01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Citation
Childs, P. (2017). Modernism (3rd ed.). Routledge. (The New Critical Idiom; published September 2016.)
Chapter Summary
The third edition of this volume in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series runs to about 250 pages and has an unusual shape: an Introduction and only three chapters, followed by a glossary and a bibliography. The chapters are long. The Introduction runs to about 40 pages, Chapter 1 to about 40, Chapter 2 to nearly 60, and Chapter 3, the book's centre of gravity, to more than 80. The publisher describes the edition as fully updated, expanded and revised, charting modernism "in its global and local contexts", and lists five things it does: it details the origins of modernism and the influence of thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein; explores the changes in the arts, literature, drama and film of the period; traces "modernism at work" in British, Irish, American and other Anglophone writers; explains recent critical interest in the culture and worldwide impact of modernism; and reflects on the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
Introduction
According to a 2020 review in Critical Literary Studies by Ali Hassanpour Darbandi and Zohreh Ramin, the Introduction opens with a set of definitions of romance, realism, modernism and postmodernism and approaches modernism comparatively, especially against postmodernism. The reviewers stress that Childs avoids fixed definitions and looks instead for the traces of each movement in the others.
Chapter 1: Interpreting and Changing
The published contents do not list this chapter's sections. Judging by the chapter titles and the publisher's description, it is where the book's account of modernism's origins belongs: the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein, the first five of whom are among the book's most frequent terms on Google Books.
Chapter 2: Genres, Art and Film
Modernism beyond the printed page: the changes the publisher lists in the arts, drama and film, alongside literary genres. (The chapter is titled "Genres and the arts" in the ebook's chapter metadata.) Terms such as cubism, Expressionist, symbolism, painting and film are among the book's frequent words.
Chapter 3: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts
The longest chapter, and the one that, in the publisher's words, traces "modernism at work" in particular writers, including Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot. The book's frequent terms include the titles or characters of several works (Heart of Darkness, Mrs Dalloway with Clarissa and the shell-shocked Septimus, The Good Soldier and its narrator Dowell, Ulysses, The Waste Land, Women in Love, Beckett's Murphy) as well as Charlotte Mew and the Harlem Renaissance, which indicates that the chapter reads individual texts in their contexts.
Glossary and Bibliography
The glossary supports readers new to the critical vocabulary, and the bibliography points to further criticism.
Key Concepts
Introduction
- Modernism, realism and postmodernism: terms the book defines against one another rather than in isolation.
- Overlap between movements: the reviewers' emphasis that Childs traces each movement within the others instead of fixing boundaries.
Chapter 1: Interpreting and Changing
- Intellectual origins: the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein as background to modernist writing.
Chapter 2: Genres, Art and Film
- Modernism across the arts: changes in painting, drama and film alongside literature, including movements such as cubism and Expressionism.
Chapter 3: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts
- Modernism at work: modernist techniques studied in particular texts.
- Global and local modernisms: modernism read through British, Irish, American and other Anglophone writers, including the Harlem Renaissance, rather than as a single European movement.
Critical Analysis
Strengths
- Concepts through texts. Hassanpour Darbandi and Ramin found the book accessible and wide-ranging, and more concerned with analysing movements in context and particular literary works than with abstract definition. The long third chapter, with its range of named works, bears this out.
- Broader than a European canon. The third edition explicitly frames modernism in global and local contexts and names writers such as Nella Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance alongside Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, matching recent critical interest in modernism's worldwide reach.
- Relational definitions. The same reviewers praise the refusal of "rock-solid" definitions in favour of showing how romance, realism, modernism and postmodernism overlap, which helps students who find the term itself elusive.
- Covers the other arts. A whole chapter on art and film means the book is not limited to literature.
Limitations
- Hard to navigate. With only three chapters, the contents give little guidance to readers looking for a particular author or topic, and the index is the better way into the book.
- Anglophone focus. For all its global framing, the writers named by the publisher are British, Irish, American and other Anglophone; continental European modernism is not the book's focus.
- Still introductory. At about 250 pages for intellectual background, the other arts and textual readings together, each subject is treated briefly. Students writing on a specific author will need specialist criticism.
Where It Fits in the Course
Childs is a mid-length critical introduction in this course. Christopher Butler's Modernism: A Very Short Introduction is a shorter first overview of modernism across literature, the visual arts, music and architecture. Pericles Lewis's The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism covers similar ground at similar length but is organised differently, around the emergence of modernism and its development across genres in England, Ireland and continental Europe; it complements Childs's Anglophone emphasis. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson, gathers specialist essays on genres, contexts and the other arts and is the step beyond either introduction.
Childs's closing reflections on the shift to postmodernism lead toward the rest of the course: Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism develops a full theory of postmodern fiction, and Robert Eaglestone's Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction surveys fiction of recent decades.
How to Use This Book
The book suits undergraduates in a modernism or twentieth-century literature course. Having read a few modernist works, for example by Joyce, Woolf or Eliot, makes Chapter 3 far more useful.
A practical approach:
- Read the Introduction first. Its comparative definitions frame the rest of the book and are worth returning to at the end of a course.
- Read Chapter 1 early in the course. It provides the intellectual background (Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others) that later readings assume.
- Use Chapter 2 when the course turns to the other arts or to film.
- Treat Chapter 3 as a companion to set texts. Rather than reading it straight through, use the index to find the discussion of each work as it comes up in the syllabus, and read the primary text first.
- Use the glossary for terms such as symbolism or Expressionism, and the bibliography to find further criticism.
Earlier editions (2000, 2008) differ; check which edition a syllabus cites.