Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It arguesthat parody is central to the whole modernist project. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, definethemselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing.

This book comprehensively rethinks the relationship between G.K. Chesterton and a range of key literary modernists. When Chesterton and modernism have previously been considered in relation to one another, the dynamic has typically been conceived as one of mutual hostility, grounded in Chesterton’s advocacy of popular culture and modernist literature’s appeal to an aesthetic elite. In setting out to challenge this binary narrative, Shallcross establishes for the first time the depth and ambivalence of Chesterton’s engagement with modernism, as well as the reciprocal fascination of leading modernist writers with Chesterton’s fiction and thought. Shallcross argues that this dynamic was defined by various forms of parody and performance, and that these histrionic expressions of cultural play not only suffused the era, but found particular embodiment in Chesterton’s public persona. This reading not only enables a far-reaching reassessment of Chesterton’s corpus, but also produces a framework through which to re-evaluate the creative and critical projects of a host of modernist writers—most sustainedly, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound—through the prism of Chesterton's disruptive presence. The result is an innovative study of the literary performance of popular and ‘high’ culture in early twentieth-century Britain, which adds a valuable new perspective to continuing critical debates on the parameters of modernism.

In this definitive work Margaret Rose presents an analysis and history of theories and uses of parody from ancient to contemporary times and offers a new approach to the analysis and classification of modern, late-modern, and post-modern theories of the subject. The author's Parody/Meta-Fiction (1979) was influential in broadening awareness of parody as a 'double-coded' device which could be used for more than mere ridicule. In the present study she both expands and revises the introductory section of her 1979 text and adds substantial new sections on modern and post-modern theories and uses of parody and pastiche which also discuss the work of theorists and writers including the Russian formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Charles Jencks, Umberto Eco, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and others.

Jaroslav Kušnír’s book American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction is a sequel to his previous study on American postmodern fiction entitled Poetika americkej postmodernej prózy: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme [Poetics of American Fiction: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme]. Prešov: Impreso, 2001. It explores various aspects of American postmodernist fiction as manifested in the works by Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme and other American postmodernist authors such as Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster. Analyzing various short stories and novels, the author shows differences between modernist and postmodernist literature in the works of Donald Barthelme; the way postmodern parodies of popular literary genres give a critique of some aspects of American cultural identity and experience (the American Dream, individualism, consumerism); and he also shows different ways postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster create metafictional effect as one of the most significant aspects of postmodern literature.

Parody: The Art That Plays with Art explodes the near-universal belief that parody is a copycat genre or that it consists of a collection of trivial and derivative forms. Parody is revealed as an über-technique, a principal source of innovation and invention in the arts. The technique is defined in terms of three major variations that bang, bind, and blend artistic conventions into contrasting pairings, the results of which are upheavals of existing conventions and the formation of unexpected and sometimes startling and revolutionary new configurations. Parodic art fashions a galaxy of contrasts, and from these stem an illusionistic sense of multiplicity and an array of divergent meanings and interpretive paths. This book, an extreme departure from existing analyses of parody, is nonetheless highly accessible and will be of major interest not only to scholars but to general readers and to professional writers as well. Parody: The Art That Plays with Art is particularly suited for readers interested in modernism, postmodernism, meta-art, criticism, satire, and irony.

"Lewis's political writings present ambiguities: his stated belief in the autonomy of art from life is contradicted by other statements he made and by his critical analyses of writers; and his political writings blur any a priori generic distinction between art and non-art. Given this blurring between art and life, artistic genre and non-artistic genre, Quema claims that Lewis's political texts present characteristics usually attributed to avant-gardism. However, this radicalism has to be balanced against Lewis's conservatism. Thus his political writings can be read as allegories with two pragmatic aims: to organize the life of the polis from an artistic standpoint and to persuade the reader to adhere to authoritarian politics."--BOOK JACKET.

In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ten eminent scholars from Britain and the United States offer timely new appraisals of the revolutionary cultural transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, provide both close analyses of individual works and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A chronology and guide to further reading supply valuable orientation for the study of Modernism. Readers will be able to use the book at once as a standard work of reference and as a stimulating source of compelling new readings of works by writers and artists from Joyce and Woolf to Stein, Picasso, Chaplin, H. D. and Freud, and many others. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating re-evaluation.