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  • The Modernist Novel Reconsidered
  • Mark D. Larabee
Gregory Castle, ed. A History of the Modernist Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvi + 532 pp. $115.00

IN HIS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, Gregory Castle describes having been “wary” when approached to edit A History of the Modernist Novel. Such wariness would seem well founded; much recent scholarship has seen the borders of modernism as increasingly fluid, complicating efforts to form categories and trace chronologies and influences in a volume of literary history. Castle judiciously abstains from emphasizing individual authors, movements, or “-isms,” instead using themes, problems, and ideas as organizing principles. He meets the heterogeneity of modernist novels head-on, indicating such dialectical relations as those between creative innovation and political reactionism, heightened spiritualism and brutal lived realities, and technological refinement and violence. This collection is consequently both a reliable introduction to the literary past and an engaging invitation to future study, making A History of the Modernist Novel a highly useful, stimulating resource for students and established scholars.

The arrangement of the essays in the book indicates that considerable thought went into it, resulting in no mere assortment but rather a constellation of productive analyses coordinated around particular moments in modernism. Five sections totaling twenty-three chapters examine the experimentation and impressionism of the 1890s, reconsiderations of realism in a transitional period, the primacy of quotidian materiality in modernism’s maturity, new developments in genres and the means of publication and distribution, and globalization in the interwar and postwar periods. This flexible and illuminating arrangement keeps in view complex local, regional, and global interrelations as well as differences of language and ideology.

The gratifying range and variety of analytical approaches and texts discussed in this volume defy ready summary. Accordingly, it might make sense to outline a few of the book’s signal achievements. First, [End Page 115] at the outset Castle describes modernism as not merely a reaction in style. Realism became one tactic among others within modernism, he writes, rather than one pole of a binary opposition. This critical spirit of searching out complexity enriches the entire volume, which develops an expanded view of the relations linking realism, materialism, and modernism. One of the five parts of the collection is devoted explicitly to materialism within modernist novels, but as the collection emphasizes throughout, material life shaped the matter and form of modernist fiction in many ways that have hitherto not been adequately explored. For instance, materiality in everyday existence contributed to the difficulty of modernist fiction (writes Pamela L. Caughie in an essay on Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen); it played a central, if unacknowledged, role in the modernism of the Irish novel of the Big House (Nicholas Allen on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September); and it differentiates the modernism of Mulk Raj Anand’s fiction from that of his cosmopolitan contemporaries James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (Jessica Berman).

The book repeatedly draws fresh connections between topics and between authors. For example, Paul Armstrong asserts that impressionism led directly to modernism through “instabilities of an aesthetic of qualia” (the problem of explaining the conscious experience of sensation)—which also accounts for the contradictory and paradoxical aspects of impressionism, as well as the wide variance of approach among its practitioners. Joseph Bristow balances works that are better known to readers (such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) and those less so, even neglected (Ouida’s Under Two Flags), at the same time making a case for the influence of critically understudied British aesthetic fiction on modernist writing. Laura Winkiel likewise situates Mhudi, a novel by the black South African writer Solomon T. Plaatje, among the novels of his more famous contemporaries through their shared availability to examination using world-systems theory.

In other revealing sets of connections, Sean Latham demonstrates the ties between the formal innovations of elite modernist style and the worldwide commercial, technological, and legal networks of magazine publishing that made modernist authorship profitable. Howard J. Booth links D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster in a view of their related responses to modernity that runs against an older, “teleological model of modernist studies” that could otherwise tend to contrast these two...

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