High & Low Moderns

Book reviews here as "monologic" and "linear" might argue that a seemingly inclusive critical approach which disregards so much of Wilde's output has its own limitations. Rod Boroughs ________________ Cambridge, England High & Low Moderns Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, eds. High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. χ + 259 pp. $49.95 AFEW PAGES INTO the introduction to High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889-1939, co-editor Maria DiBattista explains that this book hopes to "inaugurate" "a 'new' cultural studies" and blithely sums up: "in short, we propose with this volume to rethink the modernist canon and to free modernist scholarship." If you peruse High and Low Moderns expecting it to liberate us all, you will probably be disappointed. In fact, this volume accomplishes something that is less dramatic, but more useful: it contributes to the growing body of recent scholarship which traces modernism's affiliations to "low" or popular culture (journalism, music-halls, commodity culture) and reveals modernism 's deep debts to Victorian ideas, texts, and genres. The modernists liked to say that they made a radical break with the past, and similarly DiBattista wants to argue that this volume "inaugurates a new cultural studies," but in fact High and Low Moderns is as intricately connected to previous work as it demonstrates the modernist canon to be. DiBattista acknowledges the influence of Varnedoe and Gopnik's High and Low Moderns and Brantlinger and Naremore's Modernity and Mass Culture, but she could well have added Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity and Thomas Strychacz's Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism to the list of those who are rethinking the modernist genre. And once the reader stops expecting a radical new criticism, it is possible to appreciate how valuable many of the essays in DiBattista and McDiarmid's volume really are. The volume offers several different ways of linking modernists and "low culture." Some of the contributors play with the classic "influence" study, showing how major authors and popular genres actually shaped each other. McDiarmid's "The Demotic Lady Gregory" reveals how Lady Gregory's dramas were shaped by prisoners' memoirs, and by her own psychological and erotic identifications with the figure of the felon. The article is not only persuasive, but beautifully written. Harvey Teres also 189 ELT 41 : 2 1998 places a major modernist in the context of a popular genre of writing. In "Remaking Marxist Criticism: Partisan Review's Eliotic Leftism," Teres brilliantly manages the most improbable of juxtapositions, showing how T. S. Eliot's principles were vital to revisionary Marxist criticism . Another outstanding article is Jay Dickson's "Surviving Victoria," the first essay in the volume. He argues that the death of Queen Victoria was a pivotal moment in the creation of modernism. To would-be modernist observers, Victoria's death represented the end of the era which bore her name, and Victoria posthumously came to embody all the despised, yet nostalgically idealized, domestic, imperial, and matriarchal virtues of the nineteenth century. All three of these articles offer admirably extensive historical evidence for their arguments. Other contributors find novel ways to connect high and low culture. In Edward Mendelson's "How Lawrence Corrected Wells; How Orwell Refuted Lawrence," H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence receive equal space and consideration, a technique which not only reveals unexpected connections between these writers, but subtly reinforces the message that they are both worth attention. Mendelson explores how Women in Love rewrites Tono-Bungay as Lawrence unconsciously grappled with the understanding of reality which had informed Wells's choices. Three other contributors, R. F. Foster, Chris GoGwilt, and Louis Menand, treat low culture figures and texts with the sort of attention and care normally reserved for canonical figures, proving that "Kitty O'Shea," R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Rudyard Kipling are worth subtle, accomplished close readings. GoGwilt, Menand And DiBattista deserve special notice for constructing elaborate paradigms within which to read their subjects. In "R. B. Cunninