In Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community, Jessica Berman claims that the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although these modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein, she argues, not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. This study seeks to revise theories of community and cosmopolitanism in light of their construction in narrative, and in particular it seeks to reveal the ways that modernist fiction can provide meaningful alternative models of community.

Author: Berman, Jessica
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Illustration: N
Language: ENG
Title: Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community
Pages: 00252 (Encrypted PDF)
On Sale: 1997-08-15
SKU-13/ISBN: 9780521805896
Category: Literary Criticism : American - General
Category: Literary Criticism : English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Category: Literary Criticism : European - French