"This book argues that the history of literary modernism is inextricably connected with naturalism. Simon Joyce traces a complex response among aesthetes to the work of Emile Zola at the turn of the century, recovering naturalism's assumed compatibility with impressionism as a central cause of their ambivalence. Highlighting a little-studied strain of reflexive naturalism in which Zola's mode of analytical observation is turned upon the authors themselves, Joyce suggests that the confluence of naturalism and impressionism formed the precondition for so-called stream-of-consciousness writing. This style served to influence not only the work of canonical modernists such as Joyce and Woolf but also that of lesser-known writers such as George Moore, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton"--

This book argues that the history of literary modernism is inextricably connected with naturalism. Simon Joyce traces a complex response among aesthetes to the work of Émile Zola at the turn of the century, recovering naturalism's assumed compatibility with impressionism as a central cause of their ambivalence. Highlighting a little-studied strain of reflexive naturalism in which Zola's mode of analytical observation is turned upon the authors themselves, Joyce suggests that the confluence of naturalism and impressionism formed the precondition for so-called stream-of-consciousness writing. This style served to influence not only the work of canonical modernists such as Joyce and Woolf, but also that of lesser-known writers such as George Moore, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton.

Through studies of individual writers, this book reveals the inextricable connection between naturalism and literary modernism.

Presents essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction that provide authoritative assessments of the breadth and achievement of Irish novelists and short story writers.

Nietzsche and Irish Modernism demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.

Modernist epic is more interesting and more diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century—a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as 'the eclipse of Darwinism'—evolution's significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling national stories, the genre contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a new basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.

Analyses our modern obsession with intense experiences in terms of the metaphysics of intensity