Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art

Through a wide-ranging selection of essays representing a variety of different media, national contexts and critical approaches, this volume provides a broad overview of the idea of work in modernism, considered in its aesthetic, theoretical, historical and political dimensions.

Several individual chapters discuss canonical figures, including Richard Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, but Modernist Work also addresses contexts that are chronologically and geographically foreign to the main stream of modernist studies, such as Swedish proletarian writing, Haitian nationalism and South African inheritors of Dada. Prominent historical themes include the ideas of class, revolution and the changing nature of women’s work, while more conceptual chapters explore topics including autonomy, inheritance, intention, failure and intimacy.

Modernist Work investigates an important but relatively neglected topic in modernist studies, demonstrating the central relevance of the concept of work to a diverse selection of writers and artists and opening up pathways for future research.