How long has there been a “modern” English literature?

by A. Robert Lee

In this ambitious new study A. Robert Lee tackles the question of how, and why, a given selection of English literary writings can assume the mantle of “modern.” To this end Moderns – Chaucer to Contemporary Fiction pursues a selective roster down the timeline from the Middle Ages to the recent age. Highlights include the following. 

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales long has been thought a pinnacle of medieval authorship, rooted in 14th century England, a triumph of Middle English. But is there any way he can be called modern,” or rather, “medieval modern”? In this respect his “Tale of Thopas” comes into play, gamesome, full of reflexive turn, at once invitation and mock-heroic tease. He so enter his own text as “Chaucer,” a tactic that extends into the famous Prologue and beyond.

The term “modern” likewise so comes into relevance to subsequent writings, be it to John Skelton’s “ragged, tattered” poetry or to the “modern” sexual and theological audacity of John Donne’s verse. Hamlet especially enters the reckoning as supreme exploration of Being, the gyres and contraries of how human consciousness works and become aware of itself. Who, reading or listening to the soliloquies, would doubt that we are in the presence of our contemporary?

Thereafter, a text like Tristram Shandy invites “modern” recognition. Do not its gyrations, its play of voice, typography, memory, refusal of simple clock time, strike us as uncannily modern? Likewise, entering the early nineteenth-century, can there not be discerned the era’s “modern” qualities in the stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan, the more than gothic of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the observer wit of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey rather than having their authors assigned the usual categories of Romantic poet, horror writer, or minor humourist? With Hazlitt the “modern” essayist comes into view, whether in the form of his literary critiques of Shakespeare and the Romantics or portraits of everyday life, a writer to be thought the precursor of New Journalism.

In the case of a classic novel like Conrad’s The Secret Agent, thriller barely opens interpretation.The novel creates world and counter-world, whether London as unreal city or plotters and their pursuers so fashioned as to be virtually watching themselves play out their roles. Victorian custom or morality know few more assiduous challengers by “modern” literary stealth than Samuel Butler, Lytton Strachey and Ford Madox Ford. Each holds as subtly double texts, in turn fictional biography masking  autobiography in The Way of All Flesh, portraiture full of sly demolition in  Eminent Victorians, and modern/modernist ambiguities narrator and story in The Good Soldier.

 “The modern,” inevitably, leads into association with Modernism. But beyond Eliot, Joyce, or Woolf, cannot another lineage, women’s modern, be met in Mina Loy’s use of the imagery she called futurist, Dorothy Richardson’s roman fleuve begun in Painted Roofs, and Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea as the intertextual “rewriting” of Jane Eyre? Which brings us to the postmodern modern in the work of B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin, famously the former’s novel-in-a-box in The Unfortunates and the latter’s English nouveau roman in Berg.

Contemporary moderns? Six novels, in turn by Bernardine Evaristo, Diran Adebayo, Kamila Shamsie, Xiaolu Guo, Howard Jacobson, and Alan Hollinghurst, give witness to how issues of identity, or ethnicity, or gender, have equally attracted new “modern” visibilities of style. These are followed in the Epilogue by a quartet of brief speculations that draw from and comment upon the preceding accounts: Modern, Modernism, Postmodernism, Contemporary Modern.


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About the book

Boldly explores the multiple kinds of ‘modern’ that have contributed to English literary tradition from the medieval era to the twenty-first century

  • Argues that ‘the modern’ an English literary tradition, medieval to contemporary, exists its own right
  • Selects a gallery of authorship from Chaucer to contemporaries for analysis
  • Suggests why we think Hamlet quite the most ‘modern’ of Shakespeare’s plays
  • Locates modernism as but one iteration of ‘the modern’
  • Gives close readings of texts to include those by John Donne and Laurence Sterne, Mary Shelley and Ann Quin

About the author

A. Robert Lee, with degrees from the University of London, taught for nearly three decades at the University of Kent, UK, and was Professor in the English Department at Nihon University, Tokyo, 1996-2011. His book publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), 25th Anniversary Edition (2020); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the 2004 American Book Award; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009), American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010), The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019) and  Native North American Authorship: Text, Breath, Modernity (2022). He has held visiting  professorships at Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, University of Colorado, University of New Mexico, and University of California, Berkeley.

Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
Articles: 168

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