Wow! eBook
Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence
Author(s): Paul Sheehan (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: 8 Aug. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 238 pages
- ISBN-10: 9781107036833
- ISBN-13: 1107036836
Book Description
The notion that violence can give rise to art – and that art can serve as an agent of violence – is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century.
About the Author
Paul Sheehan is a senior lecturer in English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (2003). Most recently he has published essays in SubStance, Twentieth-Century Literature and Textual Practice, as well as book chapters on Thomas De Quincey, Cormac McCarthy and Ralph Ellison, and several articles on Samuel Beckett.
