Rethinking Modernism (review)

Abstract

354 Reviews helpful in alerting the reader to the difficultterrainthe various essayswill have to traverse.But it can also lead to a sense of perpetualdeferral:questionsare raisedin ways that seem unanswerable,and categoriesare generatedthat can never reallybe consistentlyemployed. Diversity is a strikingquality of the volume. The editors have divided contributions up into three categories: 'negotiating the literary marketplace';'outside the metropolis',and 'the shiftingterrainof public life', but these are only very general indicators of the shared concerns of different essays. 'Outside the metropolis' for example, contains essayson a nineteenth-centuryIndian literarytranslator,and an AfricanAmericannovelistof the i89os, as well as an account of the life of a Chinese woman, born in I911, who experienced the process of modernization through migrationin compellinglydescribedways. In disciplinarytermsthe volume includes literarycriticismand culturalhistoryas well as sociologicallyand anthropologically informed research. The challenges of such interdisciplinaritycan never really be tackledin the volume as a whole, however,because each essaysetsits own disciplinary and methodologicalparameters.Similarly,the implicitprivilegingof the literary as a mode of historicalrepresentationin the volume as a whole is never adequately theorized. Over the volume, however, we encounter a fascinating range of perspectives, which are provocativeand intriguingin the questionsthey raise.Most authorsshow a preferencefor the non-canonical writerand the non-canonical text. There is also a clear commitment to breakingdown barriersbetween differentforms of writing, and in particularto undoing the dichotomybetween high modernismand the range of imaginativemodes of writingpractisedand probed in the yearsbetween 1875and I945. Much of the impact of these essayslies in their capacityto uncoverthe suggestive anecdote, to develop what might elsewhere be an historical footnote, and to re-animatea text that had been 'forgotten'by the criticaland historicalparadigms that shape our encounters with this historicalmoment. Thus, for example, Claire Buck reads H.D. alongside Radclyffe Hall, reminding us of Hall's poetic writing and her imaginative energies before TheWellofLoneliness. And she illuminatesthis criticalre-examinationwith a memorable anecdote of an audience of 3000 singing Hall's 'The Blind Ploughman' in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, in 1918, led by a war-blinded Captain. This collection of essays will certainly contribute to current reflections on the nature of 'modernity', as well as to attempts to think the historical nature of 'modernism'.Its energetic inclusiveness,and its refusalto settle for any 'centre' for such thinking is stimulating,though it can also lead to an unsettling sense that its effort to historicize risksbeing undermined by its sometimes surprisingrefusal to contextualize. The margin, the anecdote, and the footnote, are all tellinglymined, but there is a sense that they have lost their connection to the still powerfully dominant and coherent text of 'modernity'with which we, and they, all have to grapple. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITYOF LONDON MORAG SHIACH Rethinking Modernism.Ed. by MARIANNE THORMAHLEN. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. xiv + 286 pp. f47.50. ISBN:I-4039-II80-0. Is it the business of criticism to accuse major literary figures of being mad? Two essays in this collection take the dangerous route of suggesting that we can 354 Reviews helpful in alerting the reader to the difficultterrainthe various essayswill have to traverse.But it can also lead to a sense of perpetualdeferral:questionsare raisedin ways that seem unanswerable,and categoriesare generatedthat can never reallybe consistentlyemployed. Diversity is a strikingquality of the volume. The editors have divided contributions up into three categories: 'negotiating the literary marketplace';'outside the metropolis',and 'the shiftingterrainof public life', but these are only very general indicators of the shared concerns of different essays. 'Outside the metropolis' for example, contains essayson a nineteenth-centuryIndian literarytranslator,and an AfricanAmericannovelistof the i89os, as well as an account of the life of a Chinese woman, born in I911, who experienced the process of modernization through migrationin compellinglydescribedways. In disciplinarytermsthe volume includes literarycriticismand culturalhistoryas well as sociologicallyand anthropologically informed research. The challenges of such interdisciplinaritycan never really be tackledin the volume as a whole, however,because each essaysetsits own disciplinary and methodologicalparameters.Similarly,the implicitprivilegingof the literary as a mode of historicalrepresentationin the volume as a whole is never adequately theorized. Over the volume, however, we encounter a fascinating range of perspectives, which are provocativeand intriguingin the questionsthey raise.Most authorsshow a preferencefor the non-canonical writerand the non-canonical text. There is also a...