Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This innovative collection of specially commissioned essays is essential reading for anyone wishing to come to terms with the intellectual matrix of Anglo-American literary modernism. In making available to non-specialist readers twelve expert overviews of some of the most significant fields and phenomena — such as physics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Nietzscheanism — which impacted on the “revolution of the word” between (roughly) 1880 and 1939, the companion provides both a range of contexts for modernist literature and a series of essays which are accessible and authoritative in their own right. Together they comprise the story of an age. For the first time, material condensed from a formidable array of technical books and learned articles has been brought together in a single volume, and while the companion's main target reader is the literary student, it is anticipated that its scope and reach will also appeal to specialists in a number of other disciplines and, indeed, to any general reader with an interest in discovering more about the remarkable intellectual milieu of an extraordinary cultural epoch. An enhanced awareness of the efflorescence of ideas which occurred in twelve major fields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can only intensify the reader's appreciation of the radical and iconoclastic environment in which literary modernism emerged and ... log in or subscribe to read full text