The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism

Citation

Lewis, P. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book runs to about 300 pages (xxii + 276). After a Preface and an Introduction, its seven chapters fall into three parts: Origins (Chapters 1–3), Genres (Chapters 4–6) and Fate (Chapter 7), followed by a Conclusion, a chronology, notes and an index. The publisher notes that it is illustrated with works of art, includes tables and suggestions for further study, and takes a comparative view of Anglo-American and European modernism, showing how European movements shaped modernism in English. Every chapter, as its opening pages on Cambridge Core show, begins with a concrete scene, document or work and builds outward from it.

Preface

The Preface traces the word "modernism" from its first literary use after the First World War (for the experimental work of Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Woolf) to its current breadth, in which it may cover movements from naturalism and symbolism through cubism, futurism, imagism and vorticism to dada and surrealism, and a period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Lewis acknowledges the risk that so wide a term becomes empty but argues that it names a central phenomenon in cultural history.

Introduction

The Introduction (over 30 pages) starts from the sense of crisis that late nineteenth-century writers and artists described (Mallarmé's "crisis in verse", Strindberg's theatrical crisis) and frames modernism as a crisis of representation: a questioning of the long-standing link between art and mimesis that led some painters to abstraction.

Chapter 1: Trials of modernity

Opens with the 1857 prosecutions of Flaubert for Madame Bovary and of Baudelaire for Les Fleurs du Mal, which Lewis presents as marking a new tension between art and the social order that helped define modernism's oppositional spirit.

Chapter 2: Primitivists and modernizers

Starts from Virginia Woolf's claim that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed", linking it to Roger Fry's first post-impressionist exhibition in London and to the social and political changes in England after the death of Edward VII.

Chapter 3: The avant-garde and high modernism

Begins with Gertrude Stein's account, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, of Picasso's portrait of her, a work in the development of cubism, and uses it to examine the mythology of the avant-garde, the term for the most radical innovators in the arts.

Chapter 4: Poetry

The first chapter of Part II opens with The Waste Land, which Pound called the justification of the modern experiment since 1900, and with the circumstances of its composition and the sense of cultural crisis it seemed to express.

Chapter 5: Prose fiction

Opens with Joyce's Ulysses: its Homeric parallels, the move from interior monologue to a variety of styles, the antihero, the exploration of consciousness and subjects taboo in art, and modernist scepticism about linear plot. The opening presents Ulysses as displaying most of the characteristics of the modern novel.

Chapter 6: Drama

Opens with the bare stage of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a play about characters who interrupt a rehearsal to demand that their story be staged.

Chapter 7: Literature and politics

Part III ("Fate") begins with Eliot's note to The Waste Land quoting Hermann Hesse on Europe's descent into chaos, and with the post-war fear, voiced by Spengler's The Decline of the West, of further upheaval after the Russian Revolution.

Conclusion: after modernism?

Notes that the 1920s were the high point of literary modernism and that the more political writing of the 1930s (Auden, Orwell) was less experimental, while Joyce's Finnegans Wake pushed experiment to its limit and later came to be seen as the first postmodernist text.

Key Concepts

Preface and Introduction

• Modernism as a term: a label that has expanded from a group of post-war experimental writers to a whole tendency and period.
• Crisis of representation: the questioning of art's traditional task of imitating reality.

Part I: Origins (Chapters 1–3)

• Art against society: the conflict between artists' standards and social morality, as in the Flaubert and Baudelaire trials.
• Primitivism and modernization: the two impulses named in Chapter 2's title.
• Avant-garde and high modernism: the radical vanguard in the arts, and the major works of literary modernism.

Part II: Genres (Chapters 4–6)

• Stream of consciousness: the rendering of a character's inner life, as in Ulysses.
• Scepticism about plot: modernist distrust of arranging events in a traditional, linear sequence.
• Self-conscious theatre: drama that exposes its own staging, as Pirandello's bare stage and interrupted rehearsal do.

Part III and Conclusion

• Modernism and politics: the relationship between literary experiment and the political crises of the post-war period.
• After modernism: the turn of the 1930s and the question of postmodernism.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Concrete openings. Each chapter starts from a specific trial, exhibition, painting, poem, novel or play, which gives students a vivid way into abstract questions about modernism.
• Comparative range. The book sets English-language modernism beside its European sources. Christopher Bush's review in Modern Philology (2010) describes its focus as Anglo-Irish literary modernism set in a context broad enough to include American and Continental literature and art, and judges that on those terms Lewis has done an impressive job.
• Literature and the visual arts together. Painting is central to the argument from the Introduction onwards (Denis, Picasso, the post-impressionist exhibition), and the book is illustrated.
• Clear architecture. The three parts move from origins to genres to the movement's fate, so the book can be read straight through as a history or by genre.

Limitations

• A focused, not global, survey. By the publisher's own account the book surveys England, Ireland and Europe, and Bush characterises its centre as Anglo-Irish. Students interested in modernism beyond Europe, such as the Harlem Renaissance or other world modernisms, will need other books.
• Published in 2007. It reflects the scholarship of its time; later critical directions in modernist studies are not covered.
• One chapter per genre. Poetry and prose fiction receive about 25 pages each, so the genre chapters are surveys rather than detailed readings.

Where It Fits in the Course

Lewis and Peter Childs's Modernism are the course's two mid-length introductions, and they complement each other. Lewis is organised historically and by genre, with continental Europe and the visual arts close to the centre; Childs's third edition is organised around ideas, the arts and close textual work and frames modernism in global as well as local terms. Christopher Butler's Modernism: A Very Short Introduction is a shorter overview that can be read first.

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson, is the natural next step: specialist essays on genres, contexts and the other arts that deepen each of Lewis's chapters. Lewis's Conclusion, which ends with Finnegans Wake as a candidate for the first postmodernist text, leads into Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism and Robert Eaglestone's Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates beginning a course on modernism or early twentieth-century literature; no specialist knowledge is assumed, though having read some modernist fiction or poetry helps.

A practical plan:

• Start with the Preface and Introduction. They explain the term and the crisis of representation, the frame for everything that follows.
• Read Part I in order as a history: Chapters 1–3 move from the nineteenth-century trials to the avant-garde.
• Read Part II alongside set texts. Chapter 4 pairs naturally with The Waste Land, Chapter 5 with Ulysses or Woolf, and Chapter 6 with a play such as Six Characters in Search of an Author.
• Finish with Chapter 7 and the Conclusion to connect modernism to politics and to what came after.

Use the chronology to keep dates straight across countries and arts, and the suggestions for further study to move on to criticism on particular authors.