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Modernist Commitments

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Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges ...
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  • 03 January 2012
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Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.
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Price: $160.00
Pages: 384
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Modernist Latitudes
Publication Date: 03 January 2012
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231149501
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
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Vigorously expanding the scope of modernist and postcolonial fiction studies, Modernist Commitments ranges boldly from early-twentieth-century India to Civil War Spain and Depression-era U.S. corn lands, encompassing not only writers such as Woolf, Rhys, Joyce, and Anand but also little-known authors of domestic, postcolonial, wartime, and working-class narratives. In her multifaceted, engaging, and richly researched book, Berman spans the archival and the philosophical, advances the transnationalization of modernist studies, and powerfully reveals the ethical and political urgencies embedded in modernist narrative technique.
Jessica Berman is associate professor and chair of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community and the coeditor, with Jane Goldman, of Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds. She is also the co-editor, with Paul Saint-Amour, of the series Modernist Latitudes.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imagining Justice
Part 1
1. Intimate and Global: Ethical Domains from Woolf to Rhys
2. Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce
Part 2
3. Modernism in the Zenana: The Domestic Spaces of Sorabji
4. Commitment and the Scene of War: Max Aub and Spanish Civil War Writing
5. Arising from the Cornlands: The Working-Class Voices of Conroy and Le Sueur
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index