Modernism is the name given retrospectively to a range of early twentieth-century experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and the arts. Appreciation of its aesthetic theories and practices has been very influential in the institutionalisation of Western literary criticism and the histories of European canon-formation. In this subject modernism and variously modernist writing in English are re-situated in the contexts of colonial and post-independence cultures and experiences of gender, race, class, sexuality, desire, ethnicity, nation and expatriation. Students examine the ways in which writers have negotiated and shaped modernist practices of representation, tensions between the narrative possibilities of modernism and realism and the recent Western anthropological, psychological and philosophical theories which often informed modernist practices of representation.

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Readings