Vincent Sherry

The Cambridge History of Modernism

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of “modernism” within the “modern” period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes “modernist” by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings present definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

Introduction: A History of “Modernism”

In one received understanding, “modernism” emerges as a working term only in the teaching cultures of postwar universities in England and (especially) America. According to this understanding, “modernism” earned its currency as a word mainly in those academic settings, where it offered itself chiefly as a term of convenience, providing a departmental curriculum with course titles or doctoral dissertations with historical frames. In those college classrooms and library studies, “modernism” is supposed to have exerted a neutral, mostly descriptive, non-controversial and certainly nonpolemical function – at least at its inception. This is not an accurate understanding, and the history it outlines is wrong. The word “modernism” is circulating noticeably and in fact clamorously at the turn of the twentieth century. It emerges already and first of all as a fighting word, being fraught from the start with strident and contestable claims about the meaning of the experience of history in general and contemporary history in particular. This is the historical moment for which “modern” has recently been accepted as a designation and “ism” its newly challenging, and increasingly challenged, intensive. Such is the power of the denominator, in fact, that this Cambridge History of Modernism frames its broad historical subject through the word itself. “Modernism” provides the point of reference in this Introduction because it centers a debate about the meaning of being “modern,” especially in the inflection which the additional “ism” attributes to it, and because this controversy frames many of the critical issues and interpretive questions that are most cogent to the body of work that is brought under its heading. The debate is lengthening now into its second (actually third) century. In a fashion at least mildly appropriate to the temporal imaginary of its subject, this Introduction will move through this period counterclockwise as well as clockwise – from the beginning of the twenty-first century to the end of the nineteenth – by entering in medias res.

The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill

Examines Hills verse within the context of British and American reaction to the great literary modernists of the early 20th century