History in the Edwardian Era

ELT 47 : 2 2004 center stage to tiny animals on a small planet far from the center of the universe. While Henry valuably places Woolf within a neglected moment of social and scientific history, readers should note that her study does not attempt to comprehensively address Woolf's oeuvre. Major works of the 1920s, such as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, get scant attention; indeed, Henry's study as a whole attends most rigorously to the Woolf of the 1930s, a strategy that might have been more fully acknowledged and theorized given the 1920s interest in astronomy and science that Henry details. Skeptical readers might also be troubled when Henry is occasionally unable to document Woolf s exposure to specific scientific arguments . Although she presents evidence that it is likely that Woolf heard Jeans's 1930 BBC lecture, for example, she is unable to prove that Woolf did so. Such proof seems necessary if readers are to accept that Three Guineas is "interconnected" with Jeans's argument. And yet, if Henry at times overstates the case for a dialogue between Woolf and Jeans, her general presentation of a shared cultural moment and of a mutual negotiation of scientific discourse persuades. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science closes with an evocative reading of Bernard's "fin in the waste of waters" in The Waves, connecting the image to Woolf's interest in astronomy and to her global aesthetics : "gazing at the moon and stars reminded Woolf not only of the possibility of life on other worlds even as a porpoise fin breaking the ocean surface indicates life in what is otherwise a seemingly limitless abyss, but also of the fragility of life on our planet." Readers of Henry's book will take away an enhanced understanding of how Woolf's aesthetic practice became imbricated with the scientific discourse of her day; while readers might wish for increased attention to novels across Woolf s corpus, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science valuably demonstrates Woolf's creative response to an evolving picture of a peripheral and fragile earth. Woolf s "hopeful vision for the future of humanity " is as timely and needed in 2004 as it was in the 1930s. CELIA MARSHIK State University of New York, Stony Brook History in the Edwardian Era Louise Blakeney Williams. Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 265 pp. $60.00 216 BOOK REVIEWS THIS EXPLORATION of attitudes towards history during the Edwardian period has a number of purposes. Its central goal is to demonstrate how a select group of early modernists—Yeats, Pound, Hulme, Ford, and Lawrence—abandoned nineteenth-century conceptions of history based on progress in favor of cyclic renderings of the past. Secondly, in the belief that previous examinations of this topic have minimized the role of chronology and historical background, the study attempts to follow modernist understandings of history as they evolved during the first part of the twentieth century and to explore the influence of contemporary events upon that evolution. Finally, the book posits a collective vision among these five writers in the belief that they affected each other and also fell under historical influences that moved them in similar literary and philosophical directions. Williams has been most successful advancing her primary thesis. The book demonstrates convincingly that these writers—while at first attracted to ideas of history located in progress because of aesthetic ideals rather than serious study of politics, economics, or culture—came eventually to see history as best understood in cycles. Based on a fundamental vision of man as fallen, cyclic views helped provide meaning and order in the present as well as a connection to the past. Add to that the fact that the approach alleviated fears about an uncertain future (in contrast to progressive time, which cuts one off from the past and leaves the future unknown) and it becomes clear why such a view proved attractive against the backdrop of the political and cultural chaos that was bearing down upon early twentieth-century Europe. While Williams does locate in each writer individual motivating factors for an attraction to cyclic views, she...