Modernism and . . . with Henry James

If contemporary fiction prompts the question of what happened to modernism, the transatlantic flow of books on modernism shows little sign of abating. A glance at the British Library's catalogue attests to publication of about eighteen hundred books in English with "Modernism" in their titles, predominantly in the last thirty years and relating to literature; from 2009 to the present, about one hundred and fifty are listed. As if in determined refutation of the autonomy that used to be attributed to modernist literature, the titles of many of the books since the 1980s take the form of "Modernism and. . . ." Even where the copulative form is not used, academic studies in this period have mostly related modernist literature to other cultural forms, or so demonstrated its participation in these other forms as to qualify the sense of their separation. As these studies range beyond specifically literary history and formal analysis to encompass national, political, economic and intellectual history, sexuality and gender, the ordinary and everyday, corporeality and psychological states, ethnic identities, postcolonialism, technology, the media and celebrity, a great variety of artistic works and their authors have been linked to modernism. If Malcolm Bradbury's televised series and accompanying book on a chain of "Ten Great Writers" epitomized an exclusive, canonical understanding of modernism that still had some support within the academy and largely prevailed outside it in 1988, it can now seem that its practitioners as well as its relations are boundless in an expansion of reference that parallels that of "culture."

Fueled partly by institutional investments in the "relevance" of literature, the historical broadening that marks modernist studies characterizes recent work in University English departments generally as well as Henry James studies specifically. In the loose interdisciplinarity of the new bibliographies it is possible to discern some renaissance of the man and woman of letters and continuing vitality for James. With the books under review here—all variants of "Modernism and" from scholars in English departments in American universities, whose substantial close readings begin with late James—readers may thus consider his writing through acute reflection on religious experience, on the operation of a pervasive trope, and on the aesthetics and significance of mediation. Such critical explorations in intellectual, cultural, and media history, which explore their significance in literary modernism, demonstrate something of the reach for significance that, as Gabriel Josipovici reminds us, marks modernist texts themselves and the excitement they generate. Criticism of this kind enables a widening of outlook in readers, including a broader understanding of subjectivity that was once seen as fiction's especial provenance and pleasure. These studies are further allied in insisting on the formal implications of cultural change and in a certain creative element in their fresh interpretation.

Their fundamental projects and methods, however, represent quite distinct strands of doing "English" currently. Pericles Lewis's carefully crafted Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel is the most traditional, reading the novels of "high" modernists in the light of contemporaneous "high" theory of religion. Lewis sets up the terms for his literary analysis through deft synopses of the sociology of religion and modern theology and through contestation of longstanding narratives of secularization, where he interestingly considers a significant survey of religious behavior in 1920s journals. Such preparatory work and his literary readings advance the bold literary thesis that "the problem of religious experience was crucial to the modernists; in fact, this problem lies at the root of those formal experiments characteristic of precisely the 'high' modernism that seems to differentiate itself from the more avowedly supernatural works of many popular authors" (18) and his broad argument that religious experience continued to be more important than narratives of secularization typically allow. With his high modernists, facets of religious experience are shown to raise continuing concern, and they are seen to share a sense of the...