Name: Modernism’s Whims
SKU: 64811916
Price: 136.74 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Senior Lecturer Beci Carver
ISBN: 9780198950721

Type

Physical Book

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Author

Senior Lecturer Beci Carver

Year

2026

Pages

192

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

23.4x15.6 cm

ISBN13

9780198950721

Modernism’s Whims

Senior Lecturer Beci Carver (Author) · Oxford University Press · Hardcover

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Synopsis "Modernism’s Whims"

Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims asks: what is it that 'whim' names? - what manner of simultaneously playful and possibly preoccupying thing? The book focuses, in answering this question, on the work of four twentieth-century experimental and intermittently whimsical authors: Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and Elsie Elizabeth Phare.

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: ''Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?'' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic ''whither'' that sceptically hovers between ''where'' and ''whether'', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being ''whim-drawn.'' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.Beci Carver''s Modernism''s Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavour to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalised spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim''s Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy''s stalker ghost is on the run.