Romance in the Time of Modernism: A Literature of Silence reasserts the theme of love in an age of anguish. Modernism has been and still is studied and interpreted under multiple perspectives. However, there is a lacuna in the corpus of scholarship: the theme of love has been ignored. Being modernism iconoclastic and obscure in its premises, but also dark in its conclusion, how do modernist characters love? This book emphasizes the persistence of romance in an age of dissolution. In spite of the homologation process that the industrial revolution has started, modernist characters are still individuals of passion but it is a passion they are incapable of telling. Love is a romance that is blended with everything modernism is synonymous with: alienation, nihilism, fragmentation, the terror of those who live in a universe meant to be silent.
This book is a comparative analysis of classic texts of the Western canon, with each text grounded on a modernist version of love. As the aesthetic of modernism is still an aesthetic of sublime, romance becomes a tale of beauty and terror.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: What was Modernism?
Chapter Two: Beauty Against the Grain: The Great Gatsby
Chapter Three: Prufrock, the Underground Man, and the reader
Chapter Four: Modernist Aesthetics: Silence and Absence
Chapter Five: Expressionist Loves
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Alberto Castelli is writer and humanities professor at Hainan University, China.