In this book, Jessica Berman claims that modernist fiction engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality and shared voice, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with...
In this book, Jessica Berman claims that modernist fiction engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitan...
Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its...
Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships ...