Reconfiguring Nietzsche's seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.
| ISBN: | 9783030092580 |
| Publication date: | 14th December 2018 |
| Author: | Stewart Smith |
| Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan an imprint of Springer International Publishing |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 236 pages |
| Series: | Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Philosophical traditions and schools of thought Literature: history and criticism |