Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture

ISBN-13: 9781138678736 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 296 str.

Michael Shallcross

Opis

This book studies the relationship between the work of G.K. Chesterton and a range of key literary modernists. When Chesterton and modernism have previously been considered in relation to one another the dynamic has been figured as one of mutual hostility, grounded in Chesterton's advocacy of popular culture and modernism's appeal to a cultural elite. Shallcross complicates this binary demarcation, establishing for the first time the depth and ambivalence of Chesterton's interaction with modernism, as well as the reciprocal interest of leading modernist writers in the work of Chesterton. The volume uses parody as a prism through which to view this interaction, arguing that this offered Chesterton a means of 'traversing modernity' in two distinct senses: both in the legal sense of refutation, achieved through satire, and in the ambulatory sense of boundary transgression, achieved through imitation. It argues that a comparable traffic between opposition and imitation informed the interaction of leading modernists, both with Chesterton and with one another. In this way, Shallcross illuminates the work of a range of modernist writers, including T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, through the lens of Chesterton's disruptive presence. The highly diverse modernist cast given consideration also includes James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Filippo Marinetti, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. This approach not only enables a far-reaching reassessment of Chesterton's corpus, but also produces a framework through which to re-evaluate the aesthetics of a host of other writers. The result is an innovative reading of the complex dynamic play of popular and 'high' culture in early twentieth-century British culture, which adds a valuable new perspective to current critical debates surrounding the parameters of modernism.

O autorze

Michael Shallcross is an independent researcher, based in York, UK.