THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM

SERIES EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today's critical
terminology. Each book:
MODERNISM
• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term
• offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic
• relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation
Second edition
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth of
examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in lit·
erary studies. Peter Childs
Also available in this series:
lntertextuality by Graham Allen
The Author by Andrew Bennett
Irony by Claire Colebrook
Autobiography by Linda Anderson
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Adaptation and Appropriation
by Julie Sanders Magic(al) Realism
by Maggie Ann Bowers
Class by Gary Day
Metaphor by David Punter
Colonialism IPostcolonialism
second edition Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
by Ania Loomba by Philip Hobsbaum
Comedy by Andrew Stott Mimesis by Matthew Potolsky
Crime Fiction by John Scaggs Myth by Laurence Coupe
CultureiMetaculture Narrative by Paul Cobley
by Francis Mulhern Parody by Simon Dentith
Difference by Mark Currie Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Discourse by Sara Mills Performativity by James Loxley
Drama I Theatre I Performance Rhetoric by Jennifer Richards
by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis The Postmodern by Simon Malpas
Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron Realism by Pam Morris
Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard Romance by Barbara Fuchs
Genders Romanticism by Aidan Day
by David Glover and Cora Kaplan
Science Fiction by Adam Roberts
Genre by John Frow
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Gothic by Fred Botting
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
Historicism by Paul Hamilton

~~ ~~~~~=~R:up
Subjectivity by Donald E. Hall
Humanism by Tony Davies
The Sublime by Philip Shaw
Ideology by David Hawkes
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope LONDON AND NEW YORK
lnterdisciplinarity by Joe Moran
 CoNTENTS

First edition published 2000 SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE vii

Second edition published 2008 AcKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Introduction 1
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
Answering the Question: What is Modernism?
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 (8th Floor) Plunging In 5
Words, Words, Words: Modern, Modernism, Modernity 12
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor a[ Francis Group, an informa business
Periods, Genres, Models 19
© 2000, 2008 Peter Childs
International Anglophone Modernisms 26
Typeset in Garamond and Scala Sans by
Taylor & Francis Books Interpreting and Changing 37
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Marx (1818-83) 38
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Darwin (1809-82) 46
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
Freud (1856-1939) 56
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
Nietzsche (1844-1900) 62
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in Saussure (1957-1913) 69
writing from the publishers. Einstein (1879-1955) 72
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Genres, Art and Film
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
2 79
Novel 8o
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Short Story 91
Childs, Peter, 1962-
Poetry 99
Modernism f Peter Childs. - 2nd ed.
p. em. - (The new critical idiom) Drama 108
Includes bibliographical references and index. Art Movements 114
1. Modernism (Art) 2. Arts, Modern-19th century. 3· Arts, Film 127
Modern-2oth century. I. Title.
NX454·5.M63C48 2007 3 Texts, Contexts, lntertexts 133
700' ·411 2-dc22 2007018342
'The Struggle of Becoming': Freedom and Gender 134
ISBN13 978-o-415-41544·6 (hbk) 'It Seems to Me I Am Trying to Tell You a
ISBN13 978-0-415·41546-o (pbk) Dream': Epistemology and Narration 148
ISBN13 978-0-203-93378·7 (ebk)
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For generous advice given to me during the writing and rewrit-

ing of this book, I would like to thank Liz Brown, Polly Dodson,
John Drakakis and the many readers, reviewers and repon-writers
who provided helpful comments on the first edition.

INTRODUCTION

ANSWERING THE QUESTION: WHAT IS

MODERNISM?
Romance
In medieval literature, a verse narrative [recounts] the marvelous
adventures of a chivalric hero .... In modern literature, i.e., from the
latter part of the 18th through the 19th centuries, a romance is a
work of prose fiction in which the scenes and incidents are more or
less removed from common life and are surrounded by a halo of
mystery, an atmosphere of strangeness and adventure.
(William Rose Benet, The Reader's Encyclopedia)

Realism
A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or 'reflect-
ing' faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes con-
fusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of
description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more general attitude that
rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of
romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life.
(Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)
2 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 3

