1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910781971503321

Autore

Greenberg Jonathan Daniel <1968->

Titolo

Modernism, satire, and the novel / / Jonathan Greenberg [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2011

ISBN

1-139-15292-0

1-107-22796-8

1-283-34253-7

1-139-16047-8

9786613342539

1-139-16147-4

1-139-15590-3

1-139-15765-5

1-139-15942-9

0-511-84406-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xviii, 220 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Classificazione

LIT004120

Disciplina

809.3/9112

Soggetti

Modernism (Literature)

Satire - History and criticism

Emotions in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Preface: the Uncle Fester principle; 1. Satire and its discontents; 2. Modernism's story of feeling; 3. The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; 4. Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust; 5. Cold Comfort Farm and mental life; 6. Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling; 7. Nightwood and the ends of satire; 8. Beckett's authoritarian personalities.

Sommario/riassunto

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This



sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.