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Reviewed by:
  • Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, l900–l916
  • Laurie Teal
Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, l900–l916. Christopher Butler. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 318. $42.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

There are three strengths to this comprehensive introduction to early modernism that make it required reading for students and scholars alike: its insistence that modernism be understood in an international context (Butler focuses on England, Italy, France, and Germany); its repeated assertion and demonstration that no single artistic medium of modernism can be appropriately considered in isolation; and its careful and steady weaving together of generalizations about modernism with close readings of specific literary works, musical compositions, and paintings.

Butler’s book does not, however, offer an exciting new reading of modernism. The central interpretive thesis—that early modernist formal innovations are directly linked to new ideas emerging at the end of the century—will not spark much critical debate within the field of modernist studies. The book’s greatest disappointment is its failure to engage most literary and cultural theory of the past several decades, a critical decision Butler acknowledges and defends by asserting that theoretical and political readings of modernism—he targets Peter Bürger, Terry Eagleton, and Linda Nochlin, among others—constitute an interpretation that “reads theoretical concerns into the art of the past, and uses it for contemporary political purposes” (274). Rather than establishing a critical perspective from which to view modernism, Butler instead pursues “the historical reconstruction of artistic intentions,” an approach he validates through a “liberal philosophical view of the relationship of individuals to their time (and class)” (274–75). Butler’s analysis of early modernism is thus carried out from within the aesthetic and intellectual paradigms of modernism itself—“from within the mental world of the artists and thinkers” (xvi), “as expressed in the language of the time” (248).

Butler’s historicist methodology both explains and oddly justifies his lack of critical interest in the function of gender and race within modernism. Of the sixty-nine artists and thinkers who make his biographical glossary, only two are women—Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. He mentions H. D. briefly in his discussion of Imagism, dismissing one poem as “rather trivial and inaccurate observations” (213); and the Bloomsbury painters are discussed in detail, but without a single mention of Vanessa Bell. Butler’s apparent indifference to issues of racial and cultural difference is evident in his failure to distinguish his own take on primitivism from that of the modernists, an omission that enables him to admire “a nice hint of primitivist regression” (138) in Marinetti’s poetic association of a ditch of mud with his Sudanese nurse.

Despite these limitations, Butler’s three-hundred-page, generously illustrated book provides the critical reader with an invaluable encyclopedic catalog of movements, media, artists, and works from the early modernist period, as well as a thorough exploration of the multiple ways in which the formal innovations and thematic preoccupations of these various currents of early modernism influence and echo one another.

Laurie Teal
Bates College
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