1st Edition
Illegitimate Freedom Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Informality as Illegitimate Freedom
2. Chapter One: "Intoxicated Sense": Humour and Promiscuity in Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse and Orlando
3. Chapter Two: Marking Absence: Mansfield’s Feminine Informality vs. Lockean
Liberalism
4. Chapter Three: Eliotic Contempt
5. Chapter Four: Joyce’s Challenges to Disgust
6. Chapter Five: "Inverted Hypocrisy": Auden’s Informal Pedagogy
7. Conclusion: An Openness to Misreading: The Risks of Informality
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Gaurav Majumdar is Professor of English at Whitman College. His publications include the book Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray.
"Cool modernism has always been the most informal. In Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900-1940, Gaurav Majumdar brilliantly limns this informality as a crucial philosophic, ethical and even geopolitical issue. On the one hand, modernist informality celebrates new forms of intimacy: informal styles are ripostes to the Lockean western liberal consensus, one-upping canonical ideas of freedom and of (informal, rule-breaking) individual choice. On the other, engaging with the new critique of planetary modernisms, Majumdar also shows how the modernists’ informality is key to their political impact. Ranging from Mansfield to W.H Auden, both supremely ‘informal’ writers, the book centers on the ostentatious informality of Woolf, Joyce and Eliot. Gracefully written, coolly informal: Gaurav Majumdar here reveals to us one feature of modernism we should never take for granted. This is a thought-provoking and exciting reappraisal."Enda Duffy, Professor, English, UC Santa Barbara
