generation" and "The Men of 1914," the major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative, historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can be heard to stir in these words?
Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.
Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Vincent Sherry is Professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author of The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, and James Joyce: Ulysses.
Review:
"Sherry makes a dazzling case.... It is still all too rare for critics to read Modernist literature in the context of its historical period, and Sherry's work in that direction is to be warmly welcomed."--Times Literary Supplement
"'Armed force,' notes Vincent Sherry at the beginning of his powerful and learned revisionist study, 'appears in Liberal tradition as the chief type of unreason.' Yet in 1914, the Liberal Establishment in England found a way of justifying World War I as nothing short of an ethical enterprise--the defense of 'civilization' itself against the forces of irrationalism, anarchy, and decay. Indeed, Sherry argues, once we understand the Great War as inherently the War of Liberal Rationalism, literary modernism can be understood as the reaction to that Rationalism, especially to the rationalist, mentalist conception of language. In a series of daring and sometimes controversial readings, especially of Eliot, Pound, and Woolf, Sherry shows how this process worked itself out in the Modernist masterpieces of the period. His is a sobering account and one that has startling implications for our own historical moment."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
"The story of English liberalism is usually narrated with reference to works of literature that eschew stylistic experimentation--works that tell the story themselves. Vincent Sherry does something more dazzling. By focusing on the language of liberalism, he shows how Pound, Eliot, and Woolf responded to the disintegration of liberal values by imitating, exaggerating, and parodying that disintegration within the linguistic texture of their own work. This is historical criticism turned into a high-wire performance: language is pushed to the proscenium, and we are made to feel the historicity of precise turns in syntax, grammar, and diction."--James Longenbach, University of Rochester
"Sherry's book offers a learned, elegant, intricate, and intriguing argument about the collapse of liberal languages of rationality under the pressure of WW I, so that he can suggest a set of historical pressures on the emerging of modernist efforts to decompose and recompose prevailing models for determining social values. The result is an extraordinary weaving of the historian's skills with the modes of attention fostered by literary criticism." --Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley
Vincent Sherry is Professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author of The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, and James Joyce: Ulysses.
"Sherry makes a dazzling case.... It is still all too rare for critics to read Modernist literature in the context of its historical period, and Sherry's work in that direction is to be warmly welcomed."--Times Literary Supplement
"'Armed force,' notes Vincent Sherry at the beginning of his powerful and learned revisionist study, 'appears in Liberal tradition as the chief type of unreason.' Yet in 1914, the Liberal Establishment in England found a way of justifying World War I as nothing short of an ethical enterprise--the defense of 'civilization' itself against the forces of irrationalism, anarchy, and decay. Indeed, Sherry argues, once we understand the Great War as inherently the War of Liberal Rationalism, literary modernism can be understood as the reaction to that Rationalism, especially to the rationalist, mentalist conception of language. In a series of daring and sometimes controversial readings, especially of Eliot, Pound, and Woolf, Sherry shows how this process worked itself out in the Modernist masterpieces of the period. His is a sobering account and one that has startling implications for our own historical moment."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
"The story of English liberalism is usually narrated with reference to works of literature that eschew stylistic experimentation--works that tell the story themselves. Vincent Sherry does something more dazzling. By focusing on the language of liberalism, he shows how Pound, Eliot, and Woolf responded to the disintegration of liberal values by imitating, exaggerating, and parodying that disintegration within the linguistic texture of their own work. This is historical criticism turned into a high-wire performance: language is pushed to the proscenium, and we are made to feel the historicity of precise turns in syntax, grammar, and diction."--James Longenbach, University of Rochester
"Sherry's book offers a learned, elegant, intricate, and intriguing argument about the collapse of liberal languages of rationality under the pressure of WW I, so that he can suggest a set of historical pressures on the emerging of modernist efforts to decompose and recompose prevailing models for determining social values. The result is an extraordinary weaving of the historian's skills with the modes of attention fostered by literary criticism." --Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0195101766
- ISBN 13 9780195101768
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages416
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 65.89
Shipping:
US$ 23.67
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
THE GREAT WAR AND THE LANGUAGE OF MODERNISM.
Published by
Oxford University Press, Usa,, New York
(2003)
ISBN 10: 0195101766
ISBN 13: 9780195101768
New
Hardcover
First Edition
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardback. Condition: New. First Edition. Hardback. Dust Jacket. 8vo. 29 illustrations. ISBN: 0195101766 Pages: 408 Fine in fine dust wrapper. Seller Inventory # A62189
Buy New
US$ 65.89
Convert currency