Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on modernist narrative, this book suggests that style conceived expansively as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness helps to explain many other, nonliterary formations of cosmopolitanism in history, anthropology, sociology, transcultural studies, and media studies.
Trade ReviewRecommended. Choice A valuable book... Walkowitz deserves our praise for her openness, her ambition, and her willingness to take on so demanding a critical task. -- Dominic Manganiello James Joyce Literary supplement creative and refreshing -- April Bullock Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History My own work on cosmopolitan fiction will be enriched by this ambitious book, as will the work of other critics in modernist studies, globalization studies, and feminist studies who study the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, private and international experience, modernism and immigration, and feeling and critique. Comparative Literature Shrewdly conceived, well-informed, and well-executed... this book is an impressive debut that imaginatively realigns and redefines those essentially contested terms: modernism and the cosmopolitan. Comparative Literature Studies [Walkowitz] proposes that discomfort is the only objective left for art that understands itself as such. This stance makes her work stand out in a field of modernist studies that currently abounds with talk of transnational affiliation and the global reach of early twentieth-century fiction. Novel Cosmopolitan Style convinces with its assertion that contemporary cosmopolitanism - both fictive and theoretical - owes a good deal to modernist texts, and with its vision of the ways modernist style disrupts standard, homogenized forms of national belonging. Twentieth-Century Literature
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction. Critical Cosmopolitanism and Modernist Narrative Part 1. Cosmopolitan Modernism 1. Conrad's Naturalness 2. Joyce's Triviality 3. Woolf's Evasion Part 2. Modernist Cosmopolitanism 4. Ishiguro's Treason 5. Rushdie's Mix-Up 6. Sebald's Vertigo Notes Bibliography Index
