The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature

by Richard Ellmann

This comprehensive anthology, edited by the acclaimed scholars of modernism, Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, is arranged thematically with essential readings from the Western European tradition symbolism, realism, nature, cultural history, the unconscious, myth, self-consciousness, existence, and faith. Readings include examples from Romanticism, the aesthetic movement of the late 19th century, the art theories of cubism, dadaism and futurism, and the philosophical queries of existentialism. Writers represented span the 19th and early 20th centuries and include Wilde, Rilke, Picasso, Baudelaire, Yeats, Nietzsche, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Marx and Sartre.

Genres: Criticism, Literature, 20th Century

974 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1965

About the author

Richard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Charles Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually used this anthology as a textbook in an honors freshman English class I taught way back when. Remembering it as a splendid source of all sorts of ideas about literature and art, I wanted to return to it to refresh my memories of what it contains.

I had forgotten the philosophical density of many of the entries, and often found myself in deeper intellectual waters than I'm accustomed to: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Dewey, William James, Croce, Nietzsche, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Barth, Tillich. I floundered, but never sank.

And I found a solution to a problem that has been bothering me: If we're postmodern, what is it that we're post?

To be modern is to have experienced the death of God. And not only that, to have gone through some if not all of the Kübler-Ross "stages of grief": denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Few moderns, of course, stay long in denial -- that's the place for the fundamentalists of the religious right today. But many of them are angry about it, and blame the Enlightenment and rationalists, or materialists, or scientists for killing off God. And they turn to bargaining, trying to replace divinity with the imagination, or with historical process, or with evolution toward an Übermensch.

Depression seems to lead to existentialist resignation. And acceptance opens the gate to the postmodern acceptance of plurality, of diversity, of subjectivity, and the rejection of metaphysics.

Or as Samuel Beckett put it: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

It may be hard to find a copy of the book today. Amazon has it from various second-hand sources, and you may run across it in used bookstores. If you do, I urge you to pick it up.

[Sachin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating anthology on Modernism. A must for all lovers of the Modernist literature.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effing amazing collection.

[Jesse Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite anthologies ever. Fantastic selections, great commentary, just perfect. A remarkable survey of what it means to be human up through the late modern age.