Modernism the dominant mode of the novel from its inception in Britain in
the eighteenth century with the rise of bourgeois capitalism to the
Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of
present day. According to many critics, realism is characterised
what Harold Rosenburg calls 'the tradition of the new.' It is experi-
by its attempt to offer up a mirror to the world, thus disavowing
mental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation
its own culturally conditioned processes and ideological stylistic
as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist's
assumptions. Modelled on prose forms such as historiography
freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with
and journalism, realist writing thus often presents itself as trans-
notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster ... We can dispute about
parently representative of the author's society and so features
when it starts (French symbolism; decadence; the break-up of nat-
characters, language, and a spatial-temporal setting familiar to its
uralism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes 'paleo-
contemporary readers. Most importantly for a debate of literary
modernism' and 'nee-modernism' and hence a degree of continuity
history, it is apparent that the hegemony of realism as the domi-
through to post-war art). We can regard it as a timebound concept
nant form of the novel was challenged by writers throughout the
(say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne,
twentieth century as alternative ways of representing reality and
Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers
the world were presented by modernists and then postmodernists.
(James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, joyce, Musil,
Realism itself was once a new, innovative form of writing, with
Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in
authors such as Daniel Defoe (1660-1 7 31) and Samuel Richard-
drama; Mallarme, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in
son (1690-1761) providing a different template for fiction from
poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking tech-
the previously dominant mode of prose writing, the Romance,
nical innovation, emphasize spatial or 'fugal' as opposed to chron-
which was parodied in one of the very first novels, Cervantes's Don
ological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain
Quixote (1605-15), and survives in Gothic and fantasy fiction. To
'dehumanization of art.'
the present day, realism remains the primary favoured style for
(Malcolm Bradbury, in Childs and Fowler 2005)
most novelists, but many avant-garde, innovative, and radical
writers have sought to undermine its dominance. Very broadly
Postmodernism
speaking, the vast majority of attempts to offer alternative
The new avant-garde literature (neomodernist or postmodernist) modes of representation from the middle of the nineteenth cen-
partly carried modernism further, partly reacted against it - for tury to the middle of the twentieth century have at one time or
example against its ideology and its historical orientation. What it another been termed modernist, and this applies to literature,
consistently pretended to be (and sometimes actually was) was new. music, painting, film and architecture (and to some works before
Determinedly self-destructive, it attempted to cut off its branch of and after this period). In poetry, modernism is associated with
the past, by proposing entirely new methods, a fresh 'syllabus' or moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of
canon of authors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Proust) and a new verse, to introduce vers /ibre, symbolism, and other new forms of
register of allusions. writing. In prose, it is associated with attempts to render human
(A History of English Literature, Alastair Fowler) subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent con-
sciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual's
If the idea that identity exists through difference is taken as a relation to society through interior monologue, stream of con-
starting point, then modernism can begin to be understood in sciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution
terms of possible distinctions from other literary forms. Mod- and other terms that will be encountered later in the book.
ernism is, for example, frequently distinguished from realism, Modernist writers therefore struggled, in Ezra Pound's brief
4 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 5
phrase, to 'make it new', to modify if not overturn ex1stmg then Ezra Pound's Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925. Rainey pitches
modes and subjects of representation, partly by pushing them modernism between the age of journalism and the coming of the
towards the abstract or the introspective, and to express the universities, seeing it as situated between a passing elite bour-
new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed, geois culture and the coming middle-brow world of media aes-
complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, thetics. Most importantly, it was ambiguously caught between
machinery and speed, mass markets and communication, of its inclinations away from and towards contemporaneous common
internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist and cultural practices in the wider civil society. In his conception of
the jlaneur. modernism, Rainey sees a greater importance for all kinds of
The dominant post-war conception of modernism has accen- cultural institutions than has previously been acknowledged: the
tuated these aspects to its key texts; however, emphases in recent idea of the deluxe edition and Ulysses, the rise of the little review
studies have moved towards alternative conceptualisations. Instead and The Waste Land (both forms of publication indebted to mas-
of the progressive model whereby literary modes eclipse or sive patronage), politics for Pound and 'a coterie politics' for
supersede older ones in a teleological line of development, like H.D. Thus, the significance of popular and even demotic culture
Virginia Woolfs gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, there is to 'high modernism' can be reacknowledged, from such seeming
acknowledgement of, first, styles existing alongside one another extremes as Joyce's interest in pornography to Eliot's 1923 essay
in the text, and second, of modernism's involvement in the on the extremely successful comedian and singer Marie Lloyd.
broader social structures of the period and with the mass move- / But, the wider influence of jazz, art, music, romance, machinery
ments and popular cultures of modernity. Here, the literary and the sheer frenzy of economic, cultural and social change,
complexion starts to change once the dominant view of a break from market forces to machines, is increasingly felt in the myriad
from previous, or indeed contemporary, forms and cultural prac- depictions of modernism.
tices is questioned, and marginalised voices from the fin de siecle
and the Empire, as well as voices of those excluded for reasons of
PLUNGING IN
gender or sexuality, are placed closer to the centre of modernism's
narrative. Also, a critic such as Lawrence Rainey explores the role With regard to literature, modernism is most readily understood
played by various individuals, such as patrons and collectors, and through the work of the avant-garde authors who wrote in the
institutions, such as the academy and the law courts, in initially decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. It is a
promoting the avant-garde to a wider reading public, beyond contentious term and should not be discussed without a sense of
which point literary modernism, whose engagement with popu- the literary, historical and political debates that have accom-
lar culture is evident in the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot panied its usage. The problems of definition are such that many
for example, would require the influence of the mass media as critics avoid providing one, even though they freely use the term.
well as both 'critical approbation and some degree of commercial David Ayers avoids the issue of definition by stating a starkly
viability to ratify its status as a significant idiom' (Rainey 1998: contrasting problem with regard to Ulysses: Joyce's novel is such
170). Starting with the little discussed pre-war visits to England a touchstone for uses of the term in literature that it has become
of the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Rainey's almost impossible to read it in any terms other than 'modernist',
sociologically oriented Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and which means reference will be made to its symbolism, its variety
Public Culture reconstructs formative moments in the making of of textual forms, and range of methods (see Ayers 2004: 66), and
modernism, focusing on the decade after 1912 up to the pub- no matter how much contemporary critics try to analyse the
lication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922, and novel's content, in terms of gender, nationalism, colonialism and
6 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 7
so on, rather than its form, content and form remain inseparable, Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk,
and so do, it seems, Ulysses and modernism. slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of
One of the first aspects of much modernist writing to strike 5 north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-
contemporary readers was the way in which such novels, stories, sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make
plays and poems immerse them in an unfamiliar world with other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he
little of the orienting preambles and descriptions provided by would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and
most nineteenth-century realist writers, such as Jane Austen, putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.
Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In other words, modernist He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed
writing 'plunges' the reader into a confusing and difficult mental not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own,
landscape which cannot be immediately understood but which it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off from
must be moved through and mapped in order to understand its the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin again for the billionth time.
limits and meanings (see Mahaffey 2007). In this Introduction, I Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the
will briefly sketch features of this landscape so that some of the 15 rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the
contours of modernism can be visible, but I recommend that the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local move-
reader returns to the Introduction having read the entire book, at ments were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the thongs. The
which time its broad brushstrokes will be better appreciated breath was not perceptible. The eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull's,
with the knowledge accrued from the later chapters. stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice moulding,
But before plunging into the terms and the definitions employed shrinking and fading. Somewhere a cuckoo-clock, having struck
by critics, I would like to plunge into a fictional narrative and between twenty and thirty, became the echo of a street-cry, which
discuss what is going on at the start of a modernist text which is now entering the mew gave Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo! directly.
in some ways exemplary but which would actually be sidelined These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained
by some definitions of modernism and by some overviews of him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly
modernist writers. Samuel Beckett's Murphy was published in 25 hoped. He wondered dimly what was breaking up his sunlight, what
1938, supposedly eight years after modernism started to wane wares were being cried. Dimly, very dimly. He sat in his chair in this
and be replaced by the neo-realism of writers such as Graham way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it
Greene, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Rosamond Lehmann appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it was not
and Evelyn Waugh. It is also by a writer who is often cited as until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind, as
the first postmodernist. However, the elements of religious scep- description in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure,
ticism, deep introspection, technical and formal experimentation, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.
cerebral game-playing, linguistic innovation, self-referentiality, (Beckett 1973: lines 1-33)
misanthropic despair overlaid with humour, philosophical spec-
ulation, loss of faith and cultural exhaustion all exemplifY the When beginning to interpret or decode these lines, we should
preoccupations of modernism. I shall quote the opening page of remember that modernist prose is enormously compressed, which
the novel, to give a strong flavour of the writing, and then offer a means that it ought to be read with the attention normally
commentary on it. reserved for poetry or philosophy. Brief lines allude to complex
ideas; comic set pieces enact philosophical theories; and there is
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy little attempt to relate the extreme situations and mental condi-
sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. tions in the novel to anything the reader might consider to be
8 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 9
representing 'normality'. This opening contains many of the fea- with several theories such as Descartes's belief that there is a
tures associated with modernist stylistics and preoccupations: a connection through the pineal gland and also the theological
solipsistic mental landscape, an unreliable narrator, psychological explanation, related to the issue of free will, that whenever the
and linguistic repetition, an obsession with language, a ques- individual wills their body to move, God causes the action to be
t(ioning) towards 'reality', uncertainty in a Godless universe, the performed. Such concerns, though flavoured by Beckett's peculiar
constraints of convention against the drives of passion and black preoccupations, exemplify modernism's fascination with the way
humour. the mind processes or projects a reality which surrounds the
A Dubliner in London, Murphy is a quite typical Beckett individual but which is often alienating and oppressing.
(anti-)hero. This is at least in the sense that he follows Beckett's The novel is also deeply concerned with religious explanations
idea of the human condition and so has a supple mind shackled of the universe and with questions of what it means to be human
to an imperfect, cumbersome body: the one a sanctuary to which with or without God. The opening line of this, Beckett's first
he wishes to retreat, the other a chaos which he wishes to con- novel, reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun (cf.
trol. This is one reason he is literally tied up at the opening of Ecclesiastes 1:9) and also hints at the belief that there is no free
the novel, as he attempts to negate the body and escape into his will in the universe. The sun has no alternative but to shine, and
mind by achieving some kind of nirvana through meditative in the second sentence we find Murphy sitting out of the sun 'as
contemplation. For our purposes, this immediately signals a though he were free', suggesting that he, like the sun, is actually
greater interest, typical of modernism, in the workings of the determined by his nature, driven by biological and psychological
mind than of the body. As discussed below, it is also a starting impulses of which he knows very little. This comment on restric-
point for consideration of how the mind works and, in particular, tion has a more literal embodied relevance in the next paragraph
how a mind in extremity works. when we learn that Murphy is tied to a chair, a predicament that
As would be common in a modernist narrative, the novel has is quite possibly a parody of the philosopher Wittgenstein who
been read as a search to climb inside the mind, away from the famously used to sit on a deckchair beneath a fan in his otherwise
body's needs and wants: to be free from desire. On the superficial bare room at Cambridge. The third sentence tells us as much
level, Murphy is a young man with a gull's eyes and a yellow about Beckett's narrator as it does about Murphy. This is because
complexion who suffers from violent heart attacks. His girlfriend the narrator, who at most later times will appear omniscient, is
Celia is a prostitute who is described via a perfunctory list of undecided about the length of time Murphy has been at West
measurements and passport details at the start of Chapter 2 and , Brompton: 'what might have been six months' (1. 3). It is one of
yet is the most sympathetically portrayed of all the characters -- the first hints that the narrator, who we have already realised is
Beckett calls them puppets - in his novels. It is Murphy's pre- playful, is not going to follow the usual conventions of story-
dicament that he is to be sought by each of the other characters telling, but will mock them instead. So he has little time for the
in the novel while he only wishes to escape from himself. normal realist descriptions of homes and is content to describe
Murphy wants to flee the physical world and seek refuge in the Murphy's condemned mews as 'a medium-sized cage of north-
indivisible, unextended, pain-free mental world, which is one western aspect.' The final sentence of the paragraph introduces
reason why he later takes a job in a mental asylum. Beckett's another of Beckett's favourite techniques: repetition. Lines 8 and
interest is in the Cartesian problem of dualism: how do the mind 9 repeat the round of eating, drinking, sleeping and dressing
and the body interact? They coexist together like the yolk and mentioned in lines 3 and 4. In this case, the echoing underlines
albumen sealed within an egg, but no one knows how they are the point that, though Murphy will soon have to move, there
connected. In an attempt to represent this dilemma, Beckett toys will indeed be nothing new for the sun to shine on. This is a
10 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 11

