UC Irvine

This dissertation considers the interaction between English modernism and the problematic of nihilism, focusing on select works by Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and Anthony Ludovici. While it might be supposed that nihilism is a concept belonging to German or Russian intellectual histories, or that nihilism is strictly a philosophical problem, this dissertation shows how these three writers deployed distinct conceptions of nihilism in their work. It highlights that the problematic of nihilism was, therefore, both transnational in scope and explored in various genres of writing, arguing in turn for the formative role that nihilism played in English modernist production. At the same time, this dissertation emphasizes nihilism’s unsettled character, arguing that each author’s concept of nihilism is distinct in type, origin, and scale, gesturing in the process towards the different implications of these distinct conceptual deployments. In tracing these distinct deployments of the concept, this dissertation problematizes various critical accounts concerned with modernism and nihilism, offering new readings of how nihilism is conceptualized and represented in each author’s work, as well as a new framework for distinguishing between nihilisms.