Allon White
The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Author-signed first edition.  0710007515  vii/190 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in brown cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is in fine condition. Dust jacket displays light shelfwear.
Inscription on front flyleaf reads: "With the author's best wishes / Jonathan Culler / from / Allon White / Jan. 1982."
"For many readers, modernist literature is associated with obscurity. Some see this obscurity as bad writing, others see it as mere pretentiousness or preciosity. But little critical attention has been paid to how or why textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature. What were the deep forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late nineteenth century, and can we begin to account for their central importance to modernism?
In this book, the first sustained, serious attempt to answer these questions, Allon White argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of "symptomatic" or "subtextual" reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public, and the "difficulties" of modernism were often a defensive response to this radical cultural transformation.
Within this general perspective, Dr. White traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant ficitons. He goes on to discuss opacity in the texts themselves -- embarrassment and shame in Meredith; "enigmas" in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James."