Description
Book Synopsis* Offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain. * Helps readers to grasp the intellectual and cultural contexts of literary Modernism. * Organised around contemporary ideas such as Freudianism and eugenics rather than literary genres.
Trade Review‘This is the most exciting and vibrant introduction to Anglo-American Modernism yet to appear. ... The
Concise Companion to Modernism is bound to become the main textbook for all those who want to understand more deeply the culture of the first three decades of the last century.’
Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania "[...] I would recommend this volume to any library with a readership who comes either out of interest, or as students of the period needing to understand the context in which ideas emerged, looking for a way into the text. [...]A select bibliography at the end of the book provides even more options for advanced research, completing a most useful guidebook to some interesting themes." Reference Review
"[McDonald] supplies everything any reader would need to understand the whole social and critical history of modernist publishing." James Joyce Quarterly
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Chronology xi
Introduction 1
David Bradshaw
1 The Life Sciences: “Everybody nowadays talks about evolution” 6
Angelique Richardson
2 Eugenics: “They should certainly be killed” 34
David Bradshaw
3 Nietzscheanism: “The Superman and the all-too-human” 56
Michael Bell
4 Anthropology: “The latest form of evening entertainment” 75
Jeremy MacClancy
5 Bergsonism: “Time out of mind” 95
Mary Ann Gillies
6 Psychoanalysis in Britain: “The rituals of destruction” 116
Stephen Frosh
7 Language: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” 138
April McMahon
8 Technology: “Multiplied man” 158
Tim Armstrong
9 The Concept of the State 1880–1939: “The discredit of the State is a sign that it has done its work well” 179
Sarah Wilkinson
10 Physics: “A strange footprint” 200
Michael H. Whitworth
11 Modernist Publishing: “Nomads and mapmakers” 221
Peter D. McDonald
12 Reading: “‘Mind hungers’ common and uncommon” 243
Todd Avery and Patrick Brantlinger
Select Bibliography 262
Index 266
