The leaders of the Irish Literary Revival were born of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Very few were Catholics, and none was from the urban middle class, except James Joyce. The emphasis of the Revival in its early stages on legendary or… Read More ›
James Joyce
Modern Novels and Novelists
One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but… Read More ›
Self-Reflexive Novels and Novelists
After a few minutes of reading stories that are not selfreflexive, readers sometimes forget what they are doing and feel transported into the world of the book. Considering this experience naïve, authors of self-reflexive fictions thwart it by such devices… Read More ›
Postcolonial Novels and Novelists
A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope and complexity of the term “postcolonial.” Temporally, the term designates any national literature written after the nation gained independence from a colonizing power. According to this definition, all literature written… Read More ›
Experimental Novels and Novelists
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
Key Theories of James Joyce
In his book on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (Derrida 19871) Jacques Derrida relates how James Joyce (1882–1941) was present in his very first book, the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), and present again in a key essay, Plato’s Pharmacy,… Read More ›
The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Luigi… Read More ›
Roland Barthes as a Cultural Theorist
French literary critic, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a key figure both in the development of structuralism — in particular in the application of techniques derived from semiology to the analysis of everyday life and popular (as well as high) culture… Read More ›
Freud’s Critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Freued’s theory of Oedipus Complex is best demonstrated in his analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus complex is the strong affinity that the child develops for his mother in its intense urge to possess the mother, wishes to kill the father…. Read More ›
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
While lauding 19th century Realism, Lukacs attacked modernist experimental writers as “decadent” instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist… Read More ›
Georg Lukacs as a Marxist Literary Theorist
The Hungarian thinker and aesthetician Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) has played a pivotal role in the development of Western Marxism, which refers to a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and central Europe. The Western Marxists are in opposition… Read More ›
The Waste Land as a Modernist Text
TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which has come to be identified as the representative poem of the Modernist canon, indicates the pervasive sense of disillusionment about the current state of affairs in the modern society, especially post World War Europe,… Read More ›
Symbolist Movement in Poetry
A term specifically applied to the work of late 19th century French writers who reacted against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism, Symbolism was first used in this sense by Jean Moreas in… Read More ›
Modernism: On or About December 1910 Human Nature Changed
“On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” – Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown in 1924. “All human relations shifted,” Woolf continued, “and when human relations change there is at the same time a change… Read More ›
Modernist Metropolis
Modernism was the first literary movement to take urban life as a given, as a form of experience that was categorically different from any other kind of life. Baudelaire was fascinated by the “flaneur”, the man who strolls the city… Read More ›
Modernist Use of Myth
In an age that was wrought with scientism, technology and loss of spirituality, many of the major modernist writers realised and asserted the employment of integrative mythology in order to give “shape and significance” to the contemporary fragmented reality. The… Read More ›