| Summary: |
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, clmely poetry, prose, and the manifesto. With reference to a wide range of canonical figures, including Aragon, Baudelaire, Eliot, �Rmy de Gourmont, Joyce, Mina Loy, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Proust, Rilke, Tzara, Va�lry, 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'. |