Description:
In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their
ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and
the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J.
Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious,
expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.
Brief description: Kevin Rulo is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the English Department at the Catholic University of America. He has published in The Review of English Studies, Neohelicon, and The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual.
Review Quotes:
Rulo has not only succeeded in foregrounding a satiric strain that underpins the Modernism project but also demonstrated satire's transhistorical ubiquity when understood as a deconstructive discourse, rather than a comic device. The book's breadth and theoretical acuity, therefore, make it essential reading for modernist scholars, satirists, and anyone interested in the intersections between critique, aesthetics, and cultural history.
Adam James Smith, review in Comedy Studies