Edwardian & Modernist Literature

ELT 41 : 3 1998 Perhaps Schwarz's book is best justified as an example of the question it addresses: "Modernism sought to find an aesthetic order or historic pattern to substitute for the crumbling certainties of the past. Yet at the same time modernists were aware that the order was elusive, as Eliot put it, fragments, to shore against the ruins of their present lives" (4). Schwarz offers one set of connections between modernist writers and artists, without claiming that they themselves were aware of them, or that other connections might not be equally plausible. To reconfigure modernism is legitimate enough, but Schwarz's book does not, on the whole, convince me that his particular system of relations amount to a satisfying order or pattern. Paul Delany ________________ Simon Fraser University Edwardian & Modernist Literature Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson, eds. Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. xxi + 266 pp. $39.95 FROM THE THIRTIES to the eighties the superiority of modernist to Edwardian writing was largely unquestioned by literary critics. Modernism had been central to the New Critical agenda, and its significance was, if anything, reinforced by the advent of post-structuralism: the modernist text, destabilising language and identity as it did, exemplified a revolution in literary language whose transgressive aesthetic put the work beyond political reproach. But increasingly in recent years, modernist writers have been under fire, accused of elitism, racism (in particular, of course, anti-Semitism), misogyny and malice. This volume of essays forms part ofthat revisionist movement, though the book's focus is not simply the critique of modernism but the re-investigation and reassessment of those writers traditionally labeled "Edwardian." "In university curricula," the editors write, "Edwardian literature is both unread and untaught; the efforts of appreciative historians and sympathetic readers not withstanding, the Modernist judgment prevails." The volume's aim is to question the mapping of literary history which has constructed a radical break between writers in the category of Edwardian "well-meaning, socially-conscious hacks" and the privileged grouping of "positive and innovative sounding" modernists. The editors have taken the period 1895 to 1920, and the essays they have collected look at the way issues such as gender, nationhood and empire enter into British 344 BOOK REVIEWS texts of the period, whatever their label, and form or deform their projects . To call this book Seeing Double is perhaps an unfortunate concession to the fashion for punning titles. To see double is paradoxically to see less rather than more, to see with confusion rather than clarity. In their introduction , "Edwardians and Modernists: Literary Evaluation and the Problem of History," the editors' vision does at times become blurred. For all their commendable talk of resisting conventional categories, they do not entirely escape them. They argue forcefully against the notion of the Edwardian writer as a "monologic, rather boorish sociologist manqué," but are too ready to make generalisations about modernist writers—a far from homogeneous or consistent group—and do not always make a distinction between the modernists' own highly variegated beliefs and their representation by later critics. Admittedly, tracing the difference is a complex matter, and it is true, as Gail McDonald has shown so brilliantly in Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Clarendon Press, 1993) that Pound and Eliot did much to create the terms in which academic literary critics have read them. But when the editors ask, "why did we so long accept the modernists' claim of artistic purity and political neutrality?", they show how only too successful the New Critics' image-making has been. There are surely, for example, few more openly polemical, indeed didactic, writers in the English language than Pound and Lawrence. The editors are right that the claim to break with their immediate predecessors became a mark of modernism (they refer reprovingly to Virginia Woolfs "brazen proclamation 'In or about December, 1910, human character changed'"). For most modernists (one could point to Pound, Eliot and indeed Woolf), if not for later critics, that was not necessarily a break with all of the past. Kaplan and Simpson's wish to read the modernists historically is admirable, but...