ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on modernist individuality or subjectivity. It shows that many modernist narratives are built on the tension between organic, traditional and essential communities, on the one hand, and precarious, intermittent and non-identitary ones, on the other. The book provides the intellectual dialogue established around Nancy's philosophical ideas on individuality and community has reinvigorated a vocabulary inherited mostly, although not exclusively, from Martin Heidegger. It argues that as opposed to traditional understandings of the modernist writer as an isolated and solipsistic figure, Woolf's understanding of literary creation is based on the necessary connection between writer and community. The book highlights the tension of Berman's and K. Anthony Appiah's cosmopolitanism and Stanford Friedman's notion of planetary modernisms with Nancy's communitarian revision, which proves illuminating in the analysis of Lawrence's novels.