Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results ...
More
This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.Less
This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.
Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism ...
More
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.Less
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.
