Modernism and Style / Modernism and... (PDF)

Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent.

'This book should be compulsory reading for all those who are interested in modernism. Less a polemical 'treatise of style' as Aragon had it, it is both an original mapping of modernism briskly revisited via the history of its successive forms, and a conceptualization of the contradictory concepts of style invoked by its most canonical authors. The scope of reference is broad, with accurate readings of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Rilke, Dujardin, Eliot, Pound, Breton, Valery, Marinetti and Mina Loy. This book renders the same service for modernism as Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero. While Barthes saw modernity as defined by the end of style, here we learn to recognize the plurality of styles of modernism, and this is an invaluable contribution.' - Jean-Michel Rabaté, the University of Pennsylvania, USA

'Hutchinson steers a course through a vast catalogue of canonical modernist authors in his effort to calibrate the oscillating valance of stylistic "purity" in the period. In doing so, he reveals manifold variations in artistic practice and theoretical positioning. Indeed, what emerges most strikingly from this kaleidoscopic reckoning is a sense of style's fluidity as a notion and of the fields of aesthetics and poetics as dynamic domains of ceaseless modulation and revision.' - Scarlett Baron, University College London, UK