Table of Contents

Introduction: mapping modernist continuities David James; Part I. Early Legacies: Inheriting Modernism at Mid-Century and Beyond: 1. Not what it used to be: nostalgia and the legacies of modernism Randall Stevenson; 2. H. E. Bates, regionalism and late modernism Dominic Head; 3. Moving beyond modernism in the fiction of B. S. Johnson: charting influences and comparisons Philip Tew; Part II. Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Character, Perception, Innovation: 4. Thinking in literature: modernism and contemporary neuroscience Patricia Waugh; 5. Autonomous automata: opacity and the fugitive character in the modernist novel and after Julia Jordan; 6. Pseudo-Impressionism? Jesse Matz; 7. 'Advancing along the inherited path': Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and the idea of being traditionally new David James; Part III. Reassessing the Ethics of Modernist Fiction: 8. A complex legacy: modernity's uneasy discourse of ethics and responsibility Tim Woods; 9. 'A renewed sense of difficulty': E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on ethics and form Andrzej Gasiorek; 10. 'Myths of desire': D. H. Lawrence, language and ethics in A. S. Byatt's fiction Peter Preston; Part IV. Modernism's Global Afterlives: 11. Fictions of global crisis Peter Middleton; 12. Representing slums and home: Chris Abani's Graceland Susan Z. Andrade; 13. For translation: Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee and transnational comparison Rebecca L. Walkowitz; Epilogue: finding the dreadfully real Adam Thorpe.

Promotional Information

The essays in this book trace the development of contemporary fiction through its dialogue with, rather than departure from, modernist literature.

About the Author

David James is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Nottingham.