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Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular Modernity returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress.
The Modernist Papers is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.
“Fredric Jameson is American’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” — Terry Eagleton
“Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today … It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him” — Colin MacCabe
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, and the author of many classic works including Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Archaeologies of the Future. His Valences of the Dialectic if forthcoming from Verso.
August 2007
450 pages
Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 096 3
£25 / US$34.95 / CAN$46
