Modernist Gothic: A Dark Discourse of Modernity from Wilde To Beckett<\/i><\/p>\n
My project arose from a desire to invent an interpretive discourse that would be equally relevant to two chronologically distant endpoints of literary modernism: Oscar Wilde\u2018s late nineteenth century writings and Samuel Beckett\u2019s ostensibly far different writings three-quarters of a century later. Building bridges between the two authors\u2019 works has meant tracing dark threads in modernist writing over nearly a century and outlining various networks of affiliation among modernist authors regarding their literary reactions to western culture\u2019s modern history of violence. Those reactions frequently engage with that history through styles that deviate from literary realism and generate unusual, sometimes disturbing responses from readers. The combination of anti-realist styles, literal and figurative violence, and readers\u2019 strong affective responses aligns this dimension of modernist writing with the Gothic narrative tradition in English, which emerged in the eighteenth century, and with an even earlier revenge tradition in drama. My study will provide new interpretations of key works of modernist Gothic against the background of that earlier tradition, and it will describe networks of influence and similarities among authors such as Conrad, Eliot, Woolf, Faulkner, Barnes, Rhys, Capote, and Morrison. The chapters also provide an extended framework for understanding how Wilde\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Salome<\/i>\u00a0(1891) and Beckett\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Not I\u00a0<\/i>(1972) contribute significantly to a culturally critical discourse concerning modernity.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16690,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/14327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/14327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14329,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/14327\/revisions\/14329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}