The New Modernist Novel by Elizabeth Pender - 9781474461481

The New Modernist NovelCriticism and the Task of Reading\nAuthor(s): Elizabeth Pender\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Edinburgh University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Edinburgh University Press\nISBN-13: 9781474461481, 978-1474461481\nSynopsis\nSince the late twentieth century, new understandings of modernism have come with new attention to a range of writers. Yet if the academic study of modernism took shape around an older, narrower selection of writers and works, how can its modes of reading be relevant to newly recovered modernist writing? This book considers how close reading may change as the subjects of literary study change. Elizabeth Pender asks what reading meant for critics of modernist literature around 1930 and around 1960, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels. Djuna Barness Nightwood, John Rodkers Adolphe 1920 and Mina Loys Insel tend to resist some of the strategies of reading that helped construct a narrowed modernist canon .