The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading

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Elizabeth Pender (Teacher at the Centre for English Teaching, University of Sydney)

The New Modernist Novel

Name: The New Modernist Novel
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ISBN: 9781474461481

Criticism and the Task of Reading

Elizabeth Pender (Teacher at the Centre for English Teaching, University of Sydney)

$219

Hardback

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English

Edinburgh University Press
07 January 2025

Literary studies: from c 1900 -

Since the late twentieth century, new understandings of modernism have come with new attention to a range of writers. Yet if the academic study of modernism took shape around an older, narrower selection of writers and works, how can its modes of reading be relevant to newly recovered modernist writing? This book considers how close reading may change as the subjects of literary study change. Elizabeth Pender asks what reading meant for critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels. Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loy's Insel tend to resist some of the strategies of reading that helped construct a narrowed modernist canon at mid-century, such as the pursuit of coherence. These novels offer new thinking about the temporality of reading, style, and the ethics of narration. Reading these novels now suggests that other new modernist fiction, too, may require revisions to vocabularies with which modernist literature has sometimes been read.

By: Elizabeth Pender (Teacher at the Centre for English Teaching University of Sydney)
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781474461481
ISBN 10: 1474461484
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 07 January 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elizabeth Pender has taught English Literature at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge and has published articles in Modernism/modernity and Critical Quarterly. The collection Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (2019) was co-edited with Cathryn Setz.

Reviews for The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading

Elizabeth Pender’s splendid close readings show how the novels of Barnes, Loy and Rodker express an oblique relation to the ""canonical"" modernism from which they emerged. Prizing style above structure and using allusion to create poetic density rather than to celebrate tradition, these ""new modernists"" propose exciting new ways to read twentieth-century fiction. -- Peter Nicholls, New York University