Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

"Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940 - writing composed by authors self-consciously entering middle- to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry of 1938, as "1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit." This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing proves at times horrifying or objectionable, at others deeply moving and different from the work produced by these writers when they were creating the texts for which they became famous. John Whittier-Ferguson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (Oxford University Press, 1996) and the editor, with A. Walton Litz and Richard Ellmann, of James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings (Faber & Faber, 1991)"--