Nietzsche and Modernism: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature)

by Stewart Smith

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Reconfiguring Nietzsche's seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.


  • ISBN13 9783319755342
  • Publish Date 18 May 2018
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country CH
  • Imprint Springer International Publishing AG
  • Edition 1st ed. 2018
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 236
  • Language English