The Anxious Body of Modernism

European modernist studies currently face a double pressure. On one side, the global turn has reframed European literature as one regional tradition among many, shrinking its perceived cultural significance. On the other, broader developments in literary studies have fragmented the study of European literatures into localized specialties, attending so closely to specific circumstances around texts that comparison has become difficult to sustain. The result is a field that struggles to articulate what European modernists share, and one whose analytical frameworks have moved steadily away from the literary text itself.The Anxious Body of Modernism offers a corrective. It argues that anxiety is the defining feature of European modernism, and that the body^—or, more precisely, the distorted image of the body^—is its most consistent literary expression. Using evidence-based cognitive psychology to guide close reading, it reframes anxiety not as a vague existential condition but as an interpretative mode shaped by distortions in how experiences are selected, framed, and evaluated. By clearly separating the physical body from the psychological construct of body image^—still not an established practice^—Eveliina Pulkki generates a methodology that hinges on critical close reading, the core strength of literary studies.By foregrounding psychological similarity over linguistic and material difference, the book shows European modernism to be a generative and coherent comparative field, bound not by shared context but by a demonstrable pattern of interpretive distortion. The Anxious Body of Modernism shows what is distinct and significant about European modernism in a world of many other important literary movements.