Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett

Name: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett
Brand: Springer International Publishing
SKU: 9783030092580
Price: 98.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Smith, Stewart

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.