The New Modernist Novel Criticism and the Task of Reading

Brings close reading into the new modernist studiesConsiders the changing meanings of reading among contemporary critics of modernist fiction and among mid-century criticsOffers sustained readings of three new modernist novels: Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe 1920, and Mina Loy's InselConsiders how these novels present their literary, cultural, and social contexts to close readingExtends the book's questions to Samuel Beckett's Comment c'est/How It Is and Jean Rhys's short stories
The new modernist studies have recognised a range of writers, many of whom are now receiving new attention in criticism and teaching. Yet if an older modernist studies was developed for a different, narrower selection of literary works, how can its tools be brought to this new, widened canon?
This book considers how close reading may change as the discipline's subjects of study change. The chapters ask first how modernism was being read around 1930 and at mid-century, and then what close reading might look like now for three new modernist novels - Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe 1920, and Mina Loy's Insel. These novels tend to deflect strategies of reading that were interdependent with the establishment of a more familiar canon of modernist literature at mid-century. Reading this new modernist fiction closely offers a way to open up modernism to other voices.