| Over the course of a century, industrialization transformed England from a rural, agrarian society into an urban, manufacturing one. This grand transformation gave rise to a culture of self-diagnosis, as writers and intellectuals struggled to make sense of the changes that were happening all around them. For writers, in particular, there were two aspects of industrial life that proved especially formative: the idea of progress, and the anxiety of social formlessness. Progress, first, was the very new belief that advancement requires neither oversight nor direction. It was less a fact than a promise, a promise that somehow the conflicts, competition, and contingency of everyday life would add up to a better tomorrow. In contrast, social formlessness was a fear of contingency itself. It was a widespread anxiety about the integrity of modern society, a sense that there was no longer a structured social whole but only a chaos of disjointed parts.; "The Writing of Modern Life" argues that 19th and early 20th-century British literature sought to develop ways of writing adequate to the conflicting experiences of progress and social formlessness. In a world where society had lost its apparent form, but where, at the same time, progress depended on the contingencies of everyday life, literature faced the following dilemma: to imagine forms of social fullness (e.g. utopia, nostalgia, Gemeinschaft) without foreclosing the advancement that comes from social deformation. Modern British literature tried, in other words, to sustain images of social harmony against a world whose progress depended on creative destruction.; Though they shared this general project, each genre and each movement found its own vision of fullness, and each had its own way of keeping that fullness at bay. "The Writing of Modern Life" focuses on a core group of writers and texts---George Eliot and "Middlemarch," William Morris and "News From Nowhere," James Joyce and "Ulysses"---in order to show how strained this balance became as it developed from mid-19 th-century realism through fin-de-siecle utopian fiction and up to the high modernist moment after World War I. |
