Moderns – Chaucer to Contemporary Fiction

A. Robert Lee has taught at the University of Kent in the UK and at Nihon University inJapan. His more than forty book publications include two previously from EdinburghUniversity Press: Multicultural American Literature (2003), which won the AmericanBook Award in 2004, and The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019). He has heldvisiting professorships at Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, the Universityof Colorado, the University of New Mexico and the University of California, Berkeley.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Modern1. Medieval Modern: Chaucer and ‘Sir Thopas’2. My Lady Mistress: Dame Philology. John Skelton3. Mind’s Eye: Hamlet and Modernity4. New Made Idiom: John Donne5. A Great Quantity of Heterogeneous Matter: Laurence Sterne6. Era Moderns: Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Peacock7. Like Nobody But Himself: Modern William Hazlitt8. Out of Victorianism: Samuel Butler, Lytton Strachey, Ford Madox Ford9. Cracked Bells and Really Intelligent Detonators: The Modern of Conrad’s The Secret Agent10. Women’s Modern: Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys11. Postmodern Modern: B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin12. Contemporary Modern: Six FictionsEpilogueIndex

The question of what makes a literary text modern continues to vex and occupy readers and scholars. A. Robert Lee rises to the challenge with elan. Moderns – Chaucer to Contemporary Fiction is a thought-provoking and fresh take on canonical and lesser-known works from the fifteenth century to the new millennium.