Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century (eBook)

Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century explores connections between utopian politics and modernism across a wide-ranging selection of twentieth-century literature.

Caroline Edwards, University of Lincoln, UK Nina Engelhardt, University of Edinburgh, UK Elizabeth English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Nick Hubble, Brunel University, UK David James, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University, USA Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University, USA Alice Reeve-Tucker, University of Birmingham, UK Shawna Ross, Arizona State University, USA Glyn Salton-Cox, postgraduate researcher, USA Nathan Waddell, University of Nottingham, UK

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Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.