David James

Modernist Futures (eBook, ePUB)

Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform. By rethinking critical and disciplinary parameters, James brings scholarship on contemporary fiction into dialogue with modernist studies, offering a nuanced account of narrative strategies that sheds new light on the form of the novel today. An ambitious and incisive contribution to the field, this book will appeal especially to scholars of modernism and contemporary literary culture as well as those in American and postcolonial studies.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. August 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781139540193
• Artikelnr.: 52974916

Autorenporträt

While a student at Portsmouth Technical College, David was tempted to follow his heart and become a writer. Instead, having been brought up in a service family, duty called and he joined the Royal Navy as a seaman officer.In 1971 he left the Senior Service to pursue his other dream - of becoming a professional civilian sailor. Hard years followed before he was sufficiently experienced and qualified to captain groups of young Londoners on adventurous sailing voyages in a traditional old Norwegian sailing rescue ship. In 1977 David was recruited to run Ocean Youth Club, Britain's largest sail training fleet. In 1985 he was head-hunted by the Drake Fellowship which he soon merged with Fairbridge to create Fairbridge-Drake. This became the UK's most effective motivational training charity for unemployed young people in inner cities.David eventually left London for West Cornwall, where, at the age when most people retire, his wife suggested opening a bookshop. They transformed a local tea-room into a much-loved café and second-hand bookshop where David started writing poetry again, publishing Any Cornish Beach in 2009.David relished the solitude imposed by the Covid lockdown and began to write his first novel, A Flower in Winter.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Introduction: contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism
1. 'Advancing along the inherited path': making it traditionally new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth
2. 'The perfect state for a novel': Michael Ondaatje's Cubist imagination
3. 'Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world': J. M. Coetzee's politics of minimalism
4. 'The dead hand of modernism': Ian McEwan, reluctant impressionist
5. 'License to strut': Toni Morrison and the ethics of virtuosity
Notes.