Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy Green Modernism. Nature and the English Novel, 1900 to 1930. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Séminaire proposé par Christine Reynier, Marie Bertrand, Tim Gupwell
One of the first studies to explore the relationship between environmental criticism and British modernism, Green Modernism explores the cultural function of nature in the modernist novel between 1900 and 1930.
Mc Carthy argues that ‘until recently, modernist studies has largely rebuffed the insights of ecocriticism thanks to the aesthetic armor of its autonomous, subjective, urban texts. But today the moment is propitious for ecocritical appraisals of modernism; each field pulls the other toward reinvention’. His task ‘is to reframe the critical conversation around ecocriticism and then propose a critical apparatus for reading modernism and the environment together’.
The seminar means to discuss the ecocritical and new materialist insights McCarthy brings to Modernist Studies, and particularly to D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his essay ‘Pan in America’.