modernist preoccupation with repeuuve, cyclical rather than Murphy sits, sweats and watches the sunlight's play on the
chronological, teleological time which will be discussed later. ceiling. A cuckoo clock strikes the improbable time of between
The second paragraph immediately matches Murphy's undres- twenty and thirty and echoes the barterer's shout Quid pro quo!
sed body with the undressed teak of his rocking chair, the perfect (one thing in exchange for another). This business cry, signalling
vehicle in which to be constantly moving and yet going nowhere. the difference between the commercial preoccupations of the
The difference between the two is that Murphy's body is not guar- capitalist world against which the modernists pitted artistic
anteed not to 'crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night' (I. 11 ). freedom, is a precursor of one of the novel's major speculative
The reader is then once more reminded of nature's unremitting philosophical themes: that the amount of suffering in the world
cycles at the level of the cosmos and of animal sexuality, with is always constant, though it may change in form. The argument
'the poor old sun [son} in the virgin again for the billionth time' is that life is a closed system, that 'For every symptom that is
(l. 13 ). The extra significance of this is that Beckett substitutes eased, another is made worse ... Humanity is a well with two
astrology for God as a system of faith for Murphy. The following buckets ... one going down to be filled, the other coming up to
sentences concerning Murphy's bondage are a typical Beckett set be emptied' (Beckett 1973: 36-7). The supposed comfort of this
piece in that they contain the detailed but flawed over-explanation theory is that though things cannot overall get better they
of a situation containing permutations. Murphy is tied up with cannot get worse either. Things 'will always be the same as they
seven scarves: two on his shins, one round his thighs, two at his always were' (Beckett 1973: 36); or, to return us to the start of
torso, and one round his wrists. The inadequate or delinquent the book, there is 'nothing new' under the sun, there is only
rather than unreliable narrator leaves the reader with two ques- redistribution: quid pro quo. Beckett suggests that this also
tions: where is the seventh scarf, and how did Murphy on his operates on the divine level by reference to the fact that in one of
own achieve this Houdini-like position, in which his hands are the gospels it is stated that one of the thieves on the cross beside
tied and he is restricted to 'the most local movements' (ll. 16-17)? Jesus was saved and the other one damned, the moral being that
Beckett's points here are that, first, mathematics, the purest sci- the individual should neither despair nor presume. This suggests
ence, does not adequately represent the world; for example, try to a balanced if inexplicable and unfair universe, to which Beckett
work out, to as many decimal places as your mind can tolerate, often wants to draw our attention in a phrase which occurs in
the exact number of weeks in a year by dividing the number of several of his works, as in Murphy: 'Remember also one thief was
days in a year [365} by the number of days in a week [7}); and, saved' (1973: 121; from St Augustine).
second, that Murphy's mind is always ensnared in and unable to The third paragraph tells us that Murphy does not like such
escape from his body, and hence is always 'tied up'. Bringing distractions breaking into his consciousness because they detract
these two points together provides a clue to why Murphy later from his pleasure, which is to 'set him free in his mind', which
calls another character 'Thou surd' (Beckett 1973: 47). A surd is again raises the question of free will. Murphy believes that the
an irrational number, such as the square root of minus one. The freedom of the mind depends upon the appeasement of the body,
mathematical way of recording these imagined figures which a fact that the narrator, again breaking the frame of the narrative,
exist in theory but not in practice is with the symbol i, which, tells us we will have to wait until section six to have described.
curiously, is also when capitalised the pronoun used to represent Such metafictional comments are anticipatory of many post-
the individual, who is always an irrational and absurd figure in modernist techniques. The last sentence tells us that 'pleasure
Beckett's imagined fiction, where the perverse, neurotic, was not the word' for the pleasure in Murphy's mind and this is a
thought-tormented characters of modernism find their fullest repeated trope in the book (cf. 'hardly the word' (Beckett 1973:
expression. 21), 'not quite the right word' (1973: 39), and 'pleasant was not
 12 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 13
the word' (1973: 66)). This is partly a questioning of language's currency and range of meanings than 'modernism'. In the late
ability to represent the world adequately and is also a questioning fifth century, for example, the Latin modernus referred to the Chris-
of boundaries: can pleasure be pushed so far that it becomes some- tian present in opposition to the Roman past; modern English is
thing else, such as pain, which leaves aside the other question as distinguished from Middle English; and the modern period in
to whether pleasure is felt by the body rather than the mind? literature is considered to be from the sixteenth century on,
The chapter ends by returning to its beginning: the narrator although it is sometimes used to describe twentieth-century writ-
contemplates 'most things under the moon' while Murphy rests ing. More generally, 'modern' has been frequently used to refer to
back in his rocking chair: 'Soon his body would be quiet, soon he the avant-garde, though since the Second World War this sense
would be free.' Murphy is eventually freed from his desires, has been embraced by the term 'contemporary' while 'modern'
when, while he is seated in his rocking chair, a gas leak is ignited has shifted from meaning 'now' to 'just now' (Williams 1989). It
and Murphy at last achieves the oblivion he has sought in a final is this sense of the avant-garde, radical, progressive or even
'big bang'. It is an ending that is inevitable in a world in which, revolutionary side to the modern that was the catalyst for the
reminding us of the novel's fatalistic opening sentence, 'all coinage 'modernism', and it is to this meaning that Rimbaud
things hobble/limp together for the only possible' (Beckett 197 3: appealed when insisting 'Il faut etre absolument moderne' (One
127 and 131). Murphy is a very funny but deeply pessimistic must be modern absolutely).
novel, and it is entirely appropriate that Murphy's will asks for It is now, however, perhaps both impossible and undesirable to
his burnt remains to be flushed down the toilet in the Abbey speak of a single 'modernism,' and the practice of referring to
Theatre, Dublin, 'where their happiest hours have been spent'. It 'modernisms' dates back to the 1960s. Some critics argue that
is appropriate to Beckett's sense of life's irony and futility that the term is simply an imposition, applied after the fact to a small
they will actually be scattered across the floor of a London pub in group of unrelated authors and a series of genuine movements
a brawl. such as imagism and vorticism. Undoubtedly, there has devel-
Having plunged into an in-some-ways-representative moder- oped in literary studies a recognisable but not immutable canon
nist piece of writing, and thus offered a microcosmic bottom-up of modernist authors and texts, just as there has more recently
perspective of a segment of modernism through one literary arisen an .ever-growing body of critics since the 1980s fore-
example, I want now to move to the other end of the spectrum of grounding alternative and other writers: female authors in parti-
approaches and offer a top-down macrocosmic overview of the cular, but also, for example, the writers of the Harlem
terms and critical stances associated with modernism. It is only Renaissance and, more recently, novelists and poets from outside
through the negotiation of these two understandings of mod- Euro-America, whose work contests the ground that has been
ernism, as specific textual examples and as a number of gross staked by the assertions, claims and practices of the familiar
cultural movements, that the word itself can become meaningful. names and their critics. It is consequently invidious to have to
say what modernism was, precisely because any history or
definition insinuates many implicit exclusions. Modernism has
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS: MODERN,
predominantly been represented in white, male, heterosexist, Euro-
MODERNISM, MODERNITY
American middle-class terms, and any of the recent challenges to
Modernism is variously argued to be a period, style, genre or each of these aspects either reorients the term itself and dilutes the
combination of the above; but it is first of all a word, one that elitism of a pantheon of modernist writers, or introduces another
exists alongside cognate words. Its stem, 'modern-', is a term one of a plurality of modernisms. This reveals that there is suf-
that, from the latin modo, means 'current', and so has a far wider ficient currency and investment in the term itself that writers

