Description
Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that sceptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim. Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavour to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalised spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.
About the Author
Beci Carver earned her BA degree, her MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University, all in the 2000s, and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. Her first book, Granular Modernism, was published the year she began her Leverhulme. In 2016, she took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter.
Book Information
ISBN 9780198950721
Author Senior Lecturer Beci Carver
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
About the Author
Beci Carver earned her BA degree, her MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University, all in the 2000s, and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. Her first book, Granular Modernism, was published the year she began her Leverhulme. In 2016, she took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter.
Book Information
ISBN 9780198950721
Author Senior Lecturer Beci Carver
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
