A Broader View of Modernism

Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist, edited by Dorothy M. Scura and Paul C. Jones. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001, 235 pp., $32.50 hardcover.

The Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America, by Elizabeth Francis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 197 pp., $18.95 paper.

Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances, by Anne Herrmann. New York: Palgrave, 2000, 192 pp., $55.00 hardcover.

Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties, by Gay Wachman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 238 pp., $24.00 paper.

Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators' Seduction, edited by Merry M. Pawlowski.New York: Palgrave, 2001, 241 pp., $62.00 hardcover.

In a cold Pennsylvania October in 1999, an excited gathering of academics, critics, and artists assembled at the inaugural conference of the Modernist Studies Association, an organization designed to bring together scholars working in what had become the disparate and amorphous field known as modernist studies. An outgrowth of the study of modernism, by most accounts a cultural and artistic movement spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "The New Modernisms," as the conference title auspiciously announced, celebrates the emergence of an interdisciplinary inquiry bearing little resemblance to the New Criticism-driven scholarship that had dominated initial phases of modernist study in the mid-twentieth century. (Taking its cue from T.S. Eliot's aesthetic formulations, the New Criticism, we may recall, focused on the formal features of a work, to the deliberate exclusion of its context.) According to the theoretical assumptions and critical practice endorsed by the "New Modernisms," no longer was the work of art to be considered in isolation from the biographical, cultural, and ideological circumstances that impacted its production and reception. And no longer was modernist studies the exclusive province of white male academics examining the work of their artistic, racial, gender-inscribed, and ethnic counterparts in England and, sometimes, the United States. Though analysis of the lives and work of such "canonical" artists as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce continues to be a part of modernist studies, attention has shifted to the cultural circumstances in which they wrote or to an interrogation of the premises by which they and other white male writers have been designated central in a landscape populated by artists and thinkers heretofore excluded from critical consideration by matters of race, ethnicity, gender, economic circumstances, geographic location, and ideology. In this writer's view, it is in the accompanying and sustained attention given to this group of formerly marginalized practitioners and their work, together with key considerations of context, that much of the promise of modernist studies lies.

Experimental writer Evelyn Scott provides a clear example of a marginalized modernist: after two decades of critical acclaim, owing in part to "the apparent sexism of the literary establishment," this author of eleven novels, two volumes of poetry, one drama, and many short stories and essays sank into obscurity (Scura and Jones 2001, xvii). In Evelyn Scott: Recovery of a Lost Modernist, editors Dorothy Scura and Paul Jones seek to remedy that circumstance. Though her artistic achievements have been overlooked for decades, the editors hope that a recent flurry of critical activity concerning Scott will combine with their book to re-ignite recognition and appreciation of her work. To that end, the concluding section of Evelyn Scott includes readings of her obscure first volume of poetry and of her drama Shadow Play. In order to provide additional exposure to underrepresented or unavailable material, Scott biographer Mary Wheeling contributes a summary of the writer's published and unpublished stories, and scholar Will Brantley introduces readers to the "quotable" Scott by providing excerpts and annotations from the writer's often hard-to-find nonfiction (202). In a similar spirit of literary unveiling, the editors include Tim Edwards's well-researched critical treatment of Scott's unfinished novel of the French Revolution, Before Cock Crow. But, as Dorothy Scura affirms in the introduction, Evelyn Scott also seeks to stimulate...