Modernist Antimodernist?

Abstract

273 BOOKS IN REVIEW letters and novels. Butcher’s readers were thus invited to discover Jules Verne’s rich career and to share his intimate thoughts throughout a long and productive life. With this expanded audiobook version of Verne’s biography, Butcher fulfills another goal: to show what the Vernian literary oeuvre might have been without Hetzel’s interference, without the radical changes he made to Verne’s novels, and without the publisher’s many “deleterious effects on the author’s creative imagination” (224). An entire new section of the revised biography is dedicated to the questions raised by the manuscripts (which are now available online on the site of the Nantes médiathèque) and suggests that, in several cases, the final published version of Verne’s novels was not the best nor the most authentic and that, for some such as The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864; trans. 1874) or Around the World in Eighty Days (1872; trans. 1873), future publishers should opt for an earlier manuscript version, not the one “censored” by Hetzel. One may or may not agree with some of Butcher’s judgments, interpretations, or hypotheses, but his compelling passion for Jules Verne cannot leave the reader or listener indifferent. His knowledge, style, and enthusiasm invite us to share his captivating exploration of one of the most famous—if often misunderstood—French authors. And I must also add that this audiobook is particularly well-served by Simon Vance’s perfect baritone reading performance.—Marie-Hélène Huet, Princeton University Modernist Antimodernist? Sarah Cole. Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 2020. xi+374 pp. $35 hc. Was H.G. Wells a modernist? He was a contemporary of the great modernists, an erstwhile friend of several of them, and included modernists among his sexual partners. But modernists had a low opinion of Wells’s fiction, almost as low as his of theirs. Virginia Woolf classed him as a materialist (i.e., the opposite of a modern like herself) while E.M. Forster believed that Wells tricked his readers into imagining his fictional characters had depths they did not possess. For his part, Wells notoriously compared Henry James to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea, mocked Joseph Conrad for wanting to turn everything into a symbol, and accused James Joyce of turning his back on the common reader. In the aftermath of the catastrophe of 1914-1918, modernists contrasted past order with present chaos, scrutinized the unique subjectivity of the individual, and produced difficult art for a highly educated elite. Meanwhile Wells, more interested in saving the endangered human species than in the lucubrations of any of its members, increasingly addressed a wide public with writings whose function was, by his own admission, as ephemeral as journalism. As a cosmopolitan agnostic socialist, Wells’s post-1918 ideological position could hardly be further from, say, those of W.B. Yeats the Irish nationalist, T.S. Eliot the High Anglican conservative, and Ezra Pound the fascist. No, Wells was not a modernist. “It is the ambition of this book to rewrite the literary history of the twentieth century in England” (1), notes Sarah Cole in the introduction to her 274 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) always interesting but flawed study of Wells. Specializing in modernism, she has discovered in Wells’s oeuvre a contribution to literature and culture that is at least the equal of the great modernists. She acknowledges the vast differences in temperament, aim, and method between Wells and the modernists, but with the enthusiasm of the newly converted she wishes to elevate him to the same level of academic prestige that they have enjoyed for seventy years or more. She is fully aware of Wells’s relative academic neglect (except, of course, among sf scholars) and does her best to account for this as well as to start to remedy it. In short, she intends to revise the canon of twentieth-century English literature to allow a prominent place for Wells, and she will do this partly by questioning why modernist reading protocols dominate literary studies. “What is wrong with telling, as distinct from showing?” (19...