Lateness and Modern European Literature

Lateness and Modern European Literature proposes a major new reading of modern literature understood not as that which is new, but as that which is "late." If this basic premise is strikingly simple, its consequences are immense. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, the book argues that lateness can be understood as an expression of modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. It explores a wide range of authors--from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno--combining close readings of their work with historical and theoretical comparisons of the various national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood (in the words of Nietzsche) as "creatures facing backwards." Ambitious and innovative,Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.

Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent. He has published widely on German, French, and English literature, including the monographsRilke's Poetics of Becoming, W. G. Sebald. Die dialektische Imagination (2009), andModernism and Style, as well as the co-edited volumes Archive: Comparative Critical Studies 8: 2-3 andA Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald. He is also active as a critic, writing for publications including theTimes Literary Supplement, The Observer, and the Literary Review. In 2011, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize.