Marxism After Modernism: Anglo-American Leftist Theorisations of Modernism in the Later Twentieth Century

This dissertation considers the manner in which a number of key Marxian intellectuals from the Anglo-American cultural left, including Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Rosalind Krauss and others, have attempted to make sense of both literary high modernism and the modernist avant-gardes. The study argues that in the period since the 1960s especially, the Marxian cultural left has helped to redefine our understanding of modernism in a number of significant ways. Chapter One considers how key Marxist intellectuals developed the concept of uneven development to challenge the almost orthodox assumption that modernism was overwhelmingly associated with metropolitan and urban milieux. Chapter Two examines how the issue of imperialism moved from the margins of Marxist cultural criticism to the core of debates about the origins and political character of modernism. The focus of Chapter Three is the American and European theorisations of the historic and contemporary avant-gardes. In Chapter Four I consider how Fredric Jameson’s seminal text on postmodernism challenged Marxists to not only rethink how they understood postmodernism but also to recondition how they thought about modernism as well. Finally, Chapter Five concludes by considering the specific instance of Irish modernism. Marxian engagements with Irish modernists from Joyce to Beckett offer an exemplary sense of the wider shifts in left-wing responses to modernism over the course of the

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Kennedy, Sinead

• English, Media & Theatre Studies

Language dc:language

en