Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd

This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power.

Author: Judith Paltin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/03/2020
Pages: 290
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d
ISBN13: 9781108842235
ISBN10: 1108842232
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | LGBTQ+