Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature - Hardcover

Varley-Winter, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845198956 ISBN 13: 9781845198954

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2018

Synopsis

As a critical term, 'fragment' is more of a starting-point than a definition. 'Fragment' and 'fragmentation' have been used to describe damaged manuscripts; drafts; notes; subverted grammatical structures; the emergence of vers libre from formal verse; texts without linear plots; translations; quotations; and works titled 'Fragment' regardless of how formally complete they might appear. This book offers a phenomenological reading of modernist literary fragments, arguing that fragments create states of conflicted embodiment in which mind and body cannot cleanly separate. Drawing on the concept of aestheticism as an overstimulated body, each chapter connects fragments to experiences of physical and emotional ambiguity. The author introduces fragmentation as an aspect of what Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous term 'ecriture feminine', and offers new readings of the texts that Stephane Mallarme struggled to finish.

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Varley-Winter completed her PhD on literary fragments and fragmentation at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Anne Stillman. She has published research articles, essays and reviews in Literary Imagination, The Goose, Cambridge Humanities Review and Glasgow Review of Books. She currently teaches undergraduate students at MiddleburyCMRS and the University of Cambridge; prior to this she was a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at Keble College, University of Oxford. Her poetry has won the Brewer Hall Prize and the T. R. Henn Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1845198956
• ISBN 13: 9781845198954
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256