The New Modernist Novel

Reconsiders the historical connections between modernism and close reading and argues that new modernist fiction can bring with it new modes of reading

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The new modernist studies have recognised a range of writers, many of whom are now receiving new attention in criticism and teaching. Yet if an older modernist studies was developed for a different, narrower selection of literary works, how can its tools be brought to this new, widened canon? This book considers how close reading may change as the discipline's subjects of study change. The chapters ask first how modernism was being read around 1930 and at mid-century, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe 1920, and Mina Loy's Insel. These novels tend to deflect strategies of reading that were interdependent with the establishment of a more familiar canon of modernist literature at mid-century. Reading this new modernist fiction closely offers a way to open up modernism to other voices.