Table of Contents

Abbreviations ; Introduction ; I. James Joyce and the Realism of the Ordinary ; II. Virginia Woolf and the "cotton wool of daily life" ; III. Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War ; IV. Wallace Stevens' Commonplace ; V. Conclusion ; Notes ; Bibliography

About the Author

Liesl Olson teaches at The University of Chicago where she is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division.

Reviews

"Modernism and the Ordinary is exceptionally well-written, elegantly organized, and compelling in its argument that critical accounts of literary modernism have failed to recognize in the major works of that period the centrality of ordinary experience and everyday life."-Rebecca Walkowitz, Rutgers University
"In this masterful study, Liesl Olson shows that modernist writers' attention to the everyday entailed a complex struggle to retain the ordinariness of the ordinary-to resist literary representation's drift toward the epiphanic, the momentous, the teleological. Olson's clear-eyed, elegant readings recast in wonderfully unexpected ways twentieth-century art's relation to the mundane life that furnished its most vital, yet most exacting, material."-Douglas Mao,
Johns Hopkins University