This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.
As one of the first English novelists to employ "stream of consciousness" as a narrative technique, Dorothy Richardson ranks among modernism's most important experimentalists, yet her epic autobiographical novel Pilgrimage has rarely received the kind of attention given to the writings of her contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Kristin Bluemel's study explores the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in Pilgrimage, demonstrating how the novel challenged the literary conventions and cultural expectations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian world and linking these relationships to the novel's construction of a lesbian sexuality, its use of medicine to interrogate class structures, its feminist critique of early-twentieth-century science, and Richardson's short stories and nonfiction.
George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.
As one of the first English novelists to employ "stream of consciousness" as a narrative technique, Dorothy Richardson ranks among modernism's most important experimentalists, yet her epic autobiographical novel Pilgrimage has rarely received the kind of attention given to the writings of her contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Kristin Bluemel's study explores the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in Pilgrimage, demonstrating how the novel challenged the literary conventions and cultural expectations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian world and linking these relationships to the novel's construction of a lesbian sexuality, its use of medicine to interrogate class structures, its feminist critique of early-twentieth-century science, and Richardson's short stories and nonfiction.
This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.
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