{"product_id":"9780198950721","title":"PRE-ORDER NOW Modernism's Whims by Senior Lecturer Beci Carver","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003cstrong\u003e PRE-ORDER NOW - Published: 03\/03\/2026 \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that sceptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.   Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavour to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalised spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eBinding: Hardback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367817490805,"sku":"9780198950721","price":81.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780198950721.jpg?v=1763548054","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780198950721","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}