Modernist Fiction and "the accumulation of unrecorded life"

Offering a thoughtful consideration of the everyday in modernist literature and art, Ella Ophir (University of Toronto) situates modernist literature in a ‘long and broad aesthetic trend’ beginning with the Romantic glorification of the commonplace. Suggesting that everyday objects, exchanges and actions function beyond the concept of ‘defamiliarization’, Ophir reframes modernism's engagement with the quotidian to include ‘the reclamation of undistinguished life, the constitution of character and the representation of consciousness and temporality’. © 2006, Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.