Overview

During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking.The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period--from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness--the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

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9780192866295

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Reviews

Then Parkes provides close readings of key works, often including the authors' political views, which contributed to their depictions of the aristocracy...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice * Adam Parkes, in Modernism and the Aristocracy, examines the representation ofaristocracy in a selection of fiction from between the wars. His theme is perhapsbest described without the definite article of the title as the argument extendswell beyond the historical British and Irish aristocracy to the idea of aristocracyas such and its metaphorical extensions. * Michael Bell, Textual Practice * Adam Parkes has written a monumental, authoritative study of aristocracy in British modernism. Evidently the product of many decades of scholarship, it will remain the final word on the topic for some time, and an important contribution to modernist studies more generally. * ALEX MURRAY, Studies in the Novel * Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilegeis an ambitious and compelling study of literary representations of the British aristocracy in the inter-war period. It is ambitious because it offers fresh insights into a wide range of works by Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West and others. Parkes's densely written book conveys his enthusiasm for his original topic and offers detailed readings that combine thematic and structural approaches with literary history and theory. This welcome addition to modernist studies will benefit scholars interested in writers' renderings of class dynamics in the inter-war years. * Shirley Bricout, Etudes britanniques contemporaines *

Then Parkes provides close readings of key works, often including the authors' political views, which contributed to their depictions of the aristocracy...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *

Author Information

Adam Parkes is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1993. Previous publications include Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996) and A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (2011), both published by OUP. Parkes was president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America in 2021-22 and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2022-23.

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