Facing Modernity : Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s Hardback

This is the first monograph on the work of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) to bepublished in English by a British-based academic, and should prove useful bothto those with a specialized interest in Roth,. whose novels and journalismcontinue to gain admirers around the world, and to those interested morebroadly in an extraordinarily rich period in twentieth-century Europeanculture.

It serves both as an introduction to the early part of a body of workwhose variety and volume were for many years overshadowed by the reputation ofthe historical novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), and as a reassessment ofRoth's writing, both of fiction and of journalism, within the modern tradition. Thematic chapters present a detailed contextual survey of Roth's intense andoften ambivalent engagement with aspects of modern life, including travel,gender, technology, the city, and cinema, showing how his responses to thecontemporary world affect both the form and content of his writing.

The authorargues that Roth's writing of the 1920s should be considered modernist not justin its often prescient sensitivity to cultural and political developments, butin its employment of a formal aesthetics and narrative self-consciousness whicheventually made possible the illusory 'wholeness' of the later fiction.