
Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors--from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno-- he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.
This book investigates whether literary modernity is better understood not as a pursuit of the new, but as a persistent condition of 'lateness' or senescence. Ben Hutchinson, a scholar of European literature, challenges traditional narratives of progress by examining how authors from the Romantic period to the twentieth century define their work through a sense of historical exhaustion. He proposes a taxonomy of lateness, arguing that modernity is characterized by a reflexive, backward-looking orientation rather than a forward-looking innovation.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and critics recognize this work as a significant contribution to comparative literary studies, particularly for its re-evaluation of the modernist canon. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the breadth of the author's cross-cultural synthesis.
Page Count:
352
Publication Date:
2016-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
0191080349
ISBN-13:
9780191080340
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