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14 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 15
and critics seek to contest its parameters and scope, its applica- concerned, the expression emerged most notably - but failed to
tion(s) and meaning(s). Even the assertion that modernism was gain currency - with Robert Graves's and Laura Riding's 1927
internationalist (in the sense of European and transatlantic) raises study A Survey of Modernist Poetry. However, it is also true that a
a question mark over the extent to which critics can speak of a conviction that there was a 'modern movement' came into broad
'British' literary modernism, just as in fine art the assumed pre- circulation before the Second World War, and the spirit of Ezra
cedence of continental painters has been questioned in the light Pound's 'make it new' was consciously embraced by many and
of re-examinations of neglected and previously unfashionable disparate writers such that, while it is commonplace to maintain
British artists from the turn of the century. While the works of that 'modernism'· is a partial version of literary history con-
Picasso and Matisse have had more impact, there is an alternative structed and mythologised long after the fact, it is nonetheless
history of modern(ist) art to be deduced from paintings such as true that many writers and especially their harshest critics
those of the Camden Town Group and the London Group. recognised in the early decades of the twentieth century multiple
Despite those critics who argue that it is a specious label, the trends toward radical, innovative, challenging and experimental
term 'modernism' appears to be here to stay; though most of the writing that would remain even if the retrospective label itself
points that would have been asserted of it in the 1970s are chal- were removed.
lengeable. For example, that it is fundamentally Euro-American is It was only in the 1960s that the term 'modernist' became
open to immediate querying, when it can as persuasively be widely used as a description of a generation of writers and of a
argued that modernism marked the regeneration of a tired literary phase that was both identifiable and in some sense over.
Western artistic tradition by other cultures: African, African- Its literary roots have been said to be in the work of the French
American, Asian, Chinese, and, more generally, diasporic. Simi- poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire and the novelist Gustave
larly, the view that modernist writers simply rejected or broke Flaubert, in the Romantics, or in the 1890s fin-de-siecle writers,
away from Victorian literature, for example, has been more and while its culmination or apogee arguably occurred before the
more challenged as critics point out connections with rather than First World War, by which point radical experimentation had
departures from the writings of such figures as Robert Browning, impacted on all the arts, or in 1922, the annus mirabilis of James
Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne and even Rudyard Kipling. Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield's
'Modernist' is a comparatively old word which in the late six- The Garden Party, May Sinclair's The Life and Death of Harriett
teenth century named a modern person and came by the eight- Frean, and Virginia Woolfsjacob's Room (see North 1999). Post-
eenth century to denote a follower of modern ways and also a war dates for modernism's high-point make sense in terms of
supporter of modern over ancient literature. By contrast, 'mod- British and also US literature but, perhaps, not in terms of any
ernism' was first used in the early eighteenth century simply to other in Europe. Its end is variously defined, in terms of time, as
denote trends characteristic of modern times, while in the nine- 1930, 1940, 1950, or even yet to happen, and, in terms of lit-
teenth century its meaning encompassed a sympathy with erary reaction, as neo-realism or postmodernism. As an interna-
modern opinions, styles or expressions. In the later part of the tional art term, it covers the many avant-garde styles and
nineteenth century, 'modernism' referred to progressive trends in movements that proliferated under the names of expressionism,
the Catholic Church. In literature, it surfaced in Thomas Hardy's imagism, surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, vorticism, formalism
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), to denote what he called a general and, in writing if not painting, impressionism. Modernist writ-
and unwelcomed creeping industrial 'ache of Modernism'. The ing is most particularly noted for its experimentation, its com-
term also gained wider and earlier use in relation to other arts, plexity, its formalism and for its attempt to create a 'tradition of
but in literary criticism, the context with which this book is the new'. Its historical and social background includes the
16 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 17
emergence of the New Woman, the peak and downturn of the upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like
British Empire, unprecedented technological change, the rise of to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
the Labour Party, the appearance of factory-line mass production, B11t a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
war in Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Modernism has, therefore, with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The
almost universally been considered a literature of not just change storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
but crisis. turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm
' 'Modernity' is a· word first used by Baudelaire in the mid- is what we call progress.
nineteenth century. In his essay 'The Painter of Modern Life', (Benjamin 1973: 259-60)
Baudelaire describes modernity as the fashionable, fleeting and
contingent in art, in opposition to the eternal and immutable. In This image complements the emerging view of history, as detri-
relation to modernism, modernity is considered to describe a way tus and shored ruins, in the world of Charles Baudelaire and then
of living and of experiencing life which has arisen with the Franz Kafka, of Eliot and Joyce. Modernity is both the culmina-
changes wrought by industrialisation, urbanisation and secular- tion of the past and the harbinger of the future, pinpointing a
isation; its characteristics are disintegration and reformation, moment of potential breakdown in socio-cultural relations and
· fragmentation and rapid change, ephemerality and insecurity. It aesthetic representation. It is not surprising that artistic reactions
involves certain ·new understandings of time and space: speed, . and responses bifurcated into the largely celebratory (Marinetti,
mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural Le Corbusier, Mayakovsky) and, particularly in the British Isles,
revolution. This societal shift was differently theorised at the turn the primarily condemnatory or apocalyptic and despairing (T. S.
of the century by, for example, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, D. H. Lawrence).
Ferdinand Tonnies. Durkheim focused on the increased division More generally, 'modernity' is an imprecise and contested term.
of labour inherent in modern production, Weber on the disen- 'It has been said to encompass Western history from the Renais-
chantment of a rationalised world, and Tonnies on the gradual sance, or the epoch that began with the seventeenth-century sci-
move from the interrelations of the close-knit rural community, entific revolutions of Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Leibniz and
the Gemeinschaft, to the heterodoxy and anonymity of urban Descartes; it has also been argued to have been inaugurated by
society, which he termed the Gesel/schaft (see the Introduction to the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment and its drive to a
Bradbury and McFarlane 1976). The foundations of sociology lie mastery of nature and society through reason, since which ration-
in these attempts to come to terms with changes that were also ality has been considered the key to justice, morality, control,
being processed by the modernists. organisation, understanding and happiness. One influential critic,
The most notable writers on modernity in the first half of the Marshall Berman (1983), divides modernity into three phases,
twentieth century were the Frankfurt School of Critical Theor- 1500-1800 (when people struggled to find a vocabulary to
ists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter describe modern life), the 1800s (from the American and French
Benjamin. Benjamin's ninth thesis in his 'Theses on the Philo- Revolutions through the great upheavals across Europe in the
sophy of History' provides a famous image of 'the nightmare of nineteenth century), and the 1900s (in which almost the whole
history' as the modernists saw it. He describes an 'Angel of world became involved in the process of modernisation). Alter-
History': natively, modernity has been said to be an attitude rather than an
epoch (Foucault 1986). Above all, it is characterised by the
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of attempt to place humanity and, in particular, human reason at
events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage the centre of everything from religion and nature to finance and
18 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 19
science. Modernity describes the rise of capitalism, of social study required by mass systems. On the other, they celebrated the new
and state regulation, of belief in progress and productivity lead- conditions of production, circulation and consumption engen-
ing to mass systems of industry, institutionalisation, administra- dered by technological change (Harvey 1989: 23). There were
tion and surveillance. Defended by its supporters as a universal paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reac-
endeavour that leads to the gradual emancipation of all human tionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of
beings, its adversarial critics contend that reason and knowledge the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair.
are merely used to enslave and control people in alternative ways
to premodern society, which employed coercion, religion and
PERIODS, GENRES, MODELS
'natural' authority to achieve social domination. One of moder-
nity's staunchest defenders, the critic Jiirgen Habermas, argues Modernism is regularly viewed as either a time-bound or a
that 'The project of modernity, formulated in the eighteenth genre-bound art form. When time-bound, it is often primarily
century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, consisted in located in the years 1890-1930, with a wider acknowledgement
their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and that it develops from the mid-nineteenth century and begins to
law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic ... for the lose its influence in the mid-twentieth century. This is certainly
rational organization of everyday life' (Habermas 1981: 9). For the period in which most modernist literature was written, but,
Habermas, modernity is an incomplete project because it con- conversely, most literature written in the period was not moder-
tinues to attempt its own self-redefinition through many instan- nist. When genre-bound, modernism is associated with innova-
ces and utterances of identification and projection. But, the tion and novelty and has been stretched to include such British
counter-argument runs, while the dominance of reason and sci- and Irish figures as John Donne, William Blake, Samuel Taylor
ence has led to material benefit, modernity has not fostered Coleridge and Laurence Sterne: typical aspects to this kind of
individual autonomy or profitable self-knowledge. It has not 'modernist' writing are radical aesthetics, technical experimenta-
provided meaning to the world or to spiritual life, religious or tion, spatial or rhythmic rather than chronological form, self-
otherwise, perhaps reducing humans merely to rational(ising) conscious reflexiveness, scepticism towards the idea of a centred
animals who are increasingly perceived as more complex and human subject and a sustained inquiry into the uncertainty of
consequently more emotionally, psychologically and technologi- reality. Any adequate discussion, however, has to take note of
cally dependent. Humanity arguably appears without purpose both views and of their meeting point in the intense interna-
and is instead merely striving for change and transformation, tional and interdisciplinary artistic revolutions around the start
which produce only momentary satisfaction or meaning. Modernity of the twentieth century.
is also associated with the period of European global expansion, Another approach is to attempt to construct a description of
such that its universalising thrust has been concomitant with and the representative features of modernist writing or style (for
dependent upon near-global systems of subjugation and navigation example, see Whitworth 2007). One critic, Norman Cantor, has
despite its Eurocentric focus. Suggestions of countermodernities offered what he calls a Model of Modernism (Cantor 1988: 35),
based on colonial or post-colonial models have been made by with the following characteristics. Modernism favoured anti-
critics such as Homi Bhabha (1991) and Paul Gilroy (1993) historicism because truth is not evolutionary and progressive but
among others. something requiring analysis. It focused on the micro- rather
Modernism has, therefore, frequently been seen as an aesthetic than the macrocosm, and, hence, the individual more than the
and cultural reaction to late modernity and modernisation. On the social. It was concerned with self-referentiality, producing art
one hand, modernist artists kicked against the homogenisation that was about itself and texts that were self-contained rather
 20 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 21

