Henri Bergson and British Modernism

By Mary Ann Gillies

Mary Ann Gillies shows that French philosopher Henri Bergson played a central role in the development of British literary modernism. While Bergson's influence on modernism has long been debated, this is the first thorough, current examination of the ways in which his ideas are manifest in British modernism.

Focusing on the work of T.E. Hulme, the Men of 1914, the Bloomsbury Group, T.S. Eliot, and John Middleton Murry, Gillies convincingly demonstrates that Bergson's theories underlie the literary aesthetics of the period that forms the intellectual basis of modern literature. She then turns her critical eye to five major modernist writers - T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Joseph Conrad - and provides insightful and detailed Bergsonian readings of their major works.

Drawing on material not previously available, Gillies persuasively argues that Bergson was a major intellectual force in British literature during the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773514279
• ISBN13: 9780773514270
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"