Description
A wide-ranging exploration of the influence of violence on literature during the long twentieth century, from World War I to 9/11 and from early modernism to postmodernism.
About the Author
Joyce Wexler is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Loyola University Chicago, USA. She is the author of three books, including Who Paid for Modernism? (1997). She has published widely on twentieth-century aesthetic movements, cultural studies, publishing history, Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence, and is Vice President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America.
Reviews
Joyce Wexler makes an important, theoretically informed argument about the many ways in which the experimental indeterminacies of modernist form respond to the social and historical dilemmas of the long twentieth century. She provides a coherent account of an exceptional variety of texts without oversimplifications that ignore or reduce their differences. Students, teachers, and readers of all kinds will find this book an accessible, engaging introduction to modern fiction in particular and to the modern period in general. * Paul Armstrong, Professor of English, Brown University, USA *
Violence Without God pursues the riveting question of the relationship between unthinkable violence and various twentieth-century avant gardes. Working with Charles Taylor's argument that, when secularism is understood as a lack of consensus about what to believe, the uncontainability of violence becomes incomprehensible to modern minds. In tracking that issue, this book uncovers some extraordinary continuities between early modernism, interwar modernism, late modernism, postwar writing, and postcolonialism, while simultaneously delineating how and why their distinctive aesthetic shifts occurred. This book offers an equally impressive intervention in recent developments within modernist studies and global comparativism. Its close comparisons between Anglo and Germanic texts mark a major step in delineating those crucial cross-cultural relationships. * Holly Laird, Professor of English, University of Tulsa, USA *
Ambitious, impressive, and provocative ... Violence Without God is an important, exciting book that I found myself thinking about for some time after I read it ... An exemplar of well-executed, bold scholarship written in lucid, energetic prose that can help us to rethink the intersections between form and history in modern literature. Wexler deftly moves among texts and theories (including trauma theory, new materialist theories, and psychoanalysis) to construct the kind of original argument that offers a new way of thinking about literary history of the past century. * James Joyce Quarterly *
Book Information
ISBN 9781501325281
Author Professor Joyce Wexler
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic USA
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Weight(grams) 295g