Modernist movements radically transformed the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century literary establishment, and their effects are still
felt today. Modernism introduces and analyzes what amounted to nothing
less than a literary and cultural revolution.
In this fully updated, expanded, and revised third edition, charting
modernism in its global and local contexts, Peter Childs:
- details the origins of modernism and the influence of thinkers such as
Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein
- explores the radical changes which occurred in the arts, literature,
drama, and film of the period
- traces 'modernism at work' in literature, especially in writings by a
range of British, Irish, American and other Anglophone authors
including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Nella Larsen,
Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and many others
- explains recent critical interest in the culture and worldwide impact
of modernism
- reflects upon the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
At once accessible and critically informed, Modernism guides readers
from first steps in the field to an advanced understanding of one of the
most important cultural phenomena of the last centuries.