Lateness and Modern European Literature

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of latenesssince romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors-from Mary Shelley Chateaubriand and Immermann via Baudelaire Henry James and Nietzsche to Valery Djuna Barnes and Adorno- he combines close readings of canonical texts withhistorical and theoretical comparisons of numerous 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 original Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.