More than a century after its beginnings, modernism still has the power to shock, alienate or challenge readers. Modernist art and literature remain thought of as complex and difficult. This introduction explains in a readable, lively style how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres. Pericles Lewis offers students a survey of literature and art in England, Ireland and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also provides an overview of critical thought on modernism and its continuing influence on the arts today, reflecting the interests of current scholarship in the social and cultural contexts of modernism. The comparative perspective on Anglo-American and European modernism shows how European movements have influenced the development of English-language modernism. Illustrated with works of art and featuring suggestions for further study, this is the ideal introduction to understanding and enjoying modernist literature and art.
I am a native of Toronto, Canada and have been teaching at Yale since 1998. My books show how developments in literary form emerge out of a background of social, political, and existential ferment. For example, rather than understand the modernists as elitists, hermetically sealed off from the broader culture, I explore their engagements with that culture and the distinctively literary solutions that they found for the central problems of their time.
Each of my books explores the development of modern literary forms in a period of political and social instability. My first book, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, received the Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarly work by a junior faculty member in the humanities at Yale. My second book, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, was published in 2007. I recently completed a third project, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010). All three books are published by Cambridge University Press. I am also editing a volume for Cambridge, The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, and serving as the 20th-century editor for new editions of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and the Norton Anthology of Western Literature.
I received my B.A. in English Literature from McGill University in 1990 and then studied Comparative Literature at Stanford University. After receiving my Ph.D. in 1997, I studied briefly as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of California, Berkeley. My teaching interests include the novel, the epic tradition from Homer to Joyce, English poetry from Chaucer to Auden, the modernist movement in literature and the arts, literature and philosophy, and literary theory. I am the founder and editor of The Modernism Lab, a virtual space for collaborative research on modernism: http://modernism.research.yale.edu.
You can also visit my Yale website at https://webspace.yale.edu/pericleslewis/.
