The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction

by Stephen Kern

Leading scholar Stephen Kern offers a probing analysis of the modernist novel, encompassing American, British and European works. Organized thematically, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the stunningly original formal innovations in novels by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Gide, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Kafka, Musil and others. Kern contextualizes and explains how formal innovations captured the dynamic history of the period, reconstructed as ten master narratives. He also draws briefly on poetry and painting of the first half of the twentieth century. The Modernist Novel is set to become a fundamental source for discussions of the genre and a useful introduction to the subject for students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Literary Criticism, Literature, History

266 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2011

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came for Kafka, stayed for the myriad of examples illustrating the most important traits of modern literature - good stuff.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough and detailed look at many of the formal techniques that distinguish the Modernist and Realist novel. The book is marred somewhat by Kern’s desire to connect these formal techniques with the Modernists’ subversion of various master narratives in a way that is somewhat schematic and arbitrary. But the book is well structured and so allows the reader to skim some of these sections.

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, used as a textbook for a class I took, helps break down the modernist period and explain what set the writers of this time apart from all others. With mentions and analysis of Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Ford, Conrad, Lawrence and others, Kern helps explain the rule-breaking lengths these writers went to in order to explore what it meant to be human and live a human experience. They translated their explorations into stories, some without a true beginning, some without a true ending, some lacking the sense of narrative all together. Yet, they broke through barriers that the previous literary periods had set up. By examining these authors and their works, Kern really introduces the modernist period with critical interpretations.

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çok çok güzel. Hem bilgileri tazelemek hem de yeni şeyler öğrenmek için ideal bir çalışma. Üstelik kullandığı yöntemi de çok başarılı buldum. Konuya dair yalın ama dolu bir kitap isteyenler için başucu kitabı olabilecek kalitede.

[Candy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required for school

[Gemma Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exhaustive and insightful typology that demonstrates the full breadth and depth of the modernist canon and it's formal and structural innovations. Also a valuable teaching resource.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kern reads with the sharpness of a literary theorist and writes with the clarity of a historian. By sharply periodizing and limiting his focus to Western European and American authors, Kern posits the specificity of modernism as a reaction to certain historical, social and technological factors.

The strengths of his work are his knowledge and reading of Ulysses, as well as the comparisons with the work of realists to demonstrate the novelty of modernism. A deficiency of his work on literary modernism, however, is the curious omission of theatre- playwrights like Brecht and Artaud would have been, in my opinion, worthwhile additions to an otherwise well rounded selection of writers.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This textbook had tons of examples to help enforce its lessons; many of which were books that we were reading in the class. It's always helpful when you can relate it to something that you're actually working on.