Modernist Sexualities, and: Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (review)

Stevens and Howlett's collection of fourteen essays is entitled far too modestly. True, in one way or another, all of the essays refer to sexuality. However, this collection goes well beyond sexuality to engage related issues of sex and gender, as well as race, class, and literary history. Taken as a whole, the collection helps to foreground and call into question a great many widely held assumptions about the definition of modernism.

The collection's broad scope is addressed in Stevens's helpful introduction. While the emergence of high modernism is often associated with the First World War, Modernist Sexualities places its starting point somewhat earlier. The introduction suggests that high modernism attempts to distance itself from the "low modernist" popular literature and culture to which it reacted and on which it was built. High modernism—like many other "isms" and "renaissances"—achieves its coherence through exclusion via thematic and generic assumptions. Once one adopts a chronological definition that admits other texts, themes, genres, and assumptions, its coherence breaks down, and other coherences become possible. Stevens suggests that high modernists were reacting to what one contributor terms "categories in crisis" (251), and that rather than exploring and reveling in that crisis, they took a reactionary position. Modernist Sexualities thus provides not only information about what was going on beneath high modernism but also provides a useful counterstatement to it.

Readers of American Literature may be especially interested in the collection's essays on Willa Cather, Henry James, Carson McCullers, and Ernest Hemingway. In Cather's 1907 story "On the Gull's Road," Judith Butler explains, the narrator has an ambiguous sexual and gender identity that is melancholic and self-referential. Pamela Thurschwell demonstrates that although James declared his British citizenship in 1915, his subsequent writings on the Great War closely resemble his writings about the American Civil War: in both, James attempts to identify with wounded soldiers. Writing about McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café, Clare Whatling applies conventions of the gothic and grotesque to shed light on how and why the character of Miss Amelia Evans violates and inverts stereotypes of sex, gender, and sexuality. Hemingway's The Garden of Eden is the focus of Ira Elliott's essay, which explains how Catherine's obsession with tanning her body not only challenges racial, gender, and national boundaries but also relates to Hemingway's sense of artistic integrity and to his representations of Africans and Native Americans in other works.

Some of the essays examine transatlantic modernism, while others focus on developments in Britain but imply applicability to U.S. literature and culture. Marianne DeKoven examines how Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf reconceptualized feminine interiority and its public literary presentation in spectacle and drama. Stevens reveals D. H. Lawrence's use of primitive masculinity, in The Plumed Serpent and its precursor Quetzalcoatl, to differentiate private homosexual desire and public homosexual identity, while Howlett examines how British suffragettes contrasted dress and militancy. Morag Shiach explores how the technology of the typewriter influenced female gender stereotypes in British culture and the meaning of "writing" in British fiction. Con Coroneos tracks the decline of the traditional heart metaphor in British spy fiction (and relates that decline to Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility"). Geoff Gilbert parallels early twentieth-century notions of adolescence and delinquency with the vorticist writings of Wyndham Lewis. The volume also includes essays on the cultural influence of Edith (Mrs. Havelock) Ellis, Yeats's views on sexuality, the arabesques of French artist Marie Laurencin, and transgender narrative and Woolf's Orlando.

While sexuality is an explicit category of inquiry in these essays, it is thus also the means by which a great many other matters are examined and addressed. A similar but more focused...