Annotated Bibliography of Selected Criticism
Alexander Howard
Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)
In this theoretically dextrous and wide-ranging study, Albright discusses the manner in which a number of prominent first-generation Anglo-American modernist writers responded to historical developments in scientific discourse. He seeks to demonstrate how major modernist writers such as W. B. Yeats (Chapter 1), Ezra Pound (Chapter 2) and T. S. Eliot (Chapter 3) sought to commandeer scientific metaphors as part of a more general attempt to reconceptualize poetry. Quantum Poetics, as Albright notes at the very start of his general introduction, is structured around three central propositions. The first of these propositions holds that canonical modernist writers such as Eliot, Pound and Yeats sought to uncover the preverbal roots of poetry. The second suggests that certain methods privileged by physicists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr inspired these poets to search for the elementary particles of poetry, which Albright terms ‘poememes’. Albright’s third and final proposition foregrounds the decidedly elusive quality of such poememes. In the first section of Quantum Poetics, Albright examines the influential early modernism of W. B. Yeats, which, in the former’s estimation, reveals a dialectical interplay between image and symbol. In the next section, Albright suggests that Pound’s entire critical vocabulary can be viewed as a concerted effort to unify art and science. In the last section, Albright discusses Eliot’s poetic and critical output in relation to poememes and wave particles. Here, among other things, Albright analyses the texture and rhythmic elements of Eliot’s poetry, as well as the poet’s fondness for geological and astrological metaphors.
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000)
This unconventional, yet noteworthy, interdisciplinary treatise considers a number of collaborative, mixed-media modernist ventures, the majority of which engage with music in some shape or form. Traversing a number of different geographical sites (London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow), and discussing the work of a range of modernist writers, composers, dancers and artists such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Vaslav Nijinsky, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Paul Hindemith, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Hindemith, George Antheil, Sergei Prokofiev, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Albright’s study explores some of the relationships that have developed between different cultural forms. Albright usefully situates his study in relation to the work of three influential aesthetic theoreticians: Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Theodor W. Adorno and Clement Greenberg. Each of these three thinkers believed in the importance of aesthetic purism. This much becomes apparent when we read Albright’s introduction, which discusses Lessing’s Laokoon, Greenberg’s ‘Towards a Newer Laöcoon’ and Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. Contrasting his interest in interdisciplinarity with the concern for formal purity expressed in these canonical texts, Albright lays the foundations for his subsequent enquiry into the field of aesthetic hybridity. Both historically and theoretically informed, Albright’s study of the relationship between cultural modernism and musicality will appeal to a range of advanced students and scholars.
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998)
Armstrong’s study is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the complex relationship between technology, the human body and the emergence of modern literature and aesthetics. Armstrong opens with the suggestion that the nineteenth century saw a revolution in attitudes concerning the human body. He notes that at the start of this century the human body was generally regarded as a machine in which the self resided, as a secure vessel that required conscious regulation and which, significantly, could not be penetrated. Armstrong also points out that this had all changed by the beginning of the twentieth century. Scientific, medical and technological advances ensured that the body, which had once seemed wholly impenetrable, now appeared decidedly permeable. Armstrong then turns his attention to modernism’s response to this situation. He describes how many modernist practitioners had a fascination with the body, before detailing the many ways in which experimental texts can be said to have encoded, and then enacted certain experimental processes pertaining to trends in biology, psychophysics and a variety of popular bodily reform techniques. Comprised of four main sections, Armstrong’s fascinating treatise considers how the interface between the human body and a rapidly changing technological landscape informs the work of notable modernists such as Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein.
John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist, Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)
The twelve essays gathered in Attridge and Rosenquist’s Incredible Modernism focus on the interwoven notions of trust and distrust. They examine the importance of these terms as defining influences on the literary output of a wide-ranging selection of influential first- and second-generation modernist writers including André Gide, Marcel Proust, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Hilda Doolittle, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, as well as later authors like Ralph Ellison. Attridge explains the critical impetus underpinning the collection in his general introduction. In it, he shows that trust played a crucial role in the understanding of modern society. Citing the influential views of self-defined sociologists such as Gabriel Tarde, H. G. Wells and George Simmel, Attridge notes that trust was, up until the start of twentieth century, regarded as a sort of social cohesive. In essence, a shared sense of trust helped to hold society together. But things changed. In Attridge’s estimation, the emergence of cultural modernism was characterized by a profound sense of scepticism. It marked a decisive turning point in matters pertaining to categories of social trust. Recognizing this, the contributors in this collection accordingly consider how modernist interests in language, credulity, fictional truth and sincerity intersected with historically changing conceptions of trust and attendant notions of deception. Highlights include Paul Sheehan’s treatment of Ellison and the mythology of deception (Chapter 4), and Sean Pryor’s account of Pound’s involvement with Italian Fascism (Chapter 10).
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989)
This is a helpful introductory account of the cultural moment of the 1920s commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. It will appeal to students interested in the history of African American literature and aesthetics in the early stages of the twentieth century. In it, Baker takes umbrage at an earlier generation of critics and Afro-American analysts who tended to view the Harlem Renaissance in terms of its perceived collective ‘failure’ to produce instances of specifically ‘modern’ art and literature in the style of, say, a James Joyce or a T. S. Eliot. Baker is of the opinion that such critics get it badly wrong when it comes to the Harlem Renaissance. He suggests that critical attempts to unthinkingly equate the literary and aesthetic achievements of the Harlem Renaissance with established models of Anglo-American and European modernism are hopelessly misguided. Adopting an alternative approach, Baker repositions the literature produced by Harlem Renaissance writers, editors and affiliates such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston in relation to contemporaneous developments in African American musical forms, philosophy and art.
Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 2007)
Students interested in the history and workings of early Anglo-American poetic modernism will find much of use in Beasley’s refreshingly clear account of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Comprising six chapters, Beasley’s introductory study utilizes a broadly chronological approach to show how the literary experiments and theoretical speculations of these seminal modernist poet-critics developed over the course of time, and to demonstrate how the results of their investigations left an indelible imprint on twentieth-century poetry. In the first chapter, Beasley outlines the rapidly changing and fluctuating turn-of-the-century literary period in which these ambitious young men began to establish themselves as modernist writers of note. Beasley then turns her attention to developments in contemporary philosophy (as set forth in the work of diverse figures including Henri Bergson, F. H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell) and their influence on the thinking of the three poets. In the third chapter, Beasley discusses the problematic and, at times, overtly anti-democratic political attitudes underpinning the theories of literature espoused by Hulme, Eliot and, most notoriously, Pound. The fourth and fifth chapters detail the conceptual difficulties that Eliot and Pound encountered when composing their respective masterpieces, The Waste Land and The Cantos. The final chapter analyses the social criticism of these two major modernists in relation to their late literary output.
Joseph Allan Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998)
This is an impressive revisionary account of literary modernism. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars interested in the intersection between writing, desire and notions of sexuality. Boone draws on developments in the fields of feminist criticism, race studies and queer theory while engaging with an impressive range of canonical and lesser-known Anglo-American literary materials written between 1853 and 1962. He makes his critical intentions clear in the introduction of Libidinal Currents. In these illuminating opening pages, Boone writes of his desire to undertake a thoroughgoing investigation of the ways in which issues of sexuality, psychology, psychoanalysis and narrative can be said to have impacted on the trajectory of cultural, aesthetic and literary modernity as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To put it another way, Boone seeks, via detailed close readings of an expansive range of novelistic fictions, to describe how a number of broadly defined modernist writers and thinkers, such as Charlotte Brontë (Chapter 1), Kate Chopin, D. H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud (Chapter 2), Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (Chapter 3), Bruce Nugent, Djuna Barnes, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Blair Niles (Chapter 4), William Faulkner, Christina Stead (Chapter 5), Lawrence Durrell and Doris Lessing (Chapter 6), developed modes of literary expression which might better evoke the fluctuating conditions of subjective interiority and, in his own words, the erotics of mental activity. In this fashion, Boone seeks to revise our understanding of the literary and sexual politics of Anglo-American modernism.
Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011)
Until recently, many literary critics tended to describe the major twentieth-century Irish writer Samuel Beckett as the ‘last’ true modernist. There are a number of reasons as to why this might have been so. As it happens, Peter Boxall touches upon some of these at the start of his wide-ranging and detailed Since Beckett, which will appeal to students and scholars interested in recent developments in American, European and South African writing. In Boxall’s estimation, Beckett’s formally uncompromising style of writing is a poetics of exhaustion, one which effectively signals the end of a whole gamut of literary and cultural possibilities. Hence the reductive critical tendency to characterize Beckett as some sort of terminal – perhaps even quasi-Beckettian – figure. In equal measure, however, Beckett’s poetics of exhaustion is, as Boxall reminds us, also a poetics of persistence, one which aspires, paradoxically, to extend the various aesthetic possibilities it simultaneously seeks to foreclose. Recognizing this fact, Boxall notes that any attempt to inherit, or simply understand, Beckett’s legacy has first to come to terms with this contradiction between a writing which is unable to go on, yet continues to go on. Grappling deftly with this insoluble contradiction, Boxall identifies, and then analyses, a discernibly Beckettian legacy which plays out across a diverse range of international contemporary writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville (Part 1), Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald (Part 2), Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee (Part 3).
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1976)
Commonly regarded as a classic of early modernist scholarship, this anthology, which is notable for its range and scope, details the myriad cultural, philosophical, social and historical transformations that shaped the development of European literature in the period between 1890 and 1930. In ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, Bradbury and McFarlane discuss some of the nuances and contradictions in much literature produced in what was a particularly tumultuous era of European history. Then, having debated and contextualized the historical emergence of modernism at some considerable length, Bradbury and McFarlane turn their anthology over to a number of other critics. The second section of the collection examines the cultural and intellectual origins of modernism. The essays in this section find that while literary modernism was an art of an uncertain, rapidly modernizing world, it retained a curious sort of Victorian confidence in the certainty of progress. The third section focuses on the issue of geography. Eschewing comprehensiveness, the essays selected for inclusion here chart the development of literary modernism in a number of now familiar urban foci: Moscow, St Petersburg, Paros, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, New York, Chicago and London. The useful fourth section focuses on specific literary (and aesthetic) movements including Symbolism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, German Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism. The fourth, fifth and sixth sections deal with lyric poetry, fiction and drama, respectively. In these highly informative chapters, sustained critical attention is paid to canonical modernist writers such as Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Robert Musil, W. B. Yeats and August Strindberg.
Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2005)
This is an engaging collection of wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary essays, which, among other things, seeks to position modernist studies in relation to contemporary debates about postcolonialism and globalization. The editors set the scene for what is to follow in their useful co-authored introduction. In it, Brooker – the author of the equally geographically situated Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (2007) – and Thacker suggest that students and scholars alike examine modernist literature and aesthetics within the spatial framework of geography. They then proceed to outline the reasons behind their desire to reread modernism in spatial terms, many of which have to do with relatively recent developments in the field of critical theory, most notably in the work of writers such as Fredric Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Edward Soja. Of especial interest here is Jameson’s spatially informed notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, which has been influential in discussions of the late modernism and post-modernism. They also refer to Homi K. Bhabha’s theorization of the postcolonial, and to Harvey’s work on cultural geography and contemporary capitalism, which responds to the ongoing changes wrought by globalization on our understanding of work, leisure, travel, information dissemination and cultural identity. Drawing on these and other assorted developments in literary and cultural theory, the essays featured in Brooker and Thacker’s collection consider the relationship between literary and aesthetic modernism in the work of diverse writers, artists and architects such as Virginia Woolf (Chapter 2), Joseph Conrad (Chapter 5), Jean Rhys (Chapters 6 and 7), Marcel Duchamp (Chapter 9), Le Corbusier (Chapter 12) and Rem Koolhaas (Chapter 13).
Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002)
Divided into five main chapters, this insightful interdisciplinary study considers the relationship between certain aesthetic and epistemological trends in music and literature during the modernist period. After furnishing the reader with a useful introductory account of the intricate and interwoven nature of the relationship between music and experimental literature (Chapter 1), Bucknell traces some of the various ways in which important proto- and canonical first-generation modernist figures such as Walter Pater (Chapter 2), Ezra Pound (Chapter 3), James Joyce (Chapter 4) and Gertrude Stein (Chapter 5) sought first to understand, and then engage with, contemporary developments in the fields of music composition and musical theory. Opening with a theoretically inflected comparative reading of Stéphane Mallarmé and Richard Wagner, Bucknell proceeds to demonstrate convincingly that his chosen writers were greatly interested in the expressive and specifically non-linguistic signifying potential of musical aesthetics. Developing his point, Bucknell considers Pound’s opera Le Testament de François Villon (1923). Having done so, Bucknell then turns his attention to the ‘Sirens’ episode in Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses. Finally, in the concluding chapter, Bucknell analyses Virgil Thompson’s score for Stein’s libretto Four Scores in Three Acts (1934). Lucid and measured in its assessments, Bucknell’s account of musicality and modernism is of great use to students and scholars alike.
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
Butler engages with a variety of literary and aesthetic forms in this useful account of ‘early’ modernism, which will appeal to students interested in the formative stages of twentieth-century European avant-gardism. Butler’s lavishly illustrated interdisciplinary study seeks to detail the manner in which highly influential (male) figures like Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, F. T. Marinetti, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg developed radically new conceptual frameworks and formal conventions for their respective arts in the decade before the First World War. Butler’s theorization of early modernism depends on the idea that the artists and writers in question were in some shape or form reacting against the movements that came before them, such as Romanticism, Decadence, Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism and Symbolism. Butler builds on this assertion in the first section of his study, which concerns early modernist scepticism about established artistic conventions and which describes how this questioning attitude precipitated an examination of the basic tenets of artistic language, such as harmony, perspective and logic. Having discussed these tenets in the second chapter of Early Modernism, Butler turns his attention to issues pertaining to subjective identity and the early modern interest in the primitive. In the fourth chapter, he discusses the relationship between modernism, the urban metropolis and rapid technological change. Butler’s fifth chapter concerns the reception of early modernist ideas, which leads him to reflect on the nature of literary and aesthetic experimentalism in his conclusion.
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1987)
This is a helpful historical and critical overview of key concepts pertaining to modernity, modernist literature and avant-garde aesthetics. It will appeal to students interested in the relationship between political modernity and aesthetic modernism. It also caters to those who wish to develop a clearer understanding of profound cultural shifts with roots stretching as far back as the late seventeenth century. Some of these cultural readjustments are discussed in the introduction to Five Faces of Modernity, where Calinescu outlines the various ways in which general conceptions of aesthetics changed over the course of the eighteenth century. He reminds the reader that what occurred during this period was nothing less than a collective rejection of previously established aesthetic notions of transcendence and permanence. The age of modernity, Calinescu points out, demanded an aesthetic model whose central values were primarily those of novelty, immanence and transitoriness. Calinescu then details the theoretical operations underpinning early, adversarial models of aesthetic modernism. Having explored the differences between classicism and modernism, Calinescu describes how the schism that emerged between the two terms paved the way for the subsequent emergence of the historical avant-garde, decadent and kitsch modes of aesthetic expression, as well as the twentieth-century cultural phenomenon that we have come to know as post-modernism. Despite showing some inevitable signs of age, Calinescu’s theoretical and semantic treatise continues to resonate in today’s ever-expanding field of modernist studies.
Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007)
This significant, well-researched and provocative study revisits the scene of early literary modernity. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in some of the more controversial aspects of canonical Anglo-American modernism. Childs discusses the ways in which three major first-generation literary modernists – W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf – were very much influenced by the eugenics movement, the origins of which can be traced back to the early 1870s. This conflicted period in British history was, Childs notes, marked by a profound sense of cultural and societal anxiety. Preying on the fears of a hubristic imperialist society reeling from the psychological blows of early defeats in the Boer War, alarmists such as the early eugenist R. R. Rentoul invoked threatening visions of national degeneracy, physical collapse and collective race suicide. Responding to these apocalyptical predictions, and to the contemporaneous theories of natural selection and heredity espoused by Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Golston, large swathes of the British public came to embrace the new ‘science’ of racial breeding. The early modernists proved no exception. Childs demonstrates convincingly the ways in which they were drawn to the discourse of eugenics. He then explains how this deep-seated interest in racial matters can be said to have impacted on modernist literary praxis. At times disquieting, Childs’s readings (especially those concerning Eliot and Yeats) have much to tell us about the relationship between literary modernism and some of the more unpalatable aspects of what was in some ways a remarkably unpleasant period of history.
Peter Childs, Modernism and the Post-Colonial (London: Continuum, 2007)
This account of modernism and postcolonialism covers the period between 1885 and 1930. Childs considers the manner in which certain modern texts register cultural anxieties and personal ambivalences pertaining to powerful historical forces of empire and imperialism. He is particularly interested in the output of mainly British modernist writers whose work questioned the values of empire and which sought to move away from entrenched colonial perspectives and attitudes. In equal measure, Childs is keen to stress that modernism was not merely a response to colonialism. He proposes that a number of modernist practitioners sought, at least in part, to register in their literary and aesthetic experiments the complexities of what was a rapidly changing, increasingly globalized world. This much is evident in Childs’s first chapter, where Joseph Conrad figures prominently. Here, Childs describes how modernists such as Conrad and Katherine Mansfield sought to distinguish their praxis from that of earlier Victorian writers such as H. R. Haggard. In the next chapter, Childs draws on the criticism of Edward Said in order to productively reread Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre. Childs broadens the terms of his discussion in the third and fourth chapters of his study, which situate modernism in relation to imperialistic conceptions of space, subjectivity and temporality. Finally, in a brief but intriguing conclusion, Childs describes how later writers like Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry oscillated between positions of ignorance and self-willed blindness when it came to matters of imperialism and empire in the 1930s.
Susan W. Churchill and Adam McKible (eds), Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (Houndmills: Ashgate, 2007)
This invaluable collection of wide-ranging essays will appeal to students and scholars interested in understanding how the cultural phenomenon of the so-called ‘little magazine’ impacted on the development of Anglo-American modernism. It should be read alongside related volumes such as Morrison’s The Public Face of Modernism (2001) and Scholes and Wulfman’s Modernism in the Magazines (2010). In the co-authored introduction, Churchill and McKible highlight some of the ways in which the study of little magazine culture serves to strength our understanding of literary modernity. In their estimation, modernist little magazines offer us the critical means with which to recover the sometimes hidden connective lines of influence, identification, difference, conflict, commerce and resistance that underpin much, if not all, modernist literary production. Favouring what the editors describe as a conversational model for modernism, the contributors featured in this volume explore the vibrant historical origins of Anglo-American literary avant-gardism as fostered and documented in the pages of a number of important little magazines such as Rhythm (Chapter 1), Poetry (Chapter 5), Epilogue (Chapter 8) and The Liberator (Chapter 11). Reminding us of the simple, yet important, fact that many little magazines functioned as useful heterogeneous social forums for writers of different genders, ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, the essays gathered together in this collection put forth a compelling argument for the centrality of periodical culture in both modernism and contemporary modernist studies. Highlights include Jay Bochner’s comparative account of Rogue and The Soil, Alan Golding’s investigation of The Dial and The Little Review (Chapter 4), and Churchill’s discussion of Others and the ‘Great Spectra Hoax’ of 1917 (Chapter 10).
Evelyn Cobley, Modernism and the Culture of Efficacy: Ideology and Fiction (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007)
There are a number of things to admire about this engaging study, which will appeal to students and scholars interested in the development of canonical British modernist fiction during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Cobley’s volume features detailed discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solider, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In particular, Cobley seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which these texts and writers registered the presence of what she describes as a culture of efficacy. In Cobley’s estimation, the roots of this ideologically charged culture have their basis in the profound series of socio-economic transformations brought about by the invention of the steam engine in 1794. In her useful historical introduction, Cobley describes how incremental improvements in locomotive construction and the coterminous growth of, and investment in, railroad networks during the nineteenth century laid the foundations for the emergence of the modern form of the technically efficient corporation and the concept of efficiency in its modern sense (as embodied in the theories and practices of Henry Ford and Winslow Taylor). Having outlined the historical trajectory of the culture, Cobley draws on developments in game theory in order to highlight some of the more extreme – and extremely negative – aspects of a commitment to efficiency (as epitomized by the regimented brutality of Nazism). In turn, Cobley considers the various tensions that exist in modernist fiction regarding the rise of efficiency and the question of individual agency over the course of number of largely convincing close readings.
Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2002)
This is an important contribution to the field of modernist studies. It will be of great use to scholars and advanced students interested in the relationship between modernist literature and the technologies of production, reproduction and information dissemination. In The Senses of Modernism, Danius focuses on the literary output of three major European modernist writers working in the first half of the twentieth century: Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Thomas Mann. Comprising a series of detailed close readings focused on issues of narrative content and generic form in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, stylistic inflection and the treatment of syntax in Joyce’s Ulysses, and thematic structuring in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Danius’s treatise demonstrates some of the ways in which specific procedures and technological innovations – such as the locomotive rail network, the mass produced automobile and the X-ray machine – can be said to have informed what we commonly understand as the aesthetics of high modernism. Emphasizing, as she does, the profound impact that technologies of cinematic, photographic and phonographic inscription had on the vital work of Proust, Joyce and Mann, Danius encourages us to reconsider historical and critical assumptions concerning issues of aesthetic autonomy, as well as challenging the long-standing presupposition that there exists an easily discerned line of demarcation between aesthetic and technological cultures.
Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulty of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003)
In this challenging, yet rewarding, treatise, Diepeveen makes a case for the continued relevance and persistence of modernistic ideas and practices. Drawing on a range of historical, sociological and linguistic discourses, and featuring an impressive number of primary source materials, Diepeveen engages with the well-known – and long-debated – notion of modernist difficulty. Diepeveen suggests, quite rightly, that ideas of difficulty underpin our critical understanding of, and attitude towards, aesthetic and literary modernism. In order to better understand the ways in which we have come to conceptualize difficulty, Diepeveen revisits the historical scene of first-generation modernism. Diepeveen explains the reasoning behind this decision at the outset of his study. In his estimation, the specific sorts of difficulty associated with cultural modernism can only be understood if read alongside the various, often bewildered responses it elicited from its original audience. This belief underwrites Diepeveen’s subsequent assertion that modernism’s difficulty is not merely a classifiable set of (now readily identifiable) literary and aesthetic techniques. Examining the work of prominent Anglo-American writers including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, as well as charting the history of the reception of writers such as Willa Cather and Robert Frost, Diepeveen details how contemporary responses to modernist texts developed over the course of time. In turn, he productively considers the manner in which public debates about difficulty helped shape what we now recognize as the modernist canon.
Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: The Question of the Subject in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013)
This classic work of literary scholarship, which was originally published in 1987, discusses the output of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Ellmann’s study focuses on the theory of poetic ‘impersonality’ as articulated in the literature and criticism of Eliot and Pound. The theory of impersonality, Ellmann suggests, existed long before Eliot placed it in the service of what we now recognize as first-generation Anglo-American literary modernism. Yet the impact that Eliot’s resurrection of the term had on the trajectory of twentieth-century literature simply cannot be ignored. As is well known, Eliot’s foray into the realms of literary impersonality can be traced all the way back to his seminal essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). In this difficult and occasionally paradoxical piece, Eliot proposes that the true writer submit to a process of continual self-suppression in order to gain his or her position along the literary immortals. Identifying a number of inconsistencies in this model of poetic impersonality, Ellmann finds that Eliot often seeks to ‘smuggle’ personality back into his poetry. Having unpacked the contradictions in Eliot’s oeuvre, Ellmann then casts a deconstructive critical eye over Pound’s poetry. Often startling, the fruits of Ellmann’s perceptive enquiry will be of use to any serious student of modernism.
Mary Lou Emery, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007)
Divided into four main sections, Emery’s wide-ranging study considers the role played by vision in the work of a number of twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean writers, artists and dramatists. Displaying a detailed engagement with theories of postcolonialism and transnationalism, Emery contends that the output of numerous figures such as Una Mason, Edna Manley, Jean Rhys, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris and Michelle Cliff focuses on notions and acts of vision. In Emory’s estimation, such acts, manifested in various works of Caribbean sculpture, criticism, drama, poetry and fiction, can refer either to social, collective acts of seeing inner visions or to reflections on matters of visual aesthetics. According to Emery, all such acts of vision are directly related to the experiences of mass migration wrought by the American, British and European colonization of the Caribbean (the personal and cultural effects of which are still being felt today). Emery concedes that this emphasis on the visual might strike some readers as surprising. From the outset of her study, Emery is upfront about the fact that her chosen topic of enquiry runs contrary to the majority of critical accounts concerning Caribbean culture, which emphasize the importance of sound, orality and musicality. Emery insists, convincingly, that the visual has just as much to tell us about Caribbean cultural production and conditions of diasporic subjectivity, especially when read in relation to, and against the grain of, the international field of mainstream Anglo-American and Continental literary modernism.
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1992)
In the introductory section of this theoretically informed study, Eysteinsson explains that he is interested in asking what the concept of modernism has been made to signify, and how. In order fully to appreciate what Eysteinsson is getting at here, we need first to place his treatise, with its myriad questions of definition and categories of signification, in historical context. Published in the early 1990s, Eysteinsson’s study emerged at a time when productive scholarly discussion about modernist issues had, at least in the eyes of some critics, more or less come to a standstill. Suggesting that much modernist criticism had become unduly preoccupied with questions of institutionalization and assumptions about reactionary political stances, Eysteinsson moves to demonstrate some of the ways in which our often contradictory theoretical conceptions and terminological accounts of modernism have developed over time. In his first chapter, Eysteinsson examines a number of different theories of modernism. Attention is paid to diverse critical thinkers including Lionel Trilling, T. S. Eliot, Theodor W. Adorno, Viktor Shklovsky and Georg Lukács. Having completed his survey of modernist critics and critical paradigms, Eysteinsson then considers the significance of literary history in relation to canon formulation (Chapter 2), notions of post-modernism (Chapter 3) and the idea of the avant-garde (Chapter 4). In his concluding chapter, Eysteinsson proposes his own reconceptualization of modernism, which he views as a historically specific interruption of realist aesthetics.
Greg Forter, Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)
Forter’s study will be of great use to students and scholars interested in understanding the way in which American modernism developed in the period between 1880 and 1920. Forter is, as the very title of his study suggests, interested in coming to terms with the complex relationship between systems of race, gender, sexuality and models of (literary) modernism in the United States. Opening with a broad historical overview, Forter argues that the arrival of disempowering nineteenth-century economic transformations wrought by monopoly capitalism had a profound impact on American society. Drawing on the work of contemporary historians and sociologists, Forter posits that American men responded to their economic disempowerment in a number of ways, some of which revealed an underlying desire to more carefully police the borders between traditional binary models of male and female identity. But this is not all. Forter also suggests that these disempowering processes impacted on conceptions of race in the United States. In his reckoning, reconfigurations within America’s capitalist economic system subordinated what had been a predominately white workforce to new bureaucratic structures while concurrently fashioning a supplementary labour market comprised of African American freedmen and ethnic immigrants. Having presented his argument, Forter discusses how prominent writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather registered (and sometimes mourned) these profound shifts in now-canonical works of American modernism including The Great Gatsby, The Professor’s House, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!
Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013)
Garrington’s study of literary modernism deals with specific notions of non-verbal haptic perception. Broadly speaking, it will appeal to students and scholars interested primarily in the development of what we now describe as canonical twentieth-century British and Irish literature. In her helpful introduction, Garrington points out that the word ‘haptic’ is best understood as a general term which can refer to any, some or indeed all of the following bodily experiences: touch, proprioception, vestibular sense and kinaesthesis. In Garrington’s estimation, the modernist period of literary history saw an increased interest in the last of these subcategories of sense perception, particularly in the reading and touching of human skin. In addition, she posits that the flowering of interest in all things haptic had much to do with rapid developments in the realm of technological innovation. Garrington argues that advances pertaining to the cinema and transport impacted on conceptions of human bodily experience and touch. Breaking with visually biased accounts of literary modernism, Garrington rewarding critical intervention proffers a series of detailed close readings of major writers like James Joyce (Chapter 2), Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3), Dorothy Richardson (Chapter 4) and D. H. Lawrence (Chapter 5), all of whom sought to document the shift towards the haptic in their work. Situating her study in relation to the work of critics such as Tim Armstrong and Santanu Das, Garrington encourages us to develop a new set of ‘haptically attuned’ critical reading strategies with which we might better understand the trajectory of first-generation literary modernity.
Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Goldman’s handbook covers the main literary transitions that unfurled in the first half of the twentieth century. It will appeal to students of canonical Anglo-American and European modernism, to those interested in the intersection of gender, culture and art, and to researchers of vital first- and second-generation little magazines such as transition, BLAST and The Egoist. Goldman finds that the most interesting and energetic literary movements that emerged in the wake of the Edwardian Era were either modernistic or avant-gardist in nature, and that they are to be located between the loosely aligned grouping of Imagist poets writing in and around 1913 and the so-called Apocalypse movement of the early 1940s. Emphasizing the role that manifestos and periodicals played during the period in question (as well as the ways in which they have shaped the critical understanding of literary modernity), Goldman’s account of modernism is divided into three main sections. In these sections, Goldman discusses the aesthetic and critical output of familiar major figures such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as well as lesser-known (but no less significant) figures including Nathanael West, John Rodker and David Gascoyne.
Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Poetics: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm (New York: Columbia UP, 2008)
This is a far-reaching and fascinating account of the relationship between modernism and science that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Golston seeks to demonstrate how scientific advances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be said to have directly influenced and motivated the formal innovations that we see in first-generation Anglo-American modernist poetry. In particular, Golston seeks to explain the role that the science of human physiology played in the development of modernism during the early stages of the twentieth century. Theories of ‘rhythm’ are important in this regard. Golston emphasizes as much in his introduction. He notes that, during the period in question, rhythm was thought to play a central role in a number of natural, social, psychological and physical processes. In equal measure, as rhythm was thought to serve as an important component in the workings of both body and mind, the various problematic, and often highly racialized, political roles to which it might serve also generated a significant amount of intense theoretical speculation (reaching an infamous culmination in the ‘blood and soil’ ideology of Nazism). Significantly, as Golston’s study adroitly reveals, a number of prominent (and lesser known) modernists were heavily invested in these theoretical investigations. Charting the way in which notions of rhythm – or, to use Golston’s terminology, rhythmics – informed the poetics and personal politics of canonical figures such as Ezra Pound (Chapters 1 and 2), W. B. Yeats (Chapters 3 and 4) and William Carlos Williams (Chapter 5), this study offers fresh insight into some of the ideological systems of thought underpinning Anglo-American literary modernism.
Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein (Houndmills: Palgrave 2007)
Goody challenges preconceived critical definitions of modernism in this theoretically informed account of literary experimentation. Featuring a detailed and useful introductory survey of recent developments in the related fields of literary studies, cultural studies and post-structuralist philosophy, Goody’s revisionist study will appeal to students and scholars interested in the ongoing feminist reconsideration of Anglo-American modernism. Responding to the influential formulations of diverse critical theorists including Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Lawrence Grossberg and Stuart Hall, Goody proffers a series of original and detailed readings of three major female modernist writers: Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes. Emphasizing what the author describes as the centrality of discontinuity, the various chapters of Goody’s study meet Barnes, Loy and Stein at different stages in their respective literary careers. Among other things, Goody’s Modernist Articulations features detailed discussions of Barnes’s fiction and journalism, Loy’s poetic engagement with artistic movements such as Dadaism and Futurism, and Stein’s famous forays into linguistic experimentation and literary portraiture. Exploring issues of gender, sexuality, Jewishness, avant-gardism and transgressive potentiality in key texts such as Barnes’s seminal document of queer modernism Nightwood, Stein’s Tender Buttons and Loy’s riotous Lunar Baedeker, Goody’s study sheds important critical light on the challenging creative praxis of these three important Anglo-American experimentalists.
