The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization - Hardcover

Brian W. Schaffer

9780870238314: The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0870238310 ISBN 13: 9780870238314

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

From the end of the 19th century until World War II, questions concerning the ideal nature and current state of ""civilisation"" preoccupied the British public. In a work of both cultural and literary criticism, Shaffer explores this debate, showing how representative novels of five British modernists - Joseph Conrad, D.H, Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Malcolm Lowry - address the same issues that engaged such social theorists as Herbert Spencer, Oswald Spengler, Clive Bell and Sigmund Freud. In examining the intersection of literary discourse and cultural rhetoric, Shaffer draws on the interpretative strategies of Mikhail Bakhtin, Terry Eagleton, Clifford Geertz and others. He demonstrates that such disparate fictions as ""Heart of Darkness"", ""The Secret Agent"", ""The Plumed Serpent"", ""Dubliners"", ""Ulysses"", ""Mrs. Dalloway"", ""To the Lighthouse"" and ""Under the Volcano"" all portray civilisation in the paradoxical image of blindness and insight, obfuscation and enlightenment - as a blinding torch that captivates the eye while it obscures vision.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Brian W. Shaffer is assistant professor of English at Rhodes College.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.