The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism

Abstract

AbstractThis essay gives a brief overview of the different ways in which literary criticism has understood modernism’s response to the crisis of liberalism that occurred in the early 20th century. Beginning with a historical explanation of the crisis and an account of its stakes for modernist art, the essay proceeds to discuss a central debate among critics that had taken place in the 1930s and that was particularly concerned about the ideological values of modernism during such a time of political instability. The essay shows how this early debate continues to frame and inform current criticism on the ‘politics of modernism’, which similarly seeks to analyze modernism’s relationship to the values of liberalism that had been so dominant for most of the 19th century. Focusing subsequently on contemporary criticism, the essay looks at two major thematic concerns that have shaped modernist studies from the 1980s onwards: first, the issue of how modernist aesthetics subverts forms of liberal subjectivity; and second, the issue of the extremist politics – invariably fascism – that modernist authors have frequently embraced. Both these concerns reflect a sense that modernism is fundamentally antagonistic to the 19th‐century heritage of liberalism, imagining alternative models of consciousness from the liberal subject and repudiating the moderation of liberal politics. However, this essay concludes with more recent criticism which seeks to rethink modernism’s relationship to liberalism in more positive ways, focusing in particular on studies that examine modernism’s response to the transformation of liberalism from its classical Victorian form to the modern form of liberal democracy.