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BOOK REVIEWS Andrew Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York; London: Oxford University Press, 2013). 224pp. ISBN: 9780199861125. Both within and outside modernist studies, the notion of literary autonomy is an outmoded one. The ineradicable social embeddedness of all literature is now a guiding assumption from which critics begin their inquiries into texts so much so that political and historical content can be wrung from even the most defiantly aestheticist and obtuse works as a matter of course. Beginning from this premise, Andrew Goldstone's book Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man insists that autonomy is still worth discussing not in its traditional guise (as an argument for art's freedom from history), but with a view to the historical and biographical tensions that press up against and influence its formulation in the writings of various authors during the modernist era. `To think about autonomy', Goldstone argues, `is to think about literature's social embeddedness in the distinctive way the modernist period permits' (5). The tension inherent in relative autonomy is apparent in Goldstone's strong first chapter, which examines the role of labour and servanthood in the work of fin-de-siècle writers
Modernist Cultures – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Oct 1, 2014
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