Columbia University Press

We here at the Press continue to be committed to publishing exciting new monographs and first books by up-and-coming scholars, so it always good when of those works and their authors get their due. At the recent International Conference on Narrative held in Austin Texas, Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation received an honorable mention for the George and Barbara Perkins Prize awarded for the best book published on narrative.

Here’s an excerpt from the citation:

The work of Cosmopolitan Style is to show how the salient features of modernist literary narrative—paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, wandering consciousness, and portmanteau language—usher in new patterns of description and recognition that powerfully challenge the social and political status quo—even as these same narrative elements invite a turning away from politics altogether….

With the intensity of its theoretical engagement on the one hand and the sensitivity of its close readings on the other, Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style accomplishes its own tour de force of scholarly style, modulating effortlessly from high concept to textual nuance, from sophisticated debates about the meaning of the literary to a detailed account of how the literary is performed in modernist and post-modernist novels. Congratulations to Rebecca Walkowtiz for this truly impressive first monograph.

More on Rebecca Walkowitz and Cosmopolitan Style: read an interview with Walkowitz | Read the Introduction (pdf) | Visit Walkowitz’s faculty page

Posted by Columbia University Press in Awards, Literary Studies