Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text (review)

Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text (review) Reviews 103 Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text, by Richard Lehan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 343 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Richard Lehan’s fi rst forays into book-length criticism produced two ad- mired studies, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966) and Theo- dore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (1969). Since those monographs appeared, Lehan has turned his attention to broader subjects, as the titles of several of his later books suggest. (The City in Literature: An Intellec- tual and Cultural History [1998] and Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition [2005]). Now he has further widened his scope (and deepened his insights) with a sweeping study of modernism and post- modernism. Lehan dates the transition between the two movements to a point somewhere between modernism’s high-water mark just before World War II and the mid-sixties when literary critics began to question the mod- ernist mind set’s suppositions. He traces the philosophical roots of mod- ernism to Heidegger’s search for an ideal in the face of Western decline. The modern temper stressed myth, memory, subjective perception, and the imagination as opposed to the naturalistic faith http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Studies in American Naturalism University of Nebraska Press

Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text (review)

Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/literary-modernism-and-beyond-the-extended-vision-and-the-realms-of-Bm0xjc3ICD
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1944-6519

Abstract

Reviews 103 Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text, by Richard Lehan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 343 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Richard Lehan’s fi rst forays into book-length criticism produced two ad- mired studies, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966) and Theo- dore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (1969). Since those monographs appeared, Lehan has turned his attention to broader subjects, as the titles of several of his later books suggest. (The City in Literature: An Intellec- tual and Cultural History [1998] and Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition [2005]). Now he has further widened his scope (and deepened his insights) with a sweeping study of modernism and post- modernism. Lehan dates the transition between the two movements to a point somewhere between modernism’s high-water mark just before World War II and the mid-sixties when literary critics began to question the mod- ernist mind set’s suppositions. He traces the philosophical roots of mod- ernism to Heidegger’s search for an ideal in the face of Western decline. The modern temper stressed myth, memory, subjective perception, and the imagination as opposed to the naturalistic faith

Journal

Studies in American Naturalism – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Jan 6, 2011

There are no references for this article.