Allon White

The Uses of Obscurity (eBook, PDF)

The Fiction of Early Modernism

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Originally published in 1981, this book examines why and how textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature and questions how we can begin to account for the forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late 19th Century and which became so important to modernism. The author argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of 'symptomatic' or 'subtextual' reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public. Within this general cultural perspective, the book traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant fictions. It discusses opacity in the texts themselves - embarrassment and shame in Meredith; 'engimas' in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 202
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Oktober 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781003821816
• Artikelnr.: 69095588

Autorenporträt

Allon White

Inhaltsangabe

1. Obscurity and Enlightenment 2. Obscure Writing and Private Life,
1880-1914 3. Truth and Impurity 4. 'Godiva' to the Gossips: Meredith and
the Language of Shame 5. Conrad and the Rhetoric of Enigma 6. 'The
Deterrent Fact': Vulgarity and Obscurity in James.