High And Low Moderns: Literature And Culture, 1889-1939

High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939

This collection of essays on modernist culture reassesses the convergence of low and high cultures, of socialist and aesthete, late Victorian and young Georgian, the popular and the coterie. Academic literary studies have until recently preferred to treat the "opaque," "difficult" writings of high moderns Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, and Eliot, and the more accessible work of the low moderns Kipling, Shaw, and Wells in separate categories. In contributions by scholars David Bromwich, Roy Foster, Edna Longley, Louis Menand, Edward Mendelson, and others, High and Low Moderns brings these writers into critical proximity. Essays on such topics as the public mourning of Queen Victoria, Florence Farr and the "New Woman," the Edwardian Shaw, Lady Gregory's attraction to Irish felons, and the high artistic uses of low entertainments--cinema, detective fiction, and journalism-- introduce a subtler model of modernism, in which "demotic" and "elite" cultural forms criticize, imitate, and addressone another.Review"High and Low Moderns offers persuasive and thorough historical research to make us rethink the literary landscape of the early twentieth century. Anyone who is interested in rethinking modernism would learn something from this collection."--English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920From the Back CoverThis collection of essays on modernist culture reassesses the convergence of low and high cultures, of socialist and aesthete, late Victorian and young Georgian, the popular and the coterie. Academic literary studies have until recently preferred to treat the "opaque", "difficult" writings of high moderns Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, and Eliot, and the more accessible work of the low moderns Kipling, Shaw, and Wells in separate categories. In contributions by scholars David Bromwich, Roy Foster, Edna Longley, Louis Menand, Edward Mendelson, and others, High and Low Moderns brings these writers into critical proximity. Essays on such topics as the public mourning of Queen Victoria, Florence Farr and the "New Woman", the Edwardian Shaw, Lady Gregory's attraction to Irish felons, and the high artistic uses of low entertainments - cinema, detective fiction, and journalismintroduce a subtler model of modernism, in which "demotic" and "elite" cultural forms criticize, imitate, and address one another.About the AuthorMaria diBattista is at Princeton University. Lucy McDiarmid is at Villanova University.