Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

by Paul Sheehan

Overview

The notion that violence can give rise to art – and that art can serve as an agent of violence – is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be re-oriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107036833
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2013
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paul Sheehan is a senior lecturer in English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (2003). Most recently he has published essays in SubStance, Twentieth-Century Literature and Textual Practice, as well as book chapters on Thomas De Quincey, Cormac McCarthy and Ralph Ellison, and several articles on Samuel Beckett.

Table of Contents

Introduction: modernism's blasted history; Part I. Decadence Rising: The Violence of Aestheticism: 1. Revolution of the senses; 2. Victorian sexual aesthetics; 3. Culture, corruption, criminality; 4. A malady of dreaming: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Part II. Modernism's Breach: The Violence of Aesthetics: 5. Prologue: transgression displaced; 6. No dreaming pale flowers; 7. Modernist sexual politics; 8. Maximum energy (like a hurricane); 9. Forbidden planet: Heart of Darkness; Epilogue: traumas of the world; Notes; Bibliography.