Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel Lewis Hardback Cambridge University Press

Modernism, Nationalism, and the NovelAuthor(s): Pericles Lewis\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521661119, 978-0521661119\nSynopsis\nIn Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own .