Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Pericles Lewis

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511485145

In Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own images. Their literary techniques - multiple narrators, transcriptions of consciousness, involuntary memory, and arcane symbolism - focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the potential of the individual, in time of crisis, to redeem the nation.

‘Lewis’s portrayal of early-modernist fiction’s relation to nation compellingly raises important questions and issues that others will want to pursue.’

Source: Irish Studies Review

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Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-vi

Acknowledgments
pp vii-viii

Note on texts
pp ix-x

1 - The modern novelist as redeemer of the nation
pp 1-51

2 - The crisis of liberal nationalism
pp 52-96

3 - “His sympathies were in the right place”: Conrad and the discourse of national character
pp 97-125

4 - Citizens of the Plain: Proust and the discourse of national will
pp 126-174

5 - “Il vate nazionale”: D'Annunzio and the discourse of embodiment
pp 175-209

Conclusion
pp 210-216

Notes
pp 217-232

Select bibliography
pp 233-237

Index
pp 238-241

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