Modernism, empire, world literature / Joe Cleary.

Cambridge, UK Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

©2021

ix, 318 pages ; 25 cm

"After World War I, American, Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the literary world system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary "renaissances" and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war-devastated Europe, émigré and domestic-based modernists produced dazzling new works that challenged London's or Paris's authority to determine literary value and propounded their own notions of critical merit, these later codified as "Modernism." However, after World War II, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed the literature that had once challenged English and French literary authority to boost the cultural prestige of the United States in the cold war and to contest Soviet conceptions of "world literature." Here, in strong readings of major works and essays by Henry James, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and Derek Walcott, Joe Cleary situates Anglophone modernism in terms of the rise and fall of European and American empires and disputed histories of "world literature.""-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Cleary, Joe (Joseph N.) Modernism, empire, world literature Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

English

October 01, 2021