Title: The passions of modernism : Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann /
Authors: Cuda, Anthony.
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Modernism (Literature)
Abstract: "Upending the traditional view of modernism as defined by skepticism and emotional detachment, Anthony Cuda argues for a perspective that emphasizes instead its deep commitment to understanding human vulnerability, powerlessness, and the unpredictable energies of passion. In The Passions of Modernism, Cuda explores how four modernist writers - T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann - conceptualize passion, how they dramatize its upheavals and illuminations, and how it affects their ideas about the creative act." "Cuda argues that many literary scholars have not allowed modernism to get far enough out of control. In this work he seeks to demonstrate that it was, from its inception, an expression of the desire to relinquish the very control that its critics mistakenly attribute to it.^
Contents: Introduction -- T. S. Eliot -- Passion and surrender: the sinking blackness of ether -- Who stood over Eliot's shoulder? passions of recognition in his later work -- W. B. Yeats -- Yeats's abnormal restlessness -- Turbulent lives of painted horses -- Woolf and Mann -- Virginia Woolf: the passions of the eye -- Thomas Mann: the infectious passions -- Conclusion: modernist compensations.