W. Somerset Maugham, Henry James, and the Modernist Aesthetic of The Moon and Sixpence

IF 0.1 4区 文学 0 LITERATURE
CEA CRITIC Pub Date : 2022-03-01 DOI:10.1353/cea.2022.0001
Darren J. Borg
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract:Ultimately, Wilson condemns Maugham as "a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing" (731). Most of Wilson's objections concern Maugham's remarks in the introductory essays to his anthology Great Modern Reading (1943), in which Maugham mixes praise with criticism of James and others; however, the ambivalence about modernism that Wilson detects in Maugham's anthology runs throughout the novelist's critical writings. Moreover, this conflict that Maugham's critical work exhibits—essentially an aesthetic of anxiety about modernism and literary impressionism in particular—manifests itself particularly in the novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). As this essay will demonstrate, the novel's plot displays the author's anxiety about style, and the novel as a whole represents the author's attempt to resolve this internal conflict and embrace a technique, both in theory and in practice, that supersedes the realism he naturally prefers.
毛姆、詹姆斯与《月亮与六便士》的现代主义美学
摘要:最终,威尔逊谴责毛姆是“一个半垃圾的小说家,写得很糟糕,但却受到半严肃的读者的青睐,他们不太关心写作”(731)。威尔逊的大多数反对意见都与毛姆在其选集《伟大的现代阅读》(1943)的引言文章中的言论有关,毛姆在文章中对詹姆斯等人的赞扬与批评交织在一起;然而,威尔逊在毛姆选集中发现的对现代主义的矛盾心理贯穿了这位小说家的批评作品。此外,毛姆的批评作品所表现出的这种冲突——本质上是对现代主义,尤其是文学印象派的焦虑美学——尤其在小说《月亮与六便士》(1919)中表现出来。正如本文所展示的那样,小说的情节显示了作者对风格的焦虑,而小说作为一个整体,代表了作者试图解决这种内部冲突,并在理论和实践中采用一种技术,取代他天生喜欢的现实主义。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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CEA CRITIC
CEA CRITIC LITERATURE-
CiteScore
0.20
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