"Through a wide-ranging selection of essays representing a variety of different media, national contexts and critical approaches, this volume provides a broad overview of the idea of work in modernism, considered in its historical, political, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions. Several individual chapters discuss canonical figures, including Richard Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, but Modernist Work also addresses contexts that are chronologically and geographically foreign to the main stream of modernist studies, such as Swedish proletarian writing, Haitian nationalism and South African inheritors of Dada. Prominent historical themes include the ideas of class, revolution and the changing nature of women's work, while more conceptual chapters explore topics including autonomy, inheritance, intention, failure and intimacy." -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- An Introduction to Modernist Work -- John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia -- I The Work of Art -- 1. The Absolute and the Impossible Work: Franz Kafka's "The Burrow" -- Robert Buch, University of New South Wales, Australia -- 2. Autonomy, Difficulty, and the Work of Literature in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and André Gide's The Counterfeiters -- Emmett Stinson, University of Newcastle, Australia -- 3. Mimesis and the Task of the Writer for Lawrence and Woolf -- Helen Rydstrand, University of New South Wales, Australia -- II Artistic Labor -- 4. Richard Strauss at Work in His Works -- David Larkin, University of Sydney, Australia -- 5. Stein's Immaterial Labors -- Kristin Grogan, St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, UK -- 6. Trace and Facture: Legacies of the "Ready-made" in Contemporary South African Art -- Alison Kearney, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa -- III Representing Work and Workers -- 7. Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: Work, Inheritance, and Desert in the Modernist Novel -- Evelyn Chan, Chinese University of Hong Kong -- 8. Magic, Modernity, and Women at Work -- Caroline Webb, University of Newcastle, Australia -- 9. The Disclosure of Work in the Poetry of Ron Silliman -- Christopher Oakey, University of New South Wales, Australia -- IV Class Identity and Class Conflict -- 10. Swedish Social Modernism: The Inward and Outward Turn in Eyvind Johnson's Stad i ljus -- Niklas Salmose, Linnaeus University, Sweden -- 11. Percussion and Repercussion: The Haitian Revolution as Worker Uprising in Guy Endore's Babouk (1934) and C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938) -- Sascha Morrell, Monash University, Australia -- 12. Domestic Holocaust: Michael Haneke's Intractable Class War -- Paul Sheehan, Macquarie University, Australia -- Afterword: Work, Modernism, and Thinking Through the Aesthetic -- Morag Shiach, Queen Mary University of London, UK -- Index.
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