Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis James Joyce (1882-1941) is a colossus of modernist fiction. He has been derided as obscene and immature and lauded as an erudite humanist; some have deemed his prose impenetrable, too concerned with artifice and verbal gamesmanship, while others have described his writing as life-affirming and always attuned to… Continue Reading James Joyce
Tag: Pericles Lewis
What Maisie Knew
Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897) is the story of a disintegrating marriage told in free indirect discourse from the perspective of a young child. The question implicit in the title, namely how much Maisie really understands about her parents’ mistreatment of each other, offered James great scope for the exploration of the limits of… Continue Reading What Maisie Knew
Poems of War and Patriotism
by Pericles Lewis Among Thomas Hardy‘s “Poems of War and Patriotism,” collected in Moments of Vision (1917), some date to as early as the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. On September 2, 1914, Cabinet Minister C. F. G. Masterman invited Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, H.… Continue Reading Poems of War and Patriotism
A Passage to India
by Pericles Lewis The last novel E.M. Forster wrote, A Passage to India (1924), ends with the question of whether two men can overcome social divisions, not of class (as in Maurice) but of race. Here, the hoped-for destruction of the barriers of prejudice is deferred. At the end of the novel, the Englishman Fielding… Continue Reading A Passage to India
Maurice
E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, written in 1913 but published only posthumously in 1971, tells the story of a homosexual love affair, in the context of a society (like that of Howards End) riven by class conflict. It ends with the title character escaping from civilization and going to live in the country with his working-class… Continue Reading Maurice
Howards End
The major novel of E.M. Forster’s early period, Howards End (1910), describes the encounter between the commercial Wilcox family and the intellectual Schlegels, representatives of the competing attitudes of the Edwardian upper classes towards modernity and social convention. The victims of their encounter, the impoverished Leonard and Jackie Bast, are both crushed under the wheel… Continue Reading Howards End
The Good Soldier
by Pericles Lewis In Ford Madox Ford‘s The Good Soldier (1915), the narrator, John Dowell, tells the story of his marriage, from 1904, when he and his wife Florence met Edward Ashburnham (the good soldier of the title) to 1913, when Ashburnham’s affair with Florence has been revealed and both Ashburnham and Florence have committed… Continue Reading The Good Soldier
Antwerp
by Pericles Lewis Ford Madox Hueffer’s “Antwerp” (January, 1915) is one of the few early poems on the war written by a card-carrying modernist. Hueffer, grandson of Ford Madox Brown and son of a German journalist and music critic, anglicized his name to Ford Madox Ford only after the war at the behest of his… Continue Reading Antwerp
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”
by Pericles Lewis T. S. Eliot expressed a typically ambivalent view of the past when he wrote in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). The essay gives voice to the fact that modernist experiments seldom simply destroyed or rejected traditional methods of representation or traditional literary forms; rather, the modernists sought to enter… Continue Reading “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
The Waste Land
by Pericles Lewis “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922. T.S. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from Eliot’s personal… Continue Reading The Waste Land