Lateness and Modern European Literature - Hutchinson, Ben (Professor of European Literature, Professor of European Literature, University of Kent)

Ben Hutchinson proposes a major new reading of modern literature understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of chronology and imitation, he argues that lateness can be understood as an expression of modernity's quest for legitimacy.