Overview
- First book to undertake unifying reassessment of modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry.
- Offers a new way to think about the nature of mimesis in modernist production.
- Reorganizes the modernist canon.
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither “difficult” nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naïveté rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Stephen D. Dowden is Professor of German Language and Literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Modernism and Mimesis
Authors: Stephen D. Dowden
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53134-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-53133-1Published: 27 September 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-53136-2Published: 28 September 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-53134-8Published: 26 September 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 283
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: Literature, general, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory