On Modernism

Modernism in British arts, literature and philosophy is manifest as a unique phenomenon around 1900 and after. This paradigm shift in all arts an in science made 19th century beliefs, norms and patterns obsolete.

Modernism in British arts, literature and philosophy is manifest as a unique thing around and after 1900. This paradigm shift in all arts and modern science made traditional beliefs, norms, and social patterns obsolete. Forerunners were 19th-century intellectuals, who favoured a new and lively spiritual culture. A new concept of reality not only changed the view of nature (atomic physics) but also the structure and gist of literature. As the belief in the visible world declined, consciousness and symbolism (surface and depth structures) occupied the focus of attention. Literature became an autonomous field. From artistic subjectivity modernism led the way to crystallizing creations of complex imaginative structures. Simultaneously, neorealism in philosophy and relativity in physics substituted a worn-out mechanistic world picture by a scientific reality reaching far beyond the visible world.

Autorentext

Jürgen Klein was the chair of English literature/British cultural and intellectual history at the University of Greifswald (1991-2011). He completed his Ph.D. in Marburg in 1973 and his habilitation in Siegen in 1981. He was an Hon. research fellow at the University of Glasgow, a British Council scholar at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh and a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Since 2004 he has been teaching literature at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.

Inhalt

Preface - Modernist Aesthetics: Late 19th and Early 20 th Century England - Modernism and Modernities - Vitalism, Empiricism, and the Quest for Reality in English and German Philosophy - Understanding Foreign Culture as an Integral Part of British Studies - List of first prints - Bibliography .