Overview
- Represents the first book to provide a sustained examination of Nietzsche’s writings on nihilism to illuminate readings of modernist literature and drama
- Engages in dialogue with recent literary-philosophical research examining modernism, affect and feeling
- Contributes to, and complicates, readings of modernism’s reactionary politics
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (PMEL)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reconfiguring Nietzsche’s seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Nietzsche and Modernism
Book Subtitle: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett
Authors: Stewart Smith
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75535-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-75534-2Published: 18 May 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09258-0Published: 14 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-75535-9Published: 03 May 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6478
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6486
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 236
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, European Literature, Continental Philosophy