Modernism Singular Plural

In Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924, Damon Franke scrupulously documents the influence of the Cambridge Heretics Society on literary and intellectual culture during the late Victorian and early modernist period. Franke traces the relationships among participants of this debate society and details its effects on intellectual culture, with a focus on its connections to other contemporary groups for intellectual exchange (notably Bloomsbury), and its influence, both direct and indirect, on a host of canonized modernist writers including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. While Franke’s scholarship achieves an admirable degree of empirical richness, the anemic fashion in which he conceptualizes modernist aesthetics and historiography–conceptualizations that go largely unexamined from the beginning of the book to the end–severely limits his ability to offer critical insight into the history that he documents.

Franke begins Modernist Heresies with the task of questioning traditional ways that scholars periodize and categorize twentieth-century literary history, focusing on the tendency to make firm distinctions between late Victorians, Edwardians, and modernists, and arguing that the tendency to periodize in this way begins with the canonized modernists themselves. Franke cites Virginia Woolf’s claim in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that a radical epistemic break in December 1910 marks the beginning of modern literature as an influential example of a modernist tendency to posit a historical rupture between the Edwardian and the modern periods. Against this “modernist elision of… antecedents” that does a “disservice to an understanding of the fluid processes of history” (14), Franke posits the “heretical discourses” characteristic of “the synthetic character of Edwardian thought,” which “provide a new historical perspective for understanding the particular continuities and discontinuities of late Victorian and modernist literature and culture” (18). Focusing on the effect of the Cambridge Heretics Society in exposing numerous modernist writers, historians, philosophers, classicists, critics, and theologians to an Edwardian synthetic approach to religious and cultural questions, Franke argues that “the vital and formative influence the Heretics had on modernist thought may be one of the more glaring omissions in our understanding of twentieth-century intellectual history” (25).

Interrogating assumptions regarding periodization can provoke us to question our critical presuppositions, and several authors in Modernism and Colonialism, discussed below, successfully undertake such an interrogation. Franke, however, fails to seriously consider the complexity or variety of modernist conceptualizations of history, memory, language, identity, or anything else that makes so many of the authors he covers compelling. By reducing modernism to a point of singularity, Franke is able to sustain a series of unproblematic binary oppositions based on a distinction between Edwardian “heretical discourses,” which “still teach us the need and reward for encouraging and defending dissent, tolerance, and diversity” (xiii), and “the modernist development of works of art which were putatively self-contained wholes” (xiv), and which he casually suggests display “fascist tendencies” (19). We are given an Edwardian pluralism verses a modernist elitism, an Edwardian belief in “reconciliation and synthesis” (19) in opposition to “the didactic modernist manifestoes [that] abound with self-satisfaction and decree” (20), an Edwardian attempt to “harmonize beliefs” set against “the modernist proclivity for exclusion” (54). Stating his intent to destabilize an ahistorical opposition between modernism and its antecedents, Franke reiteratively discovers a set of binary oppositions between modernist and Edwardian intellectual principles that would seem to be deeper and more fundamental than anyone has previously believed. Franke’s presumed contribution is therefore reduced to suggesting that there is not a clear chronological rupture between the two periods, that Edwardian tendencies continue to linger into the 1930s, and that...