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)
While not concerned with purely literary matters, this panoramic study has much to tell us about the ostensibly paradoxical relationship between cultural modernity and the political phenomenon of fascism. Drawing on the influential criticism of Frank Kermode and earlier literary studies such as Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1993), Griffin proposes a reconceptualization of modernism. He suggests that we define ‘modernism’ as a historical reaction against real and imagined threats of impending social collapse and cultural decadence between 1850 and 1945. In Griffin’s estimation, modernism is best understood as an attempt to transform the various institutions, religious belief systems and general structures of society in response to the secularizing impact of Western modernization. Griffin defines two main types of modernist activity: ‘epiphanic’ (cultural) and ‘programmatic’ (political). According to Griffin, the first of these – ‘epiphanic’ – emphasizes spiritual rebirth, renewal and purification. The second – ‘programmatic’ – has more to do with societal practicalities. However, despite these significant differences, it soon becomes clear that both types of modernist activity were greatly preoccupied with the idea of overcoming, of transcendence. This is where the links between (conservative models of) modernism and purportedly anti-modern forms of fascism begin to be most clearly felt. A manifestation of what Griffin describes as programmatic modernity, fascism, in the eyes of its supporters, warded off the sense of existential terror generated by processes of secularization, to bring closure to the search for transcendence brought on by modernity’s social, spiritual and political crisis, and to resolve humanity’s primordial quest for wholeness. Griffin’s historical study, which is divided into two main sections and features analysis of various literary works, will be of great interest to students and scholars of modernist culture and politics in the first half of the twentieth century.
Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (Austin: Texas UP, 2007)
Hammill’s comparative study of literary culture and celebrity considers the under-theorized relationship between modernism, popular culture and the middlebrow. As the title suggests, it has much to tell us about modernism and the interwar period. Hammill discusses a variety of famous and commercially successful women writers from America, Britain and Canada whose work and celebrity status serves to unsettle a number of conceptual categories and critical distinctions. Divided into seven sections, Hammill’s study analyses the varied outputs of high-profile writers such as Dorothy Parker (Chapter 1), Anita Loos (Chapter 2), Mae West (Chapter 3), L. M. Montgomery (Chapter 4), Margaret Kennedy (Chapter 5), Stella Gibbons (Chapter 6) and E. M. Delafield (Chapter 7). In her own words, Hammill’s primary goal is to reinscribe these critically marginalized writers into literary history and to reconsider their relationships with a number of canonical modernist writers (such as Wyndham Lewis, William Faulkner and James Joyce). However, there is more to Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture than this. As well as highlighting the ways in which these writers sought to fashion their celebrity and literary personas via various strategies of public performance and tactics of cultural appropriation, Hammill reminds us of the fact that assumptions about literary value, commercial success and gender continue to inform critical judgements when it comes to the topic of literary modernism in the 1920s and 1930s.
Jaime Hovey, A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism (Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2006)
Hovey’s study is an important contribution to the field of queer modernist studies. Engaging with conceptions of erotically charged literary and aesthetic portraiture, the self-conscious construction of ‘personality’ and theories of spectatorship in various instances of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experimentalism, Hovey’s incisive account serves as a necessary corrective to established readings of modernistic ‘impersonality’. Hovey begins by situating her study in relation to a number of works concerned with queer modernism, some of which feature elsewhere in this annotated bibliography. For example, she cites works of modernist literature such as Karen Jacob’s The Mind’s Eye (2001), studies of queer modernism including Anne Herrmann’s Queering the Moderns (2000) and Colleen Lamos’s Deviant Modernism (1998), and psychoanalytically informed treatments of avant-gardism like Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1991) and Joseph Allan Boone’s Libidinal Currents (1998). Building on the critical advances made in these and other related studies, Hovey posits that a better understanding of queer performativity and self-consciousness serves to productively complicate our understanding of the (still) under-theorized relationships between concepts such as gender, sexuality, social behaviour, and modernist literary and aesthetic expression. Basing her argument around detailed readings of diverse canonical and non-canonical avant-gardists such as Oscar Wilde (Chapter 1), T. S. Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, Langston Hughes (Chapter 2), Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Compton Mackenzie (Chapter 3), Collette, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein (Chapter 4), Hovey provides the reader with a critical vantage point from which they might broach the topic of queer desire as pertains to literary modernism.
Ben Hutchinson, Modernism and Style (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
This is a clear and concise account of certain formal aspects of cultural modernism. Responding to ideas articulated by Fredric Jameson in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1983), and to questions posed by Bradbury and McFarlane in their introduction to Modernism (1976), Hutchinson contends that we cannot fully appreciate the nuances of modernism if we do not first understand the ways in which leading practitioners associated with the movement sought to interrogate notions of style. Hutchinson argues that modernist ideas about style were motivated by what he describes as an underlying double movement. He points out that the modernists tended to foreground style as a sort of subject matter in its own right, rather than simply as a formal means with which to view the purportedly objective, ‘real’ world. In equal measure, however, many tended to view that which Hutchinson characterizes as ‘mere’ style with a certain degree of suspicion, believing as they did that such formal exercises were representative of a secular realm stripped of any meaningful content. Navigating between these two positions, Hutchinson sets out to, in his own words, trace the development of modernism from ‘pure’ style to what one could call ‘purely’ style. Featuring discussions of canonical Anglo-American and Continental figures such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (Chapter 1), Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire (Chapter 2), Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Thomas Mann (Chapter 3), Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot (Chapter 4), and F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon (Chapter 5), Hutchinson’s study will appeal to students interested in the development of the modernist movement in the early twentieth century.
Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)
Jaffe’s enlightening commentary is representative of a burgeoning branch of modernist studies that seeks to fashion an adequate critical vocabulary with which to describe the complex relationship that exists between aesthetic experimentalism and popular culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, Jaffe traces the ways in which the highly paradoxical, and often surprising, relationship between modernism and celebrity culture developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. He begins by pointing out that a substantial majority of modernist writers and artists were deeply concerned with the intricate and often bewildering workings of a continually fluctuating cultural marketplace. This interest stemmed from the simple fact that, like most other artistic producers, the modernists wanted to carve out a niche for themselves and their literary products and aesthetic commodities in what was an increasingly crowded cultural sphere. Jaffe’s study accordingly describes how a number of prominent modernists and their assorted allies worked towards establishing and expanding a market for their literary works during the first half of the twentieth century. Issues of self-promotion and self-fashioning come into play at this point. For example, Jaffe details how prominent modernists such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis sought both to publicize the modernist literary project and to cement their personal literary reputations. In so doing, Jaffe usefully demonstrates how these and other seemingly oppositional modernist practitioners promoted their individual and collective literary and aesthetics achievements via a skilled manipulation of the very same market forces that they so forcefully – and often disingenuously – claimed to reject.
David James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012)
The essays grouped together in this volume insist that students and scholars need to recognize the continued relevance of literary modernism if they are to develop convincing accounts of the historical trajectory of the Anglo-American novel since 1945. When read together, the essays in this collection demonstrate the various ways in which contemporary and, for the main part, innovative writers working today continue to draw on the legacies of literary modernism. Divided into four main sections, The Legacies of Modernism considers questions of influence and adaptation, while also debating what the volume editor describes as the coexistence of tradition and invention in contemporary fiction. The first of these sections focuses on the ways in which the legacies of high modernist innovation impacted on literature produced in the years leading up to and the period following the Second World War. Following on from discussions of writers such as H. E. Bates (Chapter 2) and B. S. Johnson (Chapter 3), the second section considers post-war and postmodern contemporary authors including Michael Cunningham (Chapter 6) and Philip Roth (Chapter 7), who can be said to reappropriate – or rather ‘reactivate’ – particular modernist modes for their own ends. Featuring discussions of Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith (Chapter 9) and A. S. Byatt (Chapter 10), the third section describes how post-war writers engage with ethical questions pertaining to morality and personal accountability. Engaging with recent theoretical developments in the field of transnational and global studies, the concluding section of The Legacies of Modernism features discussions of contemporary authors including Cormac McCarthy (Chapter 11), Chris Abani (Chapter 12) and J. M. Coetzee (Chapter 13).
Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013)
Jones explores the complex, though surprisingly neglected, relationship between experimental literature and dance in this well-researched contribution to the field of modernist studies. In her introduction, Jones suggests that the scale of reciprocal interaction between these two particular modes of expression was simultaneously unique and striking – with dance drawing on modern literature and vice versa. Jones locates the origins of this productive aesthetic dialogue in the fin de siècle period of the nineteenth century. According to Jones, this era saw the emergence of enduringly mutual exchanges between influential dancers, choreographers, poets, philosophers and artists including Loïe Fuller, Stéphane Mallarmé, W. B. Yeats, Michio Ito, Arthur Symons and Isadora Duncan. Jones finds that this relationship continued to develop in the first half of the twentieth century. For Jones, the increasingly interwoven fields of dance and literature came also to exert a significant influence on a number of artistic movements associated with the rise of cultural modernism, such as symbolism, primitivism, expressionism, cubism and constructivism. Structured chronically, the interdisciplinary Literature, Modernism, and Dance will appeal to a wide range of critics and students, especially those interested in the aesthetic groupings listed above, as well as to scholars invested in the literary output of prominent Anglo-American authors such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Upton Sinclair, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, the work of composers such as Igor Stravinsky and the cultural dealings of dance impresarios like Sergei Diaghilev, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine.
Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007)
Katz’s absorbing study will appeal to advanced students interested in transatlantic cultural relations, cosmopolitanism, theories of translation, transnationalism and the overall development of American literary modernism. Katz proposes that we revisit the well-documented theme of expatriation. He argues that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism should be viewed as a dialectical process. This leads Katz to propose a series of related questions. To begin with, he asks to what extent the dialectal act of expatriation might allow for a distanced and critical re-encounter with one’s homeland? Further to this, Katz queries the impact that the condition of expatriatism has on one’s relationship to language, one’s ‘native’ tongue and the idea, indeed the very act, of translation. Pursuing these and other assorted questions, Katz’s first chapter considers the figure of the ‘cosmopolite’, as defined in Henry James’s ‘Occasional Paris’ and The Portrait of a Lady. James also features in the second chapter. Here, Katz explores issues of exoticism and multilingualism as found in The Ambassadors. Katz then explores Ezra Pound’s sense of American cultural identity, as well as his indebtedness to the James of The American Scene. Katz’s discussion of Pound carries over into the fourth chapter, which focuses on the poet’s translations of Chinese poetry and Japanese drama. Gertrude Stein’s dialectic of expatriate estrangement is the central focus of Katz’s fifth chapter, which also touches on the work of Wyndham Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. Moving beyond the conventionally accepted historical bounds of modernism, Katz’s final chapter and subsequent conclusion engage with the work of the post-war San Francisco Renaissance affiliate Jack Spicer and the New York School poet John Ashbery.
