The Modernist Novel
A Critical Introduction

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.

Reviews & endorsements

"Kern’s account offers a refreshing stance towards modernist fiction. Indeed, his historicizing of the modernists’ formal innovations is both informative and persuasive throughout. In addition, by offering not only an extensive survey of formal techniques used in the modernist novel, but also an explication of how they departed from the realist novelists, Kern is able to underscore the modernists’ pioneering use of literary form in both a clear and coherent fashion."
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Product details

• Date Published: July 2011
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9781107008113
• length: 266 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 16 mm
• weight: 0.57kg
• contains: 2 b/w illus. 1 table
• availability: Available