Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature

This volume comes as a sequel to a previous publication, Impersonality and
Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature, which explored the
paradoxical connections between impersonality and emotion, two notions central
to modernist as well as to later British literature. Through the double prism
of impersonality and emotion, the first set of articles presented here bring
to light if not the tenets of Modernism, at least some of the aesthetic
principles of representative artists of the time and, from Beardsley to
Hitchcock through Windham Lewis, Gaudier Brzeska and Epstein, browses through
various forms like drawing, architecture, film and the radio play. The second
half of he volume concentrates on the post-war period, addressing the vexed
question of the relationships between impersonality and emotion in film
(Antonioni), drama (Bond), photography (Brandt, Almond), painting (School of
London), architecture, and other types of contemporary manifestations and
installations practiced by the Young British Artists and their contemporaries
(Hirst, Taylor-Wood, Floyer, Whiteread, Opie among others). The twenty two
articles in this collection unearth lines of force that run all the way from
romanticism to postmodernism. While stressing the unexpected perenniality of
the impersonal, they give the lie to Fredric Jameson’s famous vision of
contemporary literature as characterised by a ‘waning of affect'.