Out of Context
The Uses of Modernist Fiction
Michaela Bronstein
Reviews and Awards
Shortlisted for the MSA First Book Prize
"In Out of Context, Bronstein compares modern and contemporary novels, focusing on formal literary elements. The introduction and first chapter explore how past authors influence future authors, particularly the ways contemporary authors have adapted modernist experiments. In the chapters that follow, Bronstein pairs authors, showing how literary techniques could be employed in new ways. [...] The brief comparative analyses throughout Out of Context are insightful and beautifully contextualized, showing that literary techniques can be employed by writers in different circumstances for different rhetorical purposes. Summing Up: Highly recommended" -- CHOICE
"Arguing that 'to read transhistorically is not to read ahistorically,' Out of Context offers a revelatory rereading of modernist literary history, one that is sure to cause a vital shift in the study of fiction written in the past two centuries." --Jesse Matz, William P. Rice Professor of English and Literature, Kenyon College
"Out of Context is an ambitious and provocative study that makes a series of important methodological claims about how to read, and in particular about the relation between different moments in literary history, and indeed the relation between literature and history itself." --Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature, Smith College
"Out of Context will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the stakes of reconsidering the political consequences and formal modulations of modernist fiction beyond mid-century. Michaela Bronstein offers a critically bold and timely rationale for examining the transhistorical uses and aspirations of modernist aesthetics." --David James, author of Modernist Futures
"Michaela Bronstein's account of Conrad's impact on America's Faulkner or Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o is the single most compelling account I have read of 'influence' in a lifetime of reading. Intricately conversant with Anglophone writers from many geographies and carrying out tour de force feats of stylistic analysis, the book founds a new method of transhistorical literary studies. Its pages seem to announce the coming of a new school of literary thinking." --Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Harvard University