Modernism: An Anthology by Lawrence RaineyThe Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire by John Marx

Abstract

MLR, I03.1, 2oo8 203 Would a comparable comment have survived inBetween the Acts had Woolf lived to revise this text too, or had times changed? Marshik assumes thatOrlando was vul nerable to prosecution because of its representation of prostitution, butWoolf was probably skating farnearer the edge with her gender-shifting hero(ine), whose very creation may owe something to the threatof censorship. (The device effectivelyallows Woolf to depict sex between two characters both born asmen without risking legal action.) Marshik's detailed discussion ofWoolf's excisions to the textof The Voyage Out isvery illuminating, as isher point thatLeonard and Virginia Woolf became far more vulnerable to the threatof legal action as publishers thanVirginia was as author. Discussing Jean Rhys's Voyage in theDark, Marshik argues, 'The first landlady that the reader encounters refuses to rent toAnna and a friend because she doesn't "let toprofessionals"; thisphrase casts the twowomen as prostitutes and is inaccurate asAnna is a virgin at thispoint in thenarrative' (p. I79). Well, the innuendo may be there,but 'professionals' was and remains a standard non-pejorative term for those in the theatrical profession. There is useful treatment of the censorship of plays in the chapter on Shaw, but somemention of theemergence of filmcensorship might have strengthened thebook's case. The T. P.O'Connor who became President of theBritish Board of Film Censors in I9I6 was theowner of T P O'Connor's Weekly, which serialized Joseph Conrad's Nostromo in I904. The same man thus had a considerable say inwhat was allowed in both literature and film inhis lifetime. This isnone the less an engagingly written study thatbrings togetheruseful docu mentary material and illuminating comment on individual modernist texts. NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY JEREMY HAWTHORN Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. by LAWRENCERAINEY. Maldon and Oxford: Black well. 2005. xxxii+II8I PP. JI9.99. ISBN 978-O-63I-20449-7. The Modernist Novel and theDecline ofEmpire. By JOHNMARX. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Vii+226 pp. k45. ISBN 978 0-52I-85617-5. A comparison of these two books shows the extent towhich the scope and key texts of 'modernism' remain debatable. JohnMarx's critical book rangeswidely over let ters, travelwriting, and ethnography, but itskey fictional texts are novels by Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence, writers absent fromLawrence Rainey's anthology.Marx also examines fictionby James Joyce, Mary Webb, JeanRhys, EvelynWaugh, and George Orwell; of thesewriters only Joyce and Rhys appear in Modernism: An Anthology. Of course anthologies veer away from novels forobvious reasons; furthermoreMarx's book is about British fiction,whereas Rainey's anthology has a farbroader remit, covering Anglo-American literature,plus a series of 'Interludes' from theEuropean avant-garde. But the lack of overlap also reflects the difference between Marx's more historicist conception ofmodernism as a diverse and chronologically extended set of responses to,and interventions in, socio-political modernity, and Rainey's more aes theticconception ofmodernism which links ittoexperimentation and theavant-garde. Rainey addresses theproblem posed by novels in 'ANote on theSelection, Texts, and Order of Presentation', arguing plausibly that excerpted chapters are unsatis factory.His solution is to print thewhole of Between theActs, two episodes from Ulysses, and one chapter of Finnegans Wake, but to represent other novelists, such as Ford, Lewis, Richardson, West, Barnes, Rhys, and Bowen, through theirshort stories and essays.Modernism: An Anthology essentially represents avant-garde modernism between the Wars, though itdoes find space forYeats. The anthology startswith fu 204 Reviews turism, so theemphasis ison thenewness and experimentalism ofmodernism, not on any continuities or nineteenth-century anticipations. The introduction takes the same line, stressing the 'wild and irredeemable opacity' (p. xxiv) ofmodernist literatureand making itskey characteristic hostility to 'received conventions of fiction' (p. xxv). For the form ofmodernism which it addresses, Rainey's anthology offersboth breadth and depth, containing, as he tellsus, 'selectedwork of 23Anglo-American modernists, I2women and i imen' (p. xxx), plus selections from futurism,Dada, and surrealism (in the formofmanifestos) and theFrankfurt School. These 'Continental Interludes' are an imaginative way of tackling the problem, endemic to courses on modernism in anglophone universities, of managing the complex relation of Anglo-American modernism to itscontinental European contemporaries. The Frankfurt School is the...