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998)
Performing a useful pedagogical function, this anthology brings together a wide range of modernist source materials and primary documents. To paraphrase the editors, this volume, which will primarily appeal to students and teachers, is driven by the need to present suitable interpretative strategies and critical tools with which to better understand some of the formal ambiguities and theoretical nuances of literary modernism, which is characterized here in terms of conflict and upheaval. Insisting that we remain cognisant of the fact that the broadly defined category of literary modernity was made up of a truly astonishing range of divergent, competing, and, more often than not, wholly contradictory theoretical formulations and critical practices, the editors of this anthology seek to present us, in their own words, a storehouse for continuing engagements with the modern. The anthology is structured thematically and comprises three main sections. The first section – ‘The Emergence of the Modern’ – opens with an extract from Karl Marx’s correspondence and presents a variety of cultural, social, scientific and political documents alongside contemporaneous aesthetic treatises. The second section – ‘The Avant-Garde’ – contains an impressive selection of modernist literary manifestos and aesthetic declarations. The concluding section – ‘Modernists on the Modern’ – details the making (and subsequent remoulding) of modernist traditions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994)
Comprising a series of textual and contextual readings, this historicist study focuses on the literary achievements of four major American modernist poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Remaining sceptical of the idealization of literary genius, Lentricchia proposes that we read the output of these canonical first-generation modernist poets in relation to a variety of historical, cultural and social factors. In particular, Lentricchia insists that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which the central poetic texts of his chosen modernist authors reflect and shape our knowledge of literary institutions and philosophical traditions, as well as our critical understanding of gender relations and systems of (capitalist) economic exchange. Lentricchia’s examination of poetic modernism opens with an account of the landmark philosophical enquiries being conducted in the hallowed halls of Harvard University at the start of the twentieth century. In this introductory chapter, Lentricchia suggests that the work of three particular Harvard-based philosophers – George Santayana, William James and Josiah Royce – profoundly influenced what would subsequently come to be understood as modernism in the United States. In the second, Lentricchia considers the early literary careers of Pound and Frost. In addition, this chapter also touches on the important role of the cultural phenomenon of ‘little magazines’ in the development of literary modernism. The remaining chapters are given over to readings of Frost (3), Stevens (4), Pound (5) and Eliot (6). In these, Lentricchia seeks to evoke a sense of what he describes as the historical ground of culturally oppositional modernist experimentation.
Michael H. Levenson, The Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1984)
This major work of literary scholarship traces the historical and ideological development of modernism during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, The Genealogy of Modernism is concerned with the evolution of the various doctrinal literary ideologies developed by Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis between 1908 and 1922. Levenson seeks not to present us with a comprehensive account of the emergence of Anglo-American modernism, but rather, in his own words, to redeem certain lines of development which have been obscured or neglected, and which, once traced, may help restore modernity to history. Situating the literary advances and pronouncements made by his select band of first-generation writers and literary theorists in relation to contemporaneous ideas espoused by British and Continental thinkers such as Allen Upward, Hilaire Belloc, Wilhelm Worringer, Pierre Lasserre and Max Stirner, Levenson demonstrates accordingly, and in great detail, the manner in which early Anglo-American modernist thought often tended towards polarization and duality. By carefully analysing the often self-contradictory literary statements of his selected band of literary experimentalists in this exceptionally rigorous fashion, Levenson is better able to chart the trajectory of early Anglo-American modernism, from its initial emergence as a disruptive, radical force to its eventual return to a form of (Eliotic) classicism.
Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010)
Lewis engages with well-known works of canonical high modernism in this impressive critical study, which will appeal to students and scholars interested in the transmutation of religious experience in early, ostensibly secular twentieth-century experimental literature. As the title of his study conveys, Lewis is primarily interested in one particular literary form: the novel. Lewis seeks to trace the development of the modern novel alongside what he perceives as a characteristically modernistic attempt to explain religious experience, and changing attitudes to religion, in primarily non-religious terms. He contends that major modernist novelists such as Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf sought in their prose to fashion oblique literary strategies that might permit them the opportunity to indirectly address issues pertaining to the spiritual and the sacred. So as to better illustrate his argument, Lewis reads the work of the aforementioned modernists alongside the theories of contemporaneous sociologists and psychologists including William James, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim. Discussing weighty topics such as the transience of epiphany and the fragility of human communion, Lewis finds that the formal experimentation found in iconic modernist works of fiction like Ulysses, The Golden Bowl, Remembrance of Things Past, To the Lighthouse and The Castle was motivated, at least in part, by a continued interest in religious experience.
Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993)
There are a number of things to be said about this bibliographical study of literary modernism, which is made of up a highly informative introduction and two main sections. Students interested in the historical trajectory of early Anglo-American literature will find much to admire in McGann’s introduction, which deals with modernism and the well-documented Renaissance of Printing. McGann’s argument is that twentieth-century poetry written in English should be read both as a direct function and as an expression of the important historical developments in printing that began in the later stages of the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the influential figure of William Morris looms large in this portion of Black Riders. McGann is especially interested in Morris’s epochal Kelmscott Press. He contends that fine-press printing imprints like Kelmscott supplied key modernists such as W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with a number of new institutional and bibliographical possibilities, as well as affording them a wide range of hitherto unimagined typographical innovations. McGann builds on these assertions in the next section of Black Riders, which deals at great length with the impact and legacy of Morris’s materialist aesthetics during the twentieth century. Divided into two subsections, the concluding section of McGann’s study engages with the neglected praxis and criticism of Laura (Riding) Jackson and debates the supposed truth-value and function of poetry.
Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), Bad Modernisms (Durham: Duke UP, 2006)
This vibrant collection of essays will appeal to students and scholars interested in critical developments in the field of the so-called ‘new modernist studies’. Among other things, the advocates of the new modernist studies – or ‘new modernisms’ – encourage us to challenge long-standing critical and methodological assumptions concerning the production of experimental literature, dance, architecture and aesthetics in the twentieth century. In essence, they broaden the definition of modernism. In their useful introduction, Mao and Walkowitz recognize an expanded modernism – whether in terms of global geography, cultural producers or periodization. They also embrace ideas of queerness and affect that have long been topics of psychoanalytic and theoretical discussion. In their own words, the new modernist studies has extended the designation ‘modernist’ beyond such familiar figures as Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Woolf. More critically inclusive and pluralistic, the new modernist studies has embraced – and analysed – the work of diverse writers and artists hitherto perceived as neglectful of, or even resistant to, the sorts of formal innovation traditionally associated with (predominantly Anglo-American) models of literary and aesthetic modernism. This critical shift is aptly reflected in Bad Modernisms. As well as reconsidering well-established figures, this volume engages with the work of lesser-known writers and visual artists such as Carlos Bulosan and Len Lye. Read together, the eleven essays featured in this volume shed significant critical light on modernism’s preoccupation with matters of transgression, nonsensicality, politics, affect, quietude, sexuality and elitism.
Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010)
This major work of criticism will be of great use to students and scholars of modernism, especially those interested in understanding the complex relationship between early cinema and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature. Marcus details how the very first writers who chose to engage with cinematic matters – be they critics, reviewers or theorists – strove to produce cultural and aesthetic categories that could be used to define and accommodate what was alternatively referred to as ‘the seventh art’ or ‘the tenth muse’. The Tenth Muse opens with a detailed historical account of cinema’s formative critical reception. Here, Marcus emphasizes that the earliest critical treatments of cinema discourse tended to read film in relation to other, far more established aesthetic categories such as drama, dance, opera, music and literature. At the same time, however, Marcus finds that many, if not all, of those who chose to write about film did so in an attempt to articulate new ideas about vision and identity in what was a rapidly changing, modernizing realm. Reading instances of early film criticism by figures such as Maxim Gorky and Sergei Eisenstein alongside contemporaneous literary texts by a diverse range of modern and modernist authors including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, John Rodker, D. H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the subsequent chapters of The Tenth Muse – which also features detailed discussion of key periodicals such as Close Up – chart the various ways in which early developments in cinema necessitated a thoroughgoing recalibration of the relations between the literature and aesthetics.
Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)
Students and scholars of poetry and film will find much of interest in Cinematic Modernism, which, among other things, features a series of readings of important texts such as William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In particular, McCabe’s study will appeal to those who are interested in the literary and visual application of psychoanalytical theory and experimental psychology, as well as to those whose critical expertise extends to the important, interwoven fields of racial, gender and queer studies. Cinematic Modernism considers the generative links that can be discerned between silent film and the poetic output of four major American modernist poets: Williams, Stein, Hilda Doolittle and Marianne Moore. In the five chapters of her study, McCabe pays special attention to the ways in which cinematic techniques such as montage can be said to approximate literary modernity’s wider, contemporaneous fascination with notions of bodily fragmentation which rose to prominence in the wake of the First World War. In essence, McCabe’s central contention is that particular formal and technical advances in experimental cinema afforded responsive modernist writers with a new critical vocabulary through which they might better explore – and subsequently rework – physical, metaphorical and figurative categories pertaining to the ‘modern’ body (such as the automaton, the femme fatale, the bisexual and the hysteric).
Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012)
Divided into two main sections, McIntire’s study focuses on the fictional, poetic, critical and autographical texts of two canonical first-generation Anglo-American modernists: Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. McIntire proffers a detailed critical treatment of a profound, perhaps even insoluble, paradox residing at the heart of much, if not all, modernist literary production: the imbrication of memory and desire. As is well known, the numerous literary modernists were particularly effusive in their praise for, and equally demonstrative in their embrace of, innovation. At the same time, however, a number of the movement’s leading lights were interested, sometimes obsessively so, in the way that present-day literature remained in constant dialogue with past works. Drawing on the ideas of diverse thinkers and theorists including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, McIntire considers the ways in which this interest in the mechanics of memory manifests itself in the work of Eliot and Woolf. Asserting that the act of remembrance is, in her own words, animated and preserved by eros, McIntire finds that in their writing the past functions as a never-fully-lost object that can always be revived in (and for) the present. Especially notable in its reassessment of Eliot, McIntire’s study will appeal to students and scholars engaged in the study of high modernism, as well as those interested in critical theory and psychoanalytically inflected interpretations of largely familiar literary texts.
Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (California: California UP, 1999)
Students and scholars interested in the development of second-generation or so-called late modernism will find much of use in Miller’s influential contribution to the critical field, which focuses on the historical trajectory of experimental Anglo-American literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Miller opens his wide-ranging study with a useful account of the state of modernist criticism. Following the lead of influential writer-critics such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the overwhelming majority of scholars have tended, in Miller’s estimation, to define the movement in relation to evaluative and figurative underpinnings of modernism itself, and with the famous Poundian imperative to ‘make it new’. Citing major studies of literary modernism such as Hugh Kenner’s enduringly influential account of The Pound Era (1971), Miller also suggests that most traditional scholarship has focused on the formative origins and early stages of cultural modernism. Miller argues that this critical tendency does modernism something of a disservice. He suggests that we turn the chronological telescope around, so to speak. His revisionary Late Modernism is divided into two main sections and a coda. The first section contextualizes the literature of the late 1920s and 1930s. The second examines the late modernist output of important figures such as Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett. Miller’s coda considers Mina Loy’s posthumously published novel Insel.
Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences and Reception, 1905–1920 (Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP, 2001)
Providing detailed instances of textual and contextual analysis, this valuable contribution to the critical field challenges long-standing assumptions regarding Anglo-American modernism’s supposed antipathy towards mass (commodity) culture. In it, Morrison seeks to document how literary modernity and mass culture existed in a sort of symbiotic relationship, developing in tandem, in the years between 1905 and 1920. The so-called ‘little magazine’ assumes a prominent position in Morrison’s account of The Public Face of Modernism. Situating his intervention in relation to Jürgen Habermas’s influential critical notion of the bourgeois public sphere, Morrison suggests that while many prominent modernists were more than happy to disparage the products of mass culture, their recourse to the literary support systems provided by periodical print culture productively complicates our understanding of the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and processes of commodification. Emphasizing the fact that the majority of ostensibly oppositional avant-garde periodicals draw on publicity and marketing strategies developed by the purveyors of commercialized media, Morrison explores the development and reception of a range of significant first-generation modernist little magazines including The Little Review, The Freewoman (later The Egoist), Poetry and Drama, The English Review and The Masses. This impressively researched study, which also includes discussions of canonical modernist writers such as James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham, will, among other things, appeal to students and scholars interested in interwoven issues of gender, race, class and the conflicted field of literary print culture in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009)
This significant contribution to the field is informed in equal measure by developments in literary criticism, critical theory and media history. Murphet proffers a staunch materialist reading of first- and second-generation Anglo-American modernism. He seeks to detail the manner in which assorted developments in areas including photography, cinematography, advertising and media print technology impacted directly on the work of a number of early Anglo-American modernist writers. Specifically, Murphet endeavours to demonstrate the ways in which the formally innovative literary and aesthetic outputs of modernists such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky were shaped by their imbrication in, and engagement with, what he characterizes as a rapidly changing media landscape or ecology. First positioning his study in relation to the wider fields of modernist literary criticism and critical theory, Murphet then situates Stein’s avant-gardism in relation to Alfred Stieglitz’s ground-breaking photographic journal Camera Work. Murphet then reads Pound’s early poetry alongside the cinema of D. W. Griffith, before turning his attention to Lewis’s celebrated and confrontational Vorticist periodical BLAST. Then, in the last chapter of his study, Murphet establishes links between Zukofsky’s poetry, the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Marx’s Capital. Encouraging us to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between modernism, media, technology and political economy, Murphet’s study will appeal to those students and scholars who are interested in the field of new modernist studies (as set forth in the work of assorted critics such as Armstrong, Danius and Wollaeger).
Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999)
Murphy’s study serves as a useful critical corrective and will appeal to students and scholars interested in the vexed relationship between modernism and the so-called historical avant-garde, as famously defined by the critic Peter Bürger. Murphy’s introduction contains a detailed discussion of Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). From the outset of his study, Murphy makes it clear that he has significant reservations about Bürger’s classical theoretical overview of twentieth-century avant-gardism, which focuses almost exclusively on aesthetic formations such as Dadaism and Surrealism. Murphy’s reservations have much to do with Bürger’s now rather limited understanding of the relationship between the historical avant-garde and modernism. In Murphy’s estimation, Bürger conspicuously fails to address the significant conceptual overlap between these two categories. In marked contrast, Murphy insists that we acknowledge the dialectical relationship underpinning modernism and the avant-garde. Drawing on the work of critical theorists such as Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and illustrating his revisionary account of avant-gardism with detailed close readings of German Expressionist literature and cinema, Murphy forces us to reconsider preconceived notions of the avant-garde and modernist literature and aesthetics. In turn, Murphy also seeks to reposition our understanding of the avant-garde in relation to contemporaneous conceptions of postmodernity.
Ira Nadel, Modernism’s Second Act: A Cultural Narrative (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Comprising three main sections and a coda, this study focuses on what is usually described as the late modernist period. Nadel makes this much clear in the preface, where he situates his study in relation to earlier treatments of modernism such as Samuel Hyne’s The Auden Generation (1976) and Miller’s influential Late Modernism (1999). In contrast to those accounts, which, broadly speaking, focus on Anglo-American literary and aesthetic avant-gardism, Nadel’s study concentrates on the trajectory of European modernism as it developed between 1930 and 1960. Set against a historical backdrop blighted by Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, and featuring analyses of figures such as Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Hermann Broch and Arthur Koestler, Nadel’s study scrutinizes some of the troubling conceptual alignments and complicities between European modernism and systems of political totalitarianism which emerged in this period. To what extent, Nadel asks, did Continental modernism’s continuation, indeed its very survival, depend on unsavoury political compromise with dominant forms of political authoritarianism? And what impact might this have had on the subsequent direction and shape of the post-war modernist project? These are some of the important questions that Nadel poses in his study, which demands that we revisit the past in order better to understand what the author describes as the cultural narrative of late modernism.
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Second Edition (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
This is an important and wide-ranging guide to a significant number of the literary and aesthetic movements which emerged between 1840 and 1940. It will appeal to modernist students and scholars alike. Nicholls proposes that we view modernism not as some sort of monolithic ideological formation, but rather as a series of discrete and often antithetical, yet sometimes interwoven, literary and aesthetic tendencies (hence the pluralized title of the volume). It is, according to Nicholls, emphatically not to be viewed as a comprehensive documentary survey of modernism. Nicholls makes this much clear in his preface, where he explains that his intention is to investigate the intersection of politics and style and to present a sort of conceptual map of competing modernist literary materials and movement. Nicholls’s opening chapter focuses on what we might describe as the prehistory of modernism proper. In this chapter, Nicholls discusses the literary achievements of influential nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Herman Melville. Baudelaire also features in the next chapter, which focuses on the emergence of the Symbolism movement. In the third, Nicholls turns his attention to the decadent and philosophically inspired models of writing that came to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. The remaining nine chapters cover the first three decades of the twentieth century. In these chapters, Nicholls analyses Italian and Russian Futurism, French Cubism, German Expressionism, Anglo-American modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Dada, Neo-Classicism, ‘high’ modernism and Surrealism.
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998)
The Dialect of Modernism is an irrefutably important contribution to the critical field. Serving as a useful and necessary corrective to the ethnically absolutist work of earlier critics like Houston A. Baker, North’s study explores the contentious issue of race in relation to mainstream American literary modernism. North’s central thesis is built around a troubling anomaly, which has much to do with language. North contends that ideas about race played a prominent, indeed central, role in the modernist preoccupation with the possibility of a specifically ‘American’ language. Specifically, North seeks to demonstrate the manner in which prominent American modernists including e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams looked favourably, and problematically, upon representations of Afro-American dialect in poetry. According to North, American modernists such as those listed above equated their position as literary outsiders with the status of historically oppressed and marginalized racial subjects. In his estimation, American modernists tended to believe, unthinkingly, that the artist or writer occupied a role equivalent to that of a racial outsider because they sought recourse to a language opposed to the norm. This tendency, North suggests, accounts for the prominent use of dialect in much American modernist literature. North is critical of such an appropriation, and his account of the writers listed above demonstrates some of the ways in which modernism acted out a disquieting form of linguistic racial masquerade.
Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009)
North’s interdisciplinary study concerns the relationship between modernity and the comic form in literature, film, animation and the visual arts. It will appeal to students of literature and film, and to scholars interested in theories of technological reproduction, mechanization and the intersection of avant-gardism, fine art, and forms of popular culture. In it, North documents the manner in which the historic changes wrought by processes of industrialization have irrevocably changed the structure and content of the comic mode. Building on philosophical reflection, psychoanalytic speculation and literary criticism suggesting that certain characteristics associated with modernist aesthetics – such as fragmentation, repetition, paradox and incongruity – define the comic form, North puts forward a series of detailed close readings that engage with a wide range of popular and highbrow artworks. These readings reveal some of the creative – and often unconventional – ways that processes of industrial and societal routinization have been explored. Divided into three main sections, North’s illuminating account of so-called ‘machine-age comedy’ describes how a wide range of modern and postmodern artists, film-makers, actors, writers, critical theorists and animators including Charlie Chaplin, Marcel Duchamp, Walt Disney, Henri Bergson, Dziga Vertov, Rube Goldberg, Wyndham Lewis, David Foster Wallace, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton sought in their work to document, and respond to, the pressures exerted upon the individual in the twentieth century.
Deborah Parsons, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge, 2006)
Complementing Beasley’s Theorists of Modernist Poetry (2007), Parsons’s informative introduction to the modernist novel is designed to appeal to students who are new to the field, as well as those who have an interest in the development of modernist narrative techniques such as so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, and those who have a specific interest in understanding the finer nuances of the versions of literary modernism as practised by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. Much like the aforementioned Theorists of Modernist Poetry, Parsons’s account of the modernist novel is ordered chronologically. This study is divided into four main chapters. The first of these chapters situates the rise of the modernist novel in its proper historical and cultural context. Having done so, Parsons explores how Joyce, Richardson and Woolf each strove to formulate adequate narrative alternatives to pre-existing forms of literary realism in their early work. Having established a useful literary-historical framework with which to appreciate the conceptual and structural complexities of the modernist novel, concerned as it often was with the representation of subjective consciousness, Parsons proceeds to detail the different ways in which each writer sought to negotiate and limitations and possibilities of evermore self-reflexive modern fiction. The third chapter considers the issue of gender and the literary representation of a specifically female consciousness in major works such as Woolf’s Orlando, Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Joyce’s Ulysses. As it happens, Orlando and Ulysses also feature at the start of the fourth and final chapter, which is given over to a helpful discussion of the treatment of temporality and the representation of history in the modernist novel.
Allison Pease, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012)
Engaging with ideas of affect, this critical study considers the representation of boredom among female literary characters in Britain modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century. Pease explores the manner in which changing conceptions and meanings of boredom inform (and reform) our understanding of modernist literature. In Pease’s estimation, the presence of boredom in literary modernism should be read in the context of a number of wider cultural and social forces at play in early twentieth-century Britain, especially those pertaining to feminism, the Suffragist movement and the historical struggle for equal rights. Pease’s central contention is that literary representations of boredom in modernist fiction form part of this broader feminist protest against the patriarchal strictures of early twentieth-century British society. Having first acknowledged the fact that this claim runs the risk of striking readers as counterintuitive, Pease proceeds to explore how the experiences of the indifferent and bored heroines which feature in the diverse works of British writers, such as May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Robert Hitchens, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Dorothy Richardson, can be said to reflect fluctuating cultural mores and changing social roles. In so doing, Peace finds that many of the male writers mentioned above effectively seek to shore up conservative societal structures, while their female counterparts refuse to acquiesce to the constrictive roles hitherto afforded them.
Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000)
Pease charts the development of distinctly modern conceptions of obscenity and pornography in this informative study, which will be of particular interest to students and researchers engaged in the analysis of canonical British and Irish literary modernism. According to Pease, the origins of modern pornographic discourse are to be found in the eighteenth century. She argues that the emergence of pornography coincided with the birth of modern aesthetics (as theorized by Immanuel Kant, Frances Hutcheson and the third Earl of Shaftesbury). Specifically, Pease suggests that pornography and aesthetics developed together, in a discernibly dialectical relationship. Pursuing the historical trajectory of this particular dialectic, Pease shows that many serious modern artists and writers were influenced by mass-cultural pornographic representations of sex, sexuality and the body. Moreover, as Pease convincingly demonstrates, these same artists and writers often sought to incorporate pornographic tropes and imagery into their highbrow creative projects. Over the course of five detailed chapters dealing with literary figures such as Charles Algernon Swinburne, D. H. Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley and James Joyce, Pease considers the complex and conflicted consequences of such processes of aesthetic incorporation and textual accommodation. She finds that the impact of Victorian and Edwardian pornography on forms of sexual representation in modernist art and literature is much more substantial than one might first assume.
