This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Paltin, Judith 1959- (Author)
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	Cambridge ; New York, NY Cambridge University Press 2020
Subjects:	Crowds in literature English fiction / 20th century / History and criticism Modernism (Literature) Literature and society / Great Britain / History / 20th century English fiction Literature and society Great Britain 1900-1999 Criticism, interpretation, etc History
Summary:	This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power
Physical Description:	vii, 225 Seiten
ISBN:	9781108842235 1108842232