Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story

Description

Contrary to the common view that cultural modernism is a broadly anti-mimetic movement, one which turned away from traditional artistic goals of representing the world, Rhythmic Modernism argues that rhythm and mimesis are central to modernist aesthetics. Through detailed close readings of non-fiction and short stories, Helen Rydstrand shows that textual rhythms comprised the substance of modernist mimesis. Rhythmic Modernism demonstrates how many modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, were profoundly invested in mimicking a substratum of existence that was conceived as rhythmic, each displaying a fascination with rhythm, both as a formal device and as a vital, protean concept that helped to make sense of the complex modern world.

Helen Rydstrand is Adjunct Associate Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

This original and compelling book treats the centrality of rhythm - as a phenomenon, a methodology and a philosophy - in the short fiction of three significant modernist writers: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In its wide-ranging and layered treatment of 'rhythmic mimesis', the book takes us from the thermodynamic to the sonic and the social without neglecting the rhythms of the literary archive at its heart. * Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London, UK, , and author of Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 (2014) * Rhythmic Modernism arrives at the perfect moment. The author wishes to explore how all of the talk of rhythm in the early twentieth century was adopted by some of the key modernist writers as something like a personal artistic credo, and then, how it made its way into the content and form of their works. It is beautifully written and organized. It's a book on rhythm with a clear and defined rhythm of its own... Rhythmic Modernism is a very fine work. * Enda Duffy, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (2009) * Overall, Rydstrand's reading of Lawrence, Mansfield, and Woolf is a remarkable contribution to many fields: modernist studies, narrative theory, the history of the short story, and rhythmic studies. Her book deserves a wide readership and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in modernist fiction and the study of rhythm in general. * Affirmations: of the modern * Engrossing, scholarly ... Rydstrand's innovative study of these three modernist, yet very different, writers and their short stories reveals a marked prominence in the use of rhythm and mimesis in their fiction. * Virginia Woolf Bulletin *