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986)
Emphatically not a standard survey of Italian or Russian Futurism, this major work of comparative and interdisciplinary criticism analyses the historical development and creative afterlife of a number of simultaneous developments in early twentieth-century European avant-gardism. Focusing on the tumultuous creative period leading up to the outbreak of global conflict in 1914, Perloff, who conceives of the avant-garde as a cultural force capable of transcending national, political and aesthetic boundaries, considers the impact and lasting significance of the various verbal and visual experiments carried out by a diverse range of writers and artists working against the historical backdrop of what she, following Renato Poggiolo, refers to as the ‘futurist moment’. Perloff explores the myriad aesthetic, linguistic, generic and conceptual ‘ruptures’ in the work of influential avant-gardists such as Blaise Cendrars, F. T. Marinetti, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Tristan Tzara and Ezra Pound. Featuring richly detailed analysis of the poetry, prose, manifestos and artworks of these and other related avant-garde practitioners, Perloff’s study, which serves as a synchronic companion piece to her equally useful treatise The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), proposes that the creative ventures undertaken by these early twentieth-century figures anticipated subsequent developments in postmodern aesthetic and literary praxis.
Rachel Potter, Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006)
This productive study, which will appeal to students and scholars interested in the political character of experimental literature, focuses on the interrelations between first-generation Anglo-American modernist writing and conceptions of democracy. Focusing almost exclusively on avant-garde poetry, Potter analyses the modernist response to the rise of mass democracy in the first three decades of the twentieth century. She begins by noting that the emergence of literary modernism coincided with the birth of what we recognize as the modern democratic state. Potter then proceeds to examine the interesting tension at the heart of the relationship between modernism and democracy. In the first chapter, Potter considers the intellectual context of the years before the outbreak of war in 1914. Potter’s second chapter concerns the diverse range of modernist responses to the political environment of the 1910s and 1920s. In this chapter, Potter focuses on the shift in nature of the largely negative modernist response to the emergent forces of liberalism and democracy. The third, fourth and fifth chapters analyse in detail the literary output of three specific Anglo-American poets: Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot and Mina Loy. In these chapters, Potter re-evaluates critical conceptions of the relationship between literary modernism, sexual differences and democracy. In so doing, Potter deftly accounts for male and female modernist unease with contemporaneous democratic political mechanisms.
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: Duke UP, 1995)
Qian discusses a number of important issues in his helpful account of Orientalism and Anglo-American literary modernism. Drawing on – yet by no means dependent upon – the work of influential postcolonialist thinkers like Edward Said, Qian’s critical study focuses primarily on the poetic praxis of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Qian begins by reminding us of the fact that these two poets shared a mutual, deep-seated interest in Chinese culture. Qian then demonstrates that Pound and Williams, like many of their modernist contemporaries (Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Moore), cast their eyes to the Far East for literary inspiration. In Qian’s estimation, modernists such as Williams and Pound responded positively to a long-standing cultural heritage that privileged intensity, objectivity, visual clarity, harmony and precision. Yet despite this widely accepted observation, much more in the way of sustained critical enquiry needs to be undertaken if we are to understand the profound manner in which certain styles of Anglo-American modernism were directly linked to a steadily growing affinity for Chinese literary ideals and practices. This is precisely what Qian sets out to do in his richly detailed account of Orientalism and Modernism. Using Pound and Williams as primary examples, Qian finds that literary modernism simply cannot be understood without first understanding something of the culture of the Far East, especially China.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Florida: Florida UP, 1996)
This is a conceptually dense, yet rewarding reappraisal of canonical literary modernism. It will appeal to students and scholars who are interested in the workings of high modernism and in the historical legacy of literary modernity more generally. Rabaté discusses the achievements of high modernist progenitors such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé while making extended reference to critical discourses like Freudian psychoanalytic theory and post-structural philosophy. Rabaté posits that prominent high modernists such as Eliot and Pound were ‘haunted’ by a number of voices drawn from the long- and the not-so-distant past. In this sense, Rabaté’s argument mirrors the one expounded by the influential literary critic Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). In that volume, as is well known, Bloom famously posited that younger writers are hindered, or rather haunted, by their influential predecessors, with whom they maintain an ambiguous, often anxiety-ridden relationship. However, unlike Bloom, Rabaté does not view haunting in merely literary terms. Notions of historical haunting often supersede purely literary matters in Rabaté’s rereading of high modernism. This much is evident in Rabaté’s preface, which, among other things, considers Pound’s problematic understanding of and relationship with history. Building on the critical framework established in his preface, subsequent chapters of Rabaté’s treatise feature detailed analysis of the works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, André Breton, Roland Barthes, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Hermann Broch, Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson and Samuel Beckett.
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999)
This influential account of the various institutions and networks underpinning the development of literary modernism will appeal to students and scholars alike. Rainey is especially interested in issues pertaining to the production and transmission of literary modernism between 1912 and 1940. Drawing on a wealth of unearthed archival material, he proposes that we move away from more traditional modes of formal textual analysis in order to broach the topic of literary modernism’s complex and often contradictory relationship with public culture. Literary modernism, Rainey suggests, was marked by a withdrawal from the public sphere as theorized by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Rainey argues that this retreat marked a crucial turning point in the historical trajectory of canonical modernism. Dismissing the common cultural sphere as hopelessly compromised, a number of prominent modernists sought solace in a far more specialized, rarefied realm of deluxe editions, little magazines and literary patronage. In Rainey’s estimation, this willed retreat had a number of far-reaching and occasionally negative consequences, a number of which have to do with the critical reception and cultural status of modernism itself. Interested parties will find much to admire and question in Rainey’s accounts of F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound and the avant-garde (1), the marketing of James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses (2), the complex publication history of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (3), the development of Pound’s Cantos (4) and the oeuvre of Hilda Doolittle (5).
Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2005)
Rosner brings significant critical attention to bear on the complex relationship between modernist literature, design, gender and that which she describes as the ‘conceptual vocabulary’ of architecture in this interdisciplinary study, which will appeal to students and scholars interested in canonical Anglo-American modernism. In particular, Rosner seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which private and domestic spatial structures impacted on the developmental trajectory of British literary modernism. Drawing on a wide range of primary texts and related archival materials, Rosner discusses the work of a diverse collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, artists and interior designers including James McNeill Whistler, Robert Kerr, Radclyffe Hall, Robert Edis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Geoffrey Scott, E. M. Forster and Oscar Wilde, as well as Bloomsbury Group members such as Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. Over the course of five chapters – ‘Kitchen Table Modernism’, ‘Frames’, ‘Thresholds’, ‘Studies’ and ‘Interiors’ – Rosner describes how the various treatments of domestic space contained in the literary and aesthetic works produced by these and other assorted practitioners sought collectively to refine symbolic and material forms of (middle-class) private life. In demonstrating this, Rosner also productively complicates conventionally accepted critical notions of modernistic interiority.
Stephen Ross (ed.), Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (London: Routledge, 2008)
This useful collection of essays, which, among others things, includes an afterword by Fredric Jameson, will appeal to students interested in the aesthetic and methodological links that exist between the fields of modernist literature and critical theory. Productively complicating our understanding of ‘modernism’ as a literary (and aesthetic) conceptual category, this volume strives, in Ross’s editorial estimation, to achieve three main things. First and foremost, it seeks to respond to recent materialistic, historicist and archival-based developments in the critical field, particularly those concerning the phenomenon of the so-called new modernist studies. Secondly, it attempts to readdress certain misperceptions of modernism proposed by critical and cultural theorists during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, it seeks to contextualize and readdresses critical theory’s marginalization within contemporary modernist studies. Modernism and Theory is divided into three main parts. The first two – ‘Concrete Connections’ and ‘Abstract Affiliations’ – propose a series of dialogue of critical encounters. In these sections, scholars such as Hilary Thompson, Roger Rothman, Ben Highmore, Martin Jay, Pam Caughie and Scott McCracken debate the work and ideas of a range of important critical theorists including Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Theodor W. Adorno. The third section – ‘Forum’ – features contributions from Charles Altieri, Jane Goldman, Bonnie Kime Scott and Melba Cuddy-Keane, and attends to critical issues arising from broader theoretical, ethical, historical and aesthetic concerns.
Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010)
This indispensable critical survey, which is co-authored by the founder of the online Modernist Journals Project (Scholes) and the coordinator of the Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton University (Wulfman), will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars, particularly those interested in understanding the complex and historically embedded literary networks underpinning experimental print culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. In chapters such as ‘Modernism and the Rise of Modernism: A Review’ (1) and ‘How to Study a Modern Magazine’ (6), Scholes and Wulfman illustrate why we need to read periodicals and ‘little magazines’ as primary modernist texts. Indeed, they go as far to suggest that periodicals and magazines were so integral to the development of what we perceive as literary and aesthetic modernism that it is practically impossible to imagine the movement with them. In their estimation, the archetypal modernist periodical is a fundamentally dialogic and heteroglossic text, featuring a wide range of competing and complementary literary voices and personas. Entertaining the notion of the modernist magazine as a coherent literary text, Scholes and Wulfman demonstrate some of the significant ways in which a practical and thoroughgoing assessment of avant-garde periodical culture (and the various archives in which such materials are often stored) can serve to strengthen our general critical understanding of modernism. It should be read alongside Churchill and McKible’s Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (2007) and all three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, which is edited by Peter Booker, Andrew Thacker, Sascha Bru and Christian Wiekop.
Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990)
Arranged alphabetically, this is an indispensable research tool for all students, especially those interested in understanding how issues of gender and sexuality impacted on the historical development of Anglo-American literary modernism. Challenging traditional – and predominantly masculine – critical assumptions concerning the (sexual) politics of literary production, this revisionary volume brings together a wide range of experimental and non-experimental authors whose work touches on the crisis in gender identification underlying much, if not all, modernist writing. Emphasizing the various ways in which men and women participate – actively and unconsciously – in gendered social and cultural systems, Scott’s edited anthology features selections from, and includes useful scholarly introductions to, the work of the following modernist writers: Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, Nancy Cunard, Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, D. H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Rose Macaulay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Mew, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Antonia White, Anna Wickham and Virginia Woolf. It should be read alongside Scott’s later edited collection, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 2007).
