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Hunger is one of the governing metaphors for literature in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, writers and critics repeatedly describe writing as a process of starvation, as in the familiar type of the starving artist, and high art as the rejection of 'culinary' pleasures.<em>The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernismargues that this metaphor offers a way of describing the contradictions of aesthetic autonomy in modernist literature and its late-twentieth-century heirs. This book traces the emergence of a tradition of writing it calls the 'art of hunger', from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century. It focuses particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy's delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism's post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.
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OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors PAULINA KEWES
LAURA MARCUS
HEATHER O’DONOGHUE
PETER McCULLOUGH
SEAMUS PERRY
FIONA STAFFORD
LLOYD PRATT
The Art of Hunger Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism ALYS MOODY
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alys Moody 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940199 ISBN 978–0–19–882889–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgments One of the themes of this book is that even the most apparently isolated project is ultimately a social and even a collective endeavor. It is therefore a pleasure to be able to acknowledge the social and institutional ties that have shaped this book. Above all else, this book is the product of the endlessly stimulating conversations that I have been privileged to have had—and to still be having—about modernism, aesthetics, politics, and the history of theory with many brilliant scholars, including (but not limited to) Becky Roach, Kaitlin Staudt, Stephen J. Ross, Kevin Brazil, Ben Etherington, Sean Pryor, Alexis Becker, and Angu