A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class

Description

In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cezanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations.

Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. He has written or edited more than twenty books, including: Modernism and Time (Cambridge, 2000) and Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge, 2011). His most recent books are Pain and Suffering (2014; translated into Chinese, 2017); The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices (co-authored with Dr Jerry Vannatta, 2013). He is co-editor of Contemporary Literary Criticism (1998) and is the former editor of Genre.

'Schleifer's account of modernism is a fascinating and challenging attempt to realize a novel form of immanent cultural history.' Benjamin Pickford, Genre