Modern Horizons: Review of Brown's Utopian Gestures and Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire

Nicholas Brown's Utopian Generations and John Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire sift through the lessons of globalization in order to find an overarching understanding of the modernist novel. Brown's Utopian Generations returns orthodox Marxism to the scene of high modernism, swiftly dispensing with the old charge of Eurocentrism that has saddled Marxist interpretation and insisting upon the monoculture of global capitalism as the first premise of literary analysis. John Marx reinterprets imperial decline as a moment in which a new understanding of market forces pervaded artistic production; professionalism and imperialism go hand-in-hand, and John Marx's achievement is to add modernism to the mix. Both studies suggest that the critical tools that attempted to scale down the monuments of high modernism have outworn their use, and they turn to larger interpretive frameworks for the modernist canon.