The Uses of Obscurity

The Fiction of Early Modernism

Allon White (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

198 Seiten

2023
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-64593-3 (ISBN)

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Originally published in 1981, this book examines why and how textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature and questions how we can begin to account for the forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late 19th Century and which became so important to modernism. The author argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of ‘symptomatic’ or ‘subtextual’ reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public. Within this general cultural perspective, the book traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant fictions. It discusses opacity in the texts themselves – embarrassment and shame in Meredith; ‘engimas’ in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James.

Allon White

1. Obscurity and Enlightenment 2. Obscure Writing and Private Life, 1880-1914 3. Truth and Impurity 4. ‘Godiva’ to the Gossips: Meredith and the Language of Shame 5. Conrad and the Rhetoric of Enigma 6. ‘The Deterrent Fact’: Vulgarity and Obscurity in James.

Erscheinungsdatum	05.12.2023
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Revivals
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Gewicht	420 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-032-64593-8 / 1032645938
ISBN-13	978-1-032-64593-3 / 9781032645933
Zustand	Neuware