Modernism and Style

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xx

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 1-44

3. Philosophical Beginnings

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 45-80

4. 1857: Literary Beginnings

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 81-116

5. The ‘Virus of Prose’: Decadent Style and the Modernist Novel

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 117-155

6. 1922: Style and the Modernist Lyric

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 156-197

7. The ‘Alibi’ of Style: Modernist Manifestos

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 198-238

8. Conclusion

   • Ben Hutchinson

   Pages 239-244

9. Back Matter

   Pages 245-291

   PDF

Modernism is fundamentally determined by its relationship to its own notions of style: oscillating between the poles of 'pure' style and 'purely' style, this traces the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s.

• Friedrich Nietzsche
• philosophy

'This book should be compulsory reading for all those who are interested in modernism. Less a polemical 'treatise of style' as Aragon had it, it is both an original mapping of modernism briskly revisited via the history of its successive forms, and a conceptualization of the contradictory concepts of style invoked by its most canonical authors. The scope of reference is broad, with accurate readings of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Rilke, Dujardin, Eliot, Pound, Breton, Valery, Marinetti and Mina Loy. This book renders the same service for modernism as Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero. While Barthes saw modernity as defined by the end of style, here we learn to recognize the plurality of styles of modernism, and this is an invaluable contribution.' - Jean-Michel Rabaté, the University of Pennsylvania, USA

'Hutchinson steers a course through a vast catalogue of canonical modernist authors in his effort to calibrate the oscillating valance of stylistic "purity" in the period. In doing so, he reveals manifold variations in artistic practice and theoretical positioning. Indeed, what emerges most strikingly from this kaleidoscopic reckoning is a sense of style's fluidity as a notion and of the fields of aesthetics and poetics as dynamic domains of ceaseless modulation and revision.' - Scarlett Baron, University College London, UK

• University of Kent, UK

  Ben Hutchinson

Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent.

Policies and ethics