than representational. It leant towards the disjointed, disin- described this modern style in terms of repose, confidence, tol-
tegrating and discordant in opposition to Victorian harmony. erance, free activity of the mind, reason and universals (Arnold
Modernism also advocated that an object exists in terms of its· 1857). Fifty years later the avant-garde of literature expressed the
function; a house is, therefore, seen as a machine for living in (Le opposite: alienation, plight, chaos, unreason, depression and a
Corbusier) and a poem 'a machine made for words' (William disenchantment with European culture.
Carlos Williams). It was frequently and unashamedly elitist, in Modernism can be taken as a response by artists and writers to
that, for example, modernist art stressed complexity and diffi- several things, including industrialisation, urban society, war,
culty and also emphasised that culture had changed in response· technological change and new philosophical ideas. Because the
to the machine age. In terms of sexuality and the family, mod- nineteenth century experienced a spreading disillusionment with
ernism introduced a new openness with candid descriptions often existing models of the individual and the social, the Western
sympathetic to feminism, homosexuality, androgyny and bi- world was transformed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and
sexuality beside a questioning of the constraints of the nuclear Darwin, who respectively changed established notions of the
family which seemed to hamper the individual's search for per- social, the individual and the natural, as will be discussed in
sonal values. Modernists did not view ethics as superior to art, Chapter 1 prior to an overview of their effects on literary and
seeing the latter instead as the highest form of human achieve- cultural genres in Chapter 2. Imperialism had exposed European
ment. If Victorian literature was concerned with morality, mod- sensibilities to alternative cultures, ethics and social structures.
ernist writing was concerned with aesthetics. Lastly, Cantor notes The First World War, and the years immediately before and after
a tendency towards feelings of apocalypse and despair following it, brought about the demise of many institutions and beliefs:
decades of creeping Victorian doubt. In this spirit, modernist the class system was rocked by the rise of trade unions and the
texts often focus on social, spiritual or personal collapse and Labour Party; beliefs in King and Country, patriotism and duty
subsume history under mythology and symbolism. were betrayed by the carnage of the war; the strength of patri-
Other oft-noted characteristics are a focus on the city and a archy was challenged as women went to work outside the home
championing as well as a fear of technology; technical experi- and the suffrage movement gained hold. In terms of the trauma
mentation allied with radical stylistic innovation; a suspicion of of the war itself, the effect on modern consciousness cannot be
language as a medium for comprehending or explaining the world; overstated. It resulted in the invention of new weapons, such as
and an attack on nineteenth-century stalwarts such as empiricism submarines, aeroplanes, poison gas and cannons with ranges over
and rationalism. Above all, however, from the mid-nineteenth cen- 75 miles, and produced more than 33 million military casualties,
tury onwards, what has come to be called modernism appears and an additional 5 million civilian deaths, not counting the
retrospectively to have been a wide-ranging and far-reaching series millions of war-related influenza deaths. With devastation on
of vigorous and persistent attempts to multiply and disturb modes such a scale, it became absurd to celebrate noble ideas like human
of representation. Its artistic expansion seemed to follow on from dignity in art, or blithely to assert a belief in human progress.
other kinds of growth: scientific, imperial and social. These The war produced a deep distrust of optimistic secular or
lucrative material changes were accompanied by individual and teleological understandings of history and seemed a climactic,
collective crises, especially spiritual, which issued in a new lit- severing event that showed conclusively the failures of nine-
erature that was rebellious, questioning, doubtful and introspective teenth-century rationalism. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, the
but confident and even aggressive in its aesthetic conviction. In war was a defining moment in terms of both society and the indi-
1857, the cultural commentator and poet Matthew Arnold gave vidual, such that the fracturing of minds that came to be known as
a lecture entitled 'On the Modern Element in Literature'. He shell shock seemed to represent in miniature what was happening

