Modernism and Style - (Modernism And...) by B Hutchinson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Tracing the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s, this book explores the far-reaching implications of Roland Barthes' claim that modern literature is "saturated with style." It offers both a broad, comparative survey of European modernism and an inventive re-reading of the major genres of the period, namely poetry, prose, and the manifesto. With reference to a wide range of canonical figures, including Aragon, Baudelaire, Eliot, Remy de Gourmont, Joyce, Mina Loy, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Proust, Rilke, Tzara, Valery, and Virginia Woolf, Hutchinson argues that modernism oscillates between embracing a literature of "pure" style and rejecting a literature that is "purely" style. Between these two poles, style emerges, in the words of John Middleton Murry, not as "an isolable quality of writing, but as writing itself.""--

Book Synopsis

Modernism is fundamentally determined by its relationship to its own notions of style: oscillating between the poles of 'pure' style and 'purely' style, this traces the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s.

Review Quotes

'This book should be compulsory reading for all those who are interested in modernism. Less a polemical 'treatise of style' as Aragon had it, it is both an original mapping of modernism briskly revisited via the history of its successive forms, and a conceptualization of the contradictory concepts of style invoked by its most canonical authors. The scope of reference is broad, with accurate readings of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Rilke, Dujardin, Eliot, Pound, Breton, Valery, Marinetti and Mina Loy. This book renders the same service for modernism as Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero. While Barthes saw modernity as defined by the end of style, here we learn to recognize the plurality of styles of modernism, and this is an invaluable contribution.' - Jean-Michel Rabaté, the University of Pennsylvania, USA

'Hutchinson steers a course through a vast catalogue of canonical modernist authors in his effort to calibrate the oscillating valance of stylistic "purity" in the period. In doing so, he reveals manifold variations in artistic practice and theoretical positioning. Indeed, what emerges most strikingly from this kaleidoscopic reckoning is a sense of style's fluidity as a notion and of the fields of aesthetics and poetics as dynamic domains of ceaseless modulation and revision.' - Scarlett Baron, University College London, UK

About the Author

Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent.