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Lateness and Modern European Literature

Hutchinson, Ben (2016) Lateness and Modern European Literature. Oxford University Press, 404 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-876769-5. (doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.001.0001) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:56838)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695...

Abstract

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors—from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valéry, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno— he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.

Item Type: Book
DOI/Identification number: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.001.0001
Subjects: P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Jacqueline Martlew
Date Deposited: 15 Aug 2016 13:35 UTC
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2022 12:21 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/56838 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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