Beschreibung
The essays collected here deal with modernist writers who,
on the whole, felt ‘reluctant’ about their modernist status
because they believed that it was just as important to look
backward as it was to look forward. Indeed, for most of them
looking backward was more important because it was only
through the past that one could understand one’s proper
place in the present and in the future. That is why in
Huxley’s Brave New World it is the rejection of the
past in
the future – and by implication in the present – that
makes its
satire so penetrating. Modernism, in other words, means for
these writers not a radical break with the past but a
continuing search for what still connects them (and us)
vitally with it.
Peter Firchow, Professor of English at the
University of Minnesota, is the author of several books on
modern and modernist literary subjects, including books on
Huxley, Conrad, and Auden. The publication of some of his
hitherto uncollected essays in the volume is intended to
honor him on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.