The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (review)

It comes as something of a shock to realize it's not too soon to write the literary history of the twentieth century: call it the shock of the no longer new. The twentieth century is of course now the last, past century, and its history is waiting to be written. And yet paradoxically, "twentieth-century literature" is still treated as the present moment in our university courses and textbooks: we have, in other words, not yet come to terms, quite literally, with the fact that the twentieth century is now history, and instead habitually treat it as if it were the present. As Marcus and Nicholls write in their introduction, "the last century has yet to compose itself definitively as a 'period'" (1).

This is perhaps a habit we've inherited from the modernists themselves, whose poetry, prose, and critical writing provided the foundation for the first twentieth-century literature to be canonized. Twentieth-century literature made it on to our syllabi precisely as "the new (the really new)"; what then is to become of us modernist scholars when it no longer is—new, that is? One answer—conveniently enough, one provided by the modernists themselves—comes with the recognition that in some cases, nothing is so new as the old, Eliot's Tradition, which constantly renews itself as the words of dead men and women are modified in the guts of the living. "Make it new!" Pound cried, in words lifted from the Chinese emperor Shang Tang, who had inscribed them on his bathtub in the sixteenth-century BCE. As students of modernism working in the twentieth century, we were never required to pay more than lip service to Eliot's exhortation, at the end of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that the "present moment of the past" is the secret engine of the new. Now that "the New" is our past, however, we're perhaps due to read Eliot's first magisterial essay in a new light.

Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls are uniquely situated, and uniquely well qualified, to provide the first encyclopedic treatment of twentieth-century English literature as an historical phenomenon. Together at the University of Sussex, they direct the interdisciplinary Centre for Modernist Studies; and having come of age as scholars recently enough not to be uncritically accepting of modernist dogma, as were the first generation of modernist critics, nor reflexively suspicious of all things modernist as are some younger scholars, they bring a balanced appreciation of, and resistance toward, modernism which proves salutary in the assembling of a volume like this one. One comes away from the Cambridge History with the belief that for these two modernism was always an object of study, rather than an article of faith: this comes as a great relief.

Both the structure of the volume and its list of contributors are stellar. While putatively a history of the whole of twentieth-century English literature, it unapologetically lingers on modernism, which the editors clearly believe to be the finest flower of twentieth-century writing: modernism both receives more concerted attention than the remainder of the century and provides the reference point for the rest of the century. Their contributors are all recognized figures in twentieth-century studies; the relative over-dependence on British scholars seemed to me unfortunate (38 of 45 authors by my count, not including the editors), but understandable perhaps in a Cambridge History: and one would be hard-pressed to say which of the authors, or which of the essays, could have been omitted without real damage to the volume.

Given nearly 900 pages to sum up the rich diversity of twentieth-century English literature, one can easily imagine other parsings of the period; indeed one of the most controversial of the editors' decisions is right there in the title, as they take as their task not a history of British, but of English, literature. These terms, I recognize, are used with...