Modernist Irony and a New Type of Biography: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Anna Tomczak
Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet w BiałymstokuAbstract
The article argues that Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) exemplifies the use of modernist irony, as defined by AlanWilde in Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (1981). The Polish translation of Strachey’s book, which includes only two of the four original essays, while losing the ironic undertones of the title in Ludzie epoki Wiktorii, keeps some significant characteristics discussed by Wilde, such as disjunction, paradox and parataxis. Strachey’s disjunctive irony, his awareness of life’s incongruities and disparities, his perspective of distance and detachment, as well as his employment of narrative techniques suggesting discontinuity, fleeting impression and subjectivity – all lie at the root of the new form of biography as a genre.
Keywords:
modernist irony, disjunctive irony, biography, Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey, modernism, Alan WildeReferences
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Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet w Białymstoku
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