The Cambridge Companion to Modernism

Citation

Levenson, M. (Ed.). (2011). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

The Companion is a volume of thirteen essays by different contributors, with an introduction by the editor, a chronology at the front and a further reading section at the back. The second edition, published in 2011, adds four new chapters and revises others. According to the book description, the essays treat the major literary genres, the intellectual, religious and political contexts of modernism, and parallel developments in film, painting and music. They show how events such as the First World War, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire and class conflict shaped aesthetic experiment. The volume is arranged by theme, not by period or by author.

Introduction (Michael Levenson)

The editor argues that modernist studies have widened and deepened in the first decade of the century, with more ambitious contextualization, more inclusive histories and more precise readings. He asks why the name "Modernism" persists for an epoch receding into the past, and cautions that the rush to declare a postmodern period has distorted the moment it means to surpass.

Chapter 1: The metaphysics of Modernism (Michael Bell)

Bell places the peak of Anglo-American modernism between 1910 and 1925 and ties its intellectual formation to the thought of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Instead of a survey of ideas, he concentrates on the interpretative cruxes of modernism, which test how that new thought was assimilated at the time.

Chapter 2: The cultural economy of Modernism (Lawrence Rainey)

The chapter opens with Dickens's 1853 speech to the citizens of Birmingham, in which literature turns from individual patrons to a large public. The opening frames modernism's relation to patronage and the public.

Chapter 3: The Modernist novel (David Trotter)

Trotter treats the modernist novel as both a set of possibilities and a perceived impossibility. The novel was popular and newly diverse from about 1890 to 1930, yet writers felt that the traditional form no longer corresponded to modern life, a feeling Eliot expressed in "Ulysses, Order and Myth" when he said the novel had effectively ended with Flaubert and James.

Chapter 4: Modern poetry (James Longenbach)

The chapter considers how Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Stevens look when modernism is squeezed between a romantic continuum on one side and an advancing postmodernism on the other. It notes that different critics narrow the modernist field in different ways, so that Stevens is in while Pound is out, or H. D. and Gwendolyn Brooks hold attention instead.

Chapter 5: Modernism in drama (Christopher Innes)

Innes starts from the observation that drama is seldom mentioned in studies of modernism, which concentrate on poets and novelists. He argues that theatre was highly international and did not fit the 1910 to 1930 frame used for poetry and the novel.

Chapters 6–8: Modernism and the politics of culture; Modernism and religion; Modernism and mass culture (Sara Blair; Pericles Lewis; Allison Pease)

Blair asks how modernist art stands in relation to political ideologies and modes of power, and notes that even withdrawal from politics is a political stance. Lewis begins from Woolf's reaction to T. S. Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1928. Pease uses the British case to examine whether modernism and mass culture are divided by a "great divide" or are historically related and interdependent.

Chapters 9–10: Modernism and gender; Musical motives in Modernism (Marianne DeKoven; Daniel Albright)

DeKoven links modernism's emergence between 1880 and 1920 to the first wave of feminism and the figure of the New Woman. Albright begins from Kandinsky's anxieties about the lack of a grammar in painting and the envy of music, which had one, as an entry to modernist musical thinking.

Chapters 11–12: Modernism and the visual arts; Modernism and film (Glen MacLeod; Michael Wood)

MacLeod offers a brief history of modern art for readers whose main interest is British and American literature, following the version of modernism endorsed by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and drawing literary parallels chiefly from poetry. Wood's chapter treats the relationship between modernism and the cinema.

Chapter 13: Modernism and colonialism (Elleke Boehmer and Steven Matthews)

The final chapter challenges the Anglo-American or Euro-American axis in modernist criticism and attends to transnational exchange and the colonial contexts in which modernist art took shape.

Key Concepts

Introduction and Chapters 1–5

• Modernism as a contested period term: the introduction questions the name and its relation to postmodernism.
• Intellectual formation: Chapter 1 connects modernism with the thought of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche.
• Cultural economy: Chapter 2 examines the economic and audience conditions of modernist writing.
• The perceived impossibility of the novel: Chapter 3 sets the novel's popularity against writers' sense that the form had run its course.

Chapters 6–10

• Politics and mass culture: Chapters 6 and 8 treat modernism's relation to political power and to popular culture, including the "great divide" argument.
• The New Woman: Chapter 9 ties modernism to turn-of-the-century feminism.
• Musical analogy: Chapter 10 considers how painters and writers looked to music for a grammar.

Chapters 11–13

• Parallels with the visual arts and film: Chapters 11 and 12 place literary experiment next to painting and cinema.
• Transnational modernism: Chapter 13 questions a transatlantic axis for modernism.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Range of subjects in one volume. The essays cover genres (novel, poetry, drama), contexts (politics, religion, mass culture, gender, colonialism) and other arts (music, visual arts, film). The publisher notes that this interdisciplinary approach is central to the book's success.
• Named contributors with arguments. The authors include Michael Bell, Lawrence Rainey, Marianne DeKoven, Daniel Albright and Pericles Lewis, and the chapter openings show essays that take positions, for instance on how the field of modern poetry has been remapped or why drama is missing from accounts of modernism.
• Updated for current scholarship. The second edition adds four new chapters and revises others in response to changes in modernist studies, which the editor describes as wider and deeper than a decade earlier. A chronology and a list of further reading (about ten pages) support follow-up.
• Selective use. Each chapter has its own subject and author, so readers can use the volume selectively.

Limitations

• A companion, not a survey. The book is organised by theme and does not give an author-by-author or period-by-period account, so readers who want a continuous narrative of modernism should look to a single-author introduction.
• Assumes familiarity. The openings of chapters refer freely to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf and Stein, and to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, so readers new to modernism will need background reading.
• Largely Anglo-American. Most chapters focus on British and American writing, with the colonial and transnational perspective concentrated in the last chapter.
• Some turn-of-the-century framing. The opening of Chapter 4 still speaks from the end of the twentieth century ("as the twentieth century comes to an end"), and Chapter 1 refers to "the end of the century", so some chapters read as products of an earlier moment in modernist studies.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the modernism course the Companion is a multi-author volume of essays, best read after a short general introduction. Christopher Butler's Modernism: A Very Short Introduction gives a concise undergraduate overview, and Peter Childs's Modernism in the New Critical Idiom explains the term and places modernist writing in context with attention to its global reach. Pericles Lewis's The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is a readable single-author account of how modernism emerged and developed across genres and art forms; Lewis also contributes the chapter on religion here.

The Companion then adds specialist essays on topics those books treat in a few pages. For what came after, Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism develops a theory of postmodernism, and Robert Eaglestone's Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction turns to fiction in recent decades. The Companion's introduction, which takes up the relation between modernism and postmodernism, is a good bridge to Hutcheon.

How to Use This Book

The volume suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have already met some modernist works and want specialist angles on them. Familiarity with a few texts, for example Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's To the Lighthouse or Eliot's The Waste Land, will make the chapters on genres much more useful.

Read the introduction first, then choose by need. For a literature course, start with Chapters 1, 3 and 4 and add Chapter 5 if you study drama. For contexts, take Chapters 6 to 9. Chapters 10 to 12 serve students working across the arts, and Chapter 13 is the place to start for questions about empire and transnational exchange. Use the further reading section to move on from any chapter.