Modernism, Sex, and Gender by Celia Marshik Allison Pease

Abstract

MLR, .,   such as Peter Brooker and Andrew acker’s three-volume e Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines or the two Oxford Handbooks of modernist literature are also absent. No select bibliography can be exhaustive—and in a field which has expanded as rapidly as modernist studies, one sympathizes with Howard because the bibliographer’s task is exceedingly difficult—but these omissions do seem odd. e former exclusion points less to a weakness of Howard’s bibliography and perhaps more to a weakness of the collection as a whole and, indeed, to a weakness of studies of ‘British’ modernism, which remain dominated by considerations of Anglo- and Irish contexts, as well as ‘expatriate’ writers such as Eliot, Mansfield, and Pound. On a related note, the Euro-American emphasis of the Companion’s timeline reifies some of the more problematic limits of the field. Despite these slight limitations, the assembled essays and resources comprise an impressive array of frequently challenging, illuminating scholarship. e volume is perhaps best suited to advanced scholars, but many newcomers to modernist studies will find the assembled resources, overviews, and bibliographies an immense aid. Modernist studies is an increasingly large, diverse field, and while all modernists will find something to quibble with in this volume (as this reviewer has), they will find far more that informs and expands their understanding. is Companion does not settle for simply being a guide to existing knowledge, but instead blazes exciting new trails for the rest of us to follow. B U D H Modernism, Sex, and Gender. By C M and A P. (New Modernisms) New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. . x+  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. As part of the New Modernisms Series published by Bloomsbury, Modernism, Sex, and Gender is a clear and comprehensive guidebook to the scholarly debates concerning the relationships between gender, sexuality, and modernist literature, which began with the inception of modernism and continue today. is short volume is split into four sections, covering modernism’s relationship to representations of femininity and masculinity in the first two chapters, modernist representations of sexuality in the third chapter, and finally a chapter on modernism, politics, and law. Celia Marshik and Allison Pease cover a wide range of conceptual models of modernism, from the influential early accounts of literary tradition expounded by T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis to the revisionary explorations of scholars who ‘placed gender and sexuality at the center of modernist literary study’, such as Bonnie Kime Scott and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (p. ). However, rather than privileging one conceptual paradigm over another, they invite readers to imagine modernist literature and criticism ‘as a palimpsest, a manuscript that has layers of writing, one on top of the other’ (p. ). In the first chapter, for example, the authors show how second-wave feminist scholars from the s onwards engaged  Reviews themselves in a ‘scraping off of top layers of early modernist criticism to find, just below, a body of work by women writers and early feminist thought’ (p. ). Later chapters reveal how subsequent scholars focused on other layers in the palimpsest , such as modernist representations of masculinity, sexuality, and obscenity. e benefit of this approach to the development of modernist criticism is that it encourages readers to engage with and appreciate the changing understandings of modernist literature and culture, and to see how older approaches and concerns may still have relevance and purchase today. e metaphor of the palimpsest is employed throughout the four chapters, acting as a frequent reminder to readers that both modernist texts and scholarly models of modernism are multiple, diverse, and overlapping, and that further intellectual work of uncovering is still important today. In addition to splitting the debates about sex, gender, and sexuality into discreet chapters, the book also usefully features case-study sections within each chapter, which illustrate the conceptual points being discussed. e case study of May Sinclair in the first chapter, for example, highlights the ‘feminist recovery work’ that began in the s (p. ). e authors show how, despite May’s interest and active participation in feminist struggles, her practice and defence of modernist experimentation, and her popularity during her lifetime, she was out...