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22 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 23
to soCJettes and nations, as much of the world went to war, There was also a new perception of reality and the function of
Europe was torn apart, and Russia was thrown into revolution. art. The previous dominant modes had been a poetics of mimesis,
Technological changes meant that modernism was an art of a verisimilitude and realism. By contrast, modernism marked a
rapidly transforming world of industrial development, mechan- movement towards increased sophistication, studied mannerism,
isation, urbanisation, secularisation and mass forms of social profound introversion, technical display, self-scepticism and anti-
interaction. By 1900, there were on the planet eleven cities with representationalism. In music, modernists responded to the lush
populations of over I million. London and New York stood at symphonies of the nineteenth century with atonalism; in art, they
over 5 million people, while Paris had 3 million inhabitants and progressively undermined realism in movements like post-
Berlin 2 million. At the end of the nineteenth century, there impressionism, expressionism, cubism, symbolism, imagism, vor-
were several key areas of technological advancement whose ticism, Dadaism, futurism and surrealism (see ·Chapter 2). Each
importance has also to be appreciated: motor power (internal presented a different way of viewing reality. In fiction, new writers
combustion engine, diesel engine, steam turbine); fuel (elec- spearheaded a rejection of several of the fundamentals of classic
tricity, oil and petroleum as new power sources); transport realism, such as a dependable narrator; the depiction of a fixed
(automobile, motor bus appeared in London in 1905, aeroplane, stable self; history as a progressive linear process; bourgeois politics,
tractor); communication (telephone, typewriter, tape machine - which advocated reform not radical change; and the tying up of
all leading to modern office organisation); synthetic materials all narrative strands, or 'closure'.
(chemical industry was revolutionised, man-made fibres, plas- Modernism can also be discussed in terms of its exclusions and
tics). Also, in 1895, modern physics began with the use of X- its critical reformulations. I have mentioned its Eurocentric bias,
rays, the discovery of the radioactive properties of uranium and but, in its reactionary aspects, it has also been characterised as a
the initial work with radium; in 1897 electrons were detected for response to mass culture and to feminisation, and thus as resting
the first time, and the quantum theory of energy was proposed in upon a masculinist elitism. This construction chimes with many
1900. Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity appeared in of the pronouncements, in fiction and in essays, by male writers
1905, and when his theories of a fourth dimension appeared a of the time, and it also describes the character of much criticism
decade later, the accepted picture of the physical universe, which on modernism until recently. Around the turn of the century,
had been fixed by the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference which literature was increasingly perceived as a 'profession' and as,
enshrined the universal day with Greenwich as its zero point, was therefore, supposedly outside of women's domestic sphere, and it
fundamentally altered. Such changes created modern living, was beginning to be seen as a serious academic discipline, one
which was now about distance, speed, consumption, commu- that had to be assessed and regularised. Previously, literary study
nication and mechanisation. Most famously, Marinetti openly had been considered suitable for women and not for men, but in
celebrated change in 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism': the early 1900s it was more and more thought that instead of
being an escapist amusement, literature could teach codes of
We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new behaviour and define national identity. Consequently, the literary
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned 'world' became colonised by various benign commercial and
with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that didactic interests: the Times Literary Supplement, the Oxford Uni-
seems to ride on grapeshot - is more beautiful than the Victory of versity Press' series of World's Classics and the Everyman
Samothrace ... Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the imprint, the Nobel Prize for Literature (founded in 1901), and
absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. the creation of the English Association (1907) to establish the
(Cahoone 1996: 187) essential role English literature should play in British culture.
 INTRODUCTION 25
24 INTRODUCTION

This growing emphasis on a masculine national culture culmi- celebrated by critics of US literature in particular. Others, how-
nated in the setting up in 1910 of the Academic Committee: a ever, have sought to reconstruct the idea of the literary experi-
coterie of male writers gathered together with the aim of estab- mentation and newness of the period by avoiding the hegemonic
lishing all that was best and most important in English letters. claims of a literary elite as the avant-garde in favour of a more
It included Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad and, inclusive apprehension of challenges to accepted aesthetic and
formal or social and political norms coming from various under-
at times, constituted a dining and debating club which was to a
degree set upon establishing a virile, manly English literature. privileged or embattled quarters. There has also been greater
One of the Committee's conclusions was that Victorian literature emphasis on the texts of Caribbean and African-American literary
had been too feminine and moralistic, and that writers such as modernism since studies like Houston A. Baker's key 1989 tract
George Eliot, whose reputation has never been lower, had held Modernimt and the Harlem Renaissance. These critiques contrast the
back the English novel in comparison with its European equiva- traditional picture of modernism as an urban movement, centred
lents. Much of this can be easily read as a reaction to the rise of on Paris, London, New York, etc., with newer emphases on, inter
the suffragette movement and its equivalent in writing, the New alia, the black Atlantic (see Paul Gilroy), modernism in anti-
Woman, against whom Kipling composed 'The Female of the colonial resistance movements (see Boehmer), new mythologies
Species', Henry James created Henry Ransom in The Bostonians of the Caribbean in writers such as Wilson Harris and Kamau
Brathwaite (see Pollard).
and Edmund Gosse railed in 'The Decay of Literary Taste'
(Ledger 1997: 177-98). Since the 1980s, modernist writing has From these divergent viewpoints, the three highly structured
been questioned and broadened, in terms of both its authors and chapters, on influences, genres and texts, that form the rest of
its poetics. For example, writers such as Katherine Mansfield, this book sketch a syncretic picture while introducing the pre-
Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Warner and Charlotte cursors, writers and theorists of modernism as well as summar-
Mew have been added to Virginia Woolfs token inclusion in the ising the key formal, thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of a
modernist canon, which was previously summarised as The Men range of influential fiction and poetry written by avant-garde
of 1914: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism or The Pound Era, in the authors. Chapter l explains the impetus that Darwin, Marx,
titles of well-known books (replied to in Scott's Refiguring Mod- Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein gave to experimental
ernism: The Women of 1928). Critics such as Alice Jardine ( 1985) writers at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twen-
and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1985) have also registered the com- tieth centuries. Chapter 2 illuminates the pan-European origins
monality between modernist writing and icriture feminine, irre- of the radical literary changes that occurred in the novel, poetry
gular, fluid and experimental 'feminine' writing theorised by and drama, as well as the many revolutions in art and film.
French feminist critics such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous Chapter 3 then analyses modernist elements in the texts of
familiar writers such as Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence, Yeats,
(see Moi 1985). Eliot and Conrad, as well as in the work of less commonly stu-
However, claims by such critics as Andreas Huyssen that there
is a 'powerful masculinist mystique' explicit in modernism seem died authors such as Charlotte Mew and Rebecca West.
too passive in their acceptance of the self-definition embarked To develop a reasonable grasp of the subject, there is, of course,
upon by certain male writers and critics. Huyssen suggests that no substitute for reading modernist texts themselves, but, from a
even more than an exclusion of women (for example, Jean Rhys, critical standpoint, the best follow-up to the introduction offered
Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Butts) in established modernist criticism, here is to read one of the many edited books of manifestos,
there is a celebration of maleness, a phallic triumphalism which extracts and documents that have been published on modernism,
informs the 'movement', and this has often characterised the canon of which I would particularly recommend the valuable anthology
26 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

of important background material by Kolocotroni, Goldman and in politics had not the Great War intervened. As far
Taxidou (1998), and, for a more recent but very different assembly, effects on British life are concerned, as Lyn Innes has
Rainey (2005). "r"'""~ the coming together of some of the most gifted
representatives of countries and cultures th
the empi produced 'the readiness to question the assump.J')ons
ERNATIONAL ANGLOPHONE traditions, and} doctrines of the English ruling
MODERNISMS 178). Edwa Said goes further. He argues chat muucllu
The broader phenomenon of transatlantic modernism was necessary 'deal with' a new sense of Europe's
what Malcolm Bradbury has called 'dangerous pilgrim es occasioned by exes and artefacts from the Empire
heavy traffic between the old and new worlds, whose symbol of this ·s the shock not of the new
"lttractions would be repeatedly analysed by myriad mask with all t at it signified to Europe
James, Edith Wharton and Ford Ma transgression, mar ·ng a primal moment of mqdernism in Picasso's
here is the fact that American write came to Europe painting Les Demoi lies D'Avignon (1907).
revivify language and literature. Be re Pound and Eliot An example of tr nsatlantic connectio is Mina Loy ( 1882-
in, Gertrude Stein came to aris in 1903, and, for 1966), a radical poet hose involvement ith Gertrude Stein and
turned her quiet courtyard partment on the rue de Ezra Pound, modern a and futurism free verse and free love,
the cafes of M tparnasse, into 'the great produced poems from 1 10 onwards at gained a contemporary
(Bradbury 1995: 253). notoriety, about 'Joyce's ysses', ' rancusi's Golden Bird', 'The
pre-war years as, inter alia, Ineffectual Marriage' or 'Par ritio - a poem whose form mimics
and Gide, Picasso and Apolli- a woman's contractions in la o . Her characteristic cynical wit
herself came into her own at this and violent imagery in poems ch as 'Love Songs' led one of her
of her influence in the 1920s when editors to declare: 'To reduce ro ·cism to the sty was an outrage,
every visiting Americ iter had to stop and sojourn at her and to do so without verbs, enten e structure, punctuation, even
studio. As C. Barr Chabo notes, American literature would more offensive' (Scott 199 : 233). 's influence on modernism
have been both v different d much poorer if Gertrude Stein has often been underest· aced. as ha the role of the feminist
had not taken residence in P is and 'made her home a shrine For instance, it
that was culturally -to-date' (Chabot 1997: 10). development that on
true, however, that pr r to the vogue for Paris, Weaver produced
drawn more than its fai share of writers, and it l'reew~n. They entrus-
as a cultural centre to attract rtists through the dec- and he
up to the Second World War. A r Henry James and Wil-
rL--ge Bernard Shaw came to London in 1 6, the list of exiles
emigres includes Conrad, Pound, Eliot, Mansfield, H.D.,
Wilde, Olive Schreiner and many others. Londo also served as a
magnet for those within Britain who were fighti
socialise causes, making the influx to the capital
country and the world one of the most important
revolution in culture chat would probably have been