Christopher Bush

Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism

Modernist studies has changed dramatically in recent years. If it once seemed that literary modernism was defined by a narrow canon of AngloAmerican works, the possible objects of the new modernist studies continue to expand in number and kind: more consideration of the relationship between high modernism and popular culture; far more focus on little magazines rather than masterpieces; more consideration of the European avant-garde as well as of literature that is not formally experimental; more women writers; more ethnic diversity; and, increasingly, more consideration of modernism as a transnational, even global, phenomenon. In sum, formal-aesthetic programs alone no longer define the field. ‘‘Modernism’’ is now at least potentially something like the total culture of a social, political, and economic modernity whose historical and geographic scope continues to widen. It seems therefore both an exciting but in many ways an unenviable task to attempt a clear and concise introduction to such an expansive and expanding field. As with any synthetic project, many readers will be tempted to take for granted all inclusions with which they agree and to note, perhaps with a sense of injury, the omissions to which they object. The focus of Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is Anglo-Irish literary modernism, presented in a context sufficiently broad to include American and Continental literature and art. The book can therefore most favorably be thought of as an unusually generous and wide-ranging introduction to British literary modernism rather than as an all-purpose introduction to modernism tout court with an Anglo-Irish bias. On these terms Lewis has done an impressive job. Indeed, on any terms, this often elegant study

Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (review)

190 Notes 1. See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mica Nava, “‘Modernity’s Disavowal’: Women, the City and the Department Store,” in Modern Times, ed. M. Nava and A. O’Shea (London: Routledge, 1996); Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture (London: Sage, 2001). (These are later texts than those cited by Wolff and attention to these might also encourage Wolff to the possibilities of the flâneuse). 2. See Melanie McGrath, Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). 3. See Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (London: Routledge, 1990) and Biddy Martin, Femininity Played Straight (London: Routledge, 1996). 4. Reginald Blomfield, Modernismus (London: Macmillan, 1934), 52-3; The Studio 103 (JanuaryJune 1932), 63-4, 64. For more on this subject, see Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). 5. Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters, ed. R. Marler (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 272. 6. See Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) and the British Modernism Research Seminar at www.sas.ac.uk/ies.