3 Review(s)

Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce grew into adulthood during the advent of modernism. They still command our interest as witnesses of an age that brought both the excitement of constant innovation in the arts and technology and, with the eruption of World War I, the challenge of the greatest prolonged crisis for Western civilization since the French Revolution. The original version of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context strove to show how a kindred encyclopedic drive and sacramental sense informed their responses to the epochal trauma, yielding three distinct and monumental visions of the human estate by the 1920s. In this second edition, several chapters have been augmented and a new chapter added to encompass important features of modernist prose fiction reaching into and beyond World War II. These enhancements allow greater attention to the late works of Mann and Joyce, contributions of the New World authors, and the special relationship of film to literature. Some 300 writers, artists, and thinkers are referenced to illuminate the creative variety of the larger contexts in which such novelists as Gide, Kafka, Woolf, and Beckett have a prominent place.