{"product_id":"modernisms-whims-9780198950721","title":"Modernism's Whims","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Beci Carver\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Modern - 20th Century\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that sceptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBeci Carver's \u003cem\u003eModernism's Whims\u003c\/em\u003e is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavour to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalised spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":47568466444439,"sku":"9780198950721","price":10855.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9780198950721.webp?v=1774868576","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/modernisms-whims-9780198950721","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}