Paul Sheehan, Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013)
This panoramic critical study focuses on the ingrained, and always troubling, relationship between violence and experimental aesthetics. In particular, Sheehan seeks to document the development of the widespread modernist fascination, and infatuation, with forms of violence and bellicose expression. Sheehan’s account of modernism and violence opens in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Sheehan notes that this was a period in literary history when those French and English writers associated with the Aesthetic movement began to celebrate transgressive sexualities and depict forms of stylized criminality. He explores the development of aestheticism on French and English shores in the first section of his study. In the opening chapter, Sheehan finds that writers such as Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, A. C. Swinburne and Walter Pater laid the groundwork for modernism’s later interest in the aesthetics of violence. In the second chapter, Sheehan considers the question of sexual deviance as depicted in literary aestheticism. Here, Sheehan suggests that aestheticism afforded writers a means with which to channel transgressive agencies that, in his words, pit sensual delight and carnal pleasure against mimetic propriety. Then, in the third chapter, Sheehan describes how such processes of aesthetic admixture gave rise to subsequent forms of decadent writing. Sheehan develops this point in his fourth chapter, which concerns Oscar Wilde’s proto-decadent The Picture of Dorian Gray. Inaugurating the second portion of Sheehan’s study, the fifth chapter carries us across the historical threshold and into the early twentieth century. In this section, Sheehan analyses the ways in which modernism responded to the legacy of aestheticism. Here, attention is paid to a number of suitably transgressive (and aesthetically unruly) modernists including Ezra Pound (Chapter 5), Wyndham Lewis (Chapter 6), James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot (Chapter 7), T. E. Hulme, David Jones (Chapter 8) and Joseph Conrad (Chapter 9).
Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2008)
Sheehan sheds critical light on modernism’s critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism in this valuable, and at times provocative, volume. At the outset, Sheehan highlights the fact that the decades since the Second World War have been notable for engendering a reappraisal of what it means to be human. In Sheehan’s estimation, post-war theoretical discourse has profoundly altered our understanding of what was previously assumed to be a discrete, implicitly understood idea and conceptual category. Commenting upon this shift, Sheehan suggests that post-war theoretical advances effectively transformed the category of the human into a site of contention, where, to paraphrase the author, notions of hybridity, contradiction and dispersion tend now to circulate freely. Sheehan reminds us that the roots of this sceptical post-war shift have much to do with the cataclysmic events of the Shoah. As is well known, in the wake of the European Holocaust, hitherto stable humanistic principles and categories associated with the Enlightenment began to break apart. Sheehan acknowledges this in the introduction to his Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. However, having done so, Sheehan then sets out to show that the origins of the post-1945 reassessment of humanism and the human as a given category are to be found much earlier, in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Identifying discernible elements of antihumanistic thinking in the work of major modernist writers including Joseph Conrad (Chapter 1), D. H. Lawrence (Chapter 2), Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3) and Samuel Beckett (Chapter 4), Sheehan’s study productively complicates our critical understanding of the literature produced in the last 150 years.
Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004)
In this important contribution to the field of modernist studies, which will appeal to those interested in the development of canonical Anglo-American modernism, Sherry argues for a historically informed reading of the experimental literature produced in the aftermath of the World War of 1914–18. Drawing on the influential formulations of literary critics such as I. A. Richards, and responding to the important critical work undertaken by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and by Jay Winter in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1998), Sherry revisits one of the central locations of what we have now come to label as high modernism: London. Sherry reminds us that the London of the early twentieth century was a charged and intensely political environment. In his informative prologue, Sherry notes that a crisis internal to the governing party of Britain – the English Liberals – defined this highly emotive and divisive moment in local political time. He points out that the Liberal Party had come to support a war that they should – by convention and principle – ought to have opposed. Moreover, as the historical register shows, such support often came cloaked in an obfuscatory language of logic, political rationality and rhetorical abstraction. Sherry’s study illustrates some of the ways in which key modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound developed literary strategies that might effectively responded to, lampooned and combated what they collectively diagnosed as the spurious, disingenuous and highly destructive illogic underlying such purportedly rational political abstractions.
Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of Everyday Life (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 2007)
Juan A. Suárez attempts to refashion literary modernism in this study, which will appeal to scholars interested in queer studies, cinema, popular culture and theories of everyday life. Suárez disdains outmoded accounts of modernism that treat popular culture as something to be feared, or which deem it unworthy of critical enquiry. Self-consciously positioning his intervention on the periphery, Suárez proffers a reassessment of a wide array of canonical and overlooked American modernists who figured their praxis in relation to the pressures of the everyday. Divided into three sections, Suárez’s study charts the trajectory of a pop-orientated American modernism from the start of the twentieth century until the advent of Pop Art. The key to understanding the structure of Pop Modernism resides in the subtitle. In Suárez’s estimation, ‘noise’ designates nonsignifying matter in verbal, visual and aural guises. The presence of ungovernable noise in modernist art is, for Suárez, an indicator of radical alterity, of otherness. The first section of the study comprises studies of modernists – Vachel Lindsay, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, John Dos Passos – whose relationship with noise generated by popular culture and everyday life was characterized by profound anxiety. In the second, Suárez analyses the ambivalent treatment of nonsignifying matter in the work of T. S. Eliot and Joseph Cornell. In the last, Suárez considers a number of dissident modernists that embraced the murmur of otherness: Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt.
Juliette Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
This study analyses the phenomenon of multilingualism in canonical modernist literature. Situating her work in relation to earlier critics such as George Steiner, and drawing on the linguistically diverse theories of early modernist writers such as the French poet-critic Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin and the influential Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Taylor-Batty explores that which she describes as an discernible ‘multilingual turn’ in twentieth-century Anglo-American experimental literature. In the opening chapter, having first reminded us of the fact that the modernist period was characterized by a profound ambivalence when it came to matters of linguistic plurality, Taylor-Batty scrutinizes the various ways in which seminal avant-garde texts such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Mallarmé’s ‘Crise de vers’ seek to examine and represent notions of linguistic crisis. Moving forward chronologically, Taylor-Batty then examines some of the polarized critical responses to James Joyce’s multilingual masterpiece, Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). In the second chapter, she turns her attention to the fiction of Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Here, Taylor-Batty considers the relationship between linguistic diversity and characteristically modern conditions of travel, exile and migration. The third section focuses on the work of Jean Rhys. In particular, Taylor-Batty discusses the finer nuances of Rhys’s creolizing modernist fictional style, which is figured here in terms of hierarchical destabilization, and her work as a translator of French. In the fourth chapter, Taylor-Batty examines the anti-mimetic multilingualism of Joyce’s seminal, heterogeneous text of modernist literature, Ulysses. In the concluding chapter, Taylor-Batty details how the mid-career fiction of Joyce’s compatriot Samuel Beckett simultaneously undermines and represents what she terms the chaos of language.
David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007)
Trotter’s account of the interaction between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary modernism and early cinema is an impressive and important contribution to the critical field. Students and scholars alike will find much to admire in Trotter’s comprehensive study, which seeks to historicize the relationship between cinema and modernism. Eschewing what he perceives as overly simplistic comparative accounts of certain literary and filmic techniques (such as montage), Trotter considers modernism’s mediation of, and convergence with, a range of cinematic forms. Drawing on the ideas of the influential French film critic and theorist André Bazin, Trotter finds that advances in cinema afforded Anglo-American literary modernists the opportunity to explore notions of automatism and representational neutrality. Following an initial discussion of the stereoscope, a nineteenth-century invention of significant interest for many prominent modernists, Trotter turns his attention to the way in which the dialectical tension between cinema’s privileged engagement with the real (‘immediacy’) and its simultaneous tendency towards abstraction (‘hypermediacy’) impacted on the historical trajectory of literary modernity. Featuring compelling, chapter-length readings of writers and film-makers such as D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Trotter’s essential study finds that cinema and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century shared an interest in related – and quintessentially modern – ideas stemming from issues of reality, representation and impersonality.
David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001)
In this study, which focuses on the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, Trotter explores the manner in which experimental writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century intersected with a number of related issues pertaining to questions of identity and insanity, subject formation, the fear of contingency (or randomness), gender anxiety, the spread of liberal democracy in the years leading up to the First World War, anti-mimetic aesthetic perspective, and the psychological impact and consequences of the professionalization of English society. In Trotter’s estimation, the last of these – the issue of professionalization – is especially important, particularly when read in relation to contemporaneous psychoanalytic and psychiatric conceptions of paranoia. Trotter begins by reminding us that paranoia was, in the nineteenth century, one of the names given to a type of psychosis in which the patient typically developed an internally consistent, yet delusional system of beliefs based on the certainty that he or she was a person of great note. He then establishes a link between the condition of paranoia and certain anxieties exhibited by the members of the emergent professional class. Trotter suggests that there was more than a hint of madness in the average professional’s understanding and pursuit of symbolic capital (represented here in terms of specialization, mastery and expertise). He reasons that the sense of disappointment arising from one’s failure to secure adequate amounts of such symbolic capital could precipitate a slide into paranoia. Having thus established a working definition of professional paranoia, Trotter proceeds to detail the manner in which the work of modernists such as those mentioned above, all of whom wrote about madness and masculinity, sought to respond to the pressures of a highly pressurized, increasingly professionalized and potentially psychosis-inducing literary marketplace.
Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989)
In this posthumously published collection of polemical essays and fragmentary critical pieces, the important cultural materialist Raymond Williams seeks to move beyond what he regards as the unduly constrictive bounds of purely formal literary analysis. Instead, Williams proposes that we analyse modernism as a multifaceted cultural, social and historical phenomenon. We get a clear sense of Williams’s intentions in the opening essay, ‘When Was Modernism?’ In this relatively brief, yet hugely influential instance of historicist criticism, Williams traces the origins of what we have come to understand as cultural modernism back into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Having done so, Williams reminds us that the latter half of the nineteenth century was the occasion for the greatest series of developments ever witnessed in the apparatus of cultural production. Emphasizing the fact that such changes in the media of cultural production played a crucial role in the development of vital modernist movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Imagism and Surrealism, Williams then considers some of the reasons behind cultural modernism’s subsequent integration into that which he describes as the new international capitalism. Ambitious in its scope, The Politics of Modernism is essential for any student interested in issues pertaining to modernism, post-modernism, avant-gardism and politics.
Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006)
This is an important historicist and intermedial reading of literary and aesthetic modernism. As the title of his study suggests, Wollaeger’s interest concerns narrative modes of modernism – be they novelistic or cinematic – which were developed in Britain between 1900 and 1945. Supplementing a number of highly nuanced close readings with reference to contemporary media theory and freshly unearthed archival material, Wollaeger’s impressively argued study reappraises the relationship between artistic experimentalism and modern propaganda. He suggests that both modernism and propaganda provided means with which to cope with increasingly dizzying flows of information which were threatening to outstrip the modern subject’s mental processing capacity during the period in question. Wollaeger’s central contention is that these two seemingly antithetical concepts were, in fact, mutually illuminating responses to the condition (and problem) of modernity. Having outlined his critical position, Wollaeger proceeds to consider a number of specific modernist responses to the emergence of propaganda in the first half of the twentieth century. In five detailed sections dealing with the literary and aesthetic praxis of Joseph Conrad and Alfred Hitchcock (Chapter 1), Leonard and Virginia Woolf (Chapter 2), Ford Madox Ford (Chapter 3), James Joyce (Chapter 4) and Orson Welles (Chapter 5), he reveals how the modernist response to the rise of propaganda could be antagonistic, markedly ambivalent or, at times, worryingly complicit.