Arnold Bennett and His Milieu: Critical Reexamination of Realist Representation

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370275
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Hitotsubashi University
• Principal Investigator: IKAWA Chitose 一橋大学, 大学院社会学研究科, 教授 (20401672)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 英文学 / リアリズム / ミドルブラウ / モダニズム / 脱/文脈化

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research has rectified the dominant narrative of the modernist turn from realism in English literature. In this progressive, linear developmental history, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) has been marginalized because of his putatively outmoded formal technique in detailing the quotidian existence of ordinary people in the English Midlands, while the younger and supposedly more cosmopolitan authors, such as Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), James Joyce (1882-1941), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), are central figures whose abstruse styles have been deemed worthy of perpetual critical scrutiny. Focusing on the largely overlooked contemporaneity of so-called Edwardian realist authors and self-styled Georgians, as well as attending to the material context of literary production and consumption, I mapped the complicated process of negotiation between journalistic print culture and aspirations for disciplinary credibility on the part of scholars.

Free Research Field

英文学