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Generic insistence : Joseph Conrad and the document in selected British and American modernist fiction

This thesis explores the citation of documents in the modernist novel. From contracts to newspaper articles, telegrams to reports, documents are invoked as interleaved texts in ways that, to date, have not been critically interrogated. I consider a range of novels, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather, which are selected, in part, as a litmus of Anglo-American modernism, though they can more productively also be understood as coalescing around the example set by Joseph Conrad. Replete with allusions to documents, Conrad’s oeuvre is developed across the thesis as a meta-commentary on the document in modernist literature. In placing the document at the centre of analysis, and in using Conrad as a diagnostic of the document in modernity, the manifold ways in which authors use interpolated texts to perform denotative and connotative “work” in their narratives emerge, with the effect of revising our understanding of documents. These authors reveal the power of mass produced documents to lay claim to novelistic language; the historical role of documents in reifying inequality; on the level of narrative, the thematic potential of the document as a reiterable text; and finally, the capacity of the document, in its most depersonalized form, to realize social collectivity and community. This project therefore asks us to rethink and relocate the document as central to the modernist novel.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:588454
Date January 2013
CreatorsManocha, Nisha
ContributorsBoehmer, Elleke
PublisherUniversity of Oxford
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f28ba054-3443-4ba3-9e1b-c7939edc3d91

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