Modernism, Satire and the Novel

Jonathan Greenberg

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511844065

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

'This volume’s greatest strength - and there are several from which to choose - is the clarity with which Greenberg … articulates his central contention about the role that satire plays within the modernist literary canon … Summing up: highly recommended.'

D. C. Maus Source: Choice

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Modernism, Satire and the Novel

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-v

Contents
pp vii-viii

Illustration
pp ix-x

Preface
pp xi-xvii

Abbreviations
pp xviii-xviii

Chapter 1 - Satire and its discontents
pp 1-20

Chapter 2 - Modernism's story of feeling
pp 21-46

Chapter 3 - The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies
pp 47-69

Chapter 4 - Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust
pp 70-91

Chapter 5 - Cold Comfort Farm and mental life
pp 92-114

Chapter 6 - Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling
pp 115-137

Chapter 7 - Nightwood and the ends of satire
pp 138-160

Chapter 8 - Beckett's authoritarian personalities
pp 161-183

Notes
pp 184-214

Index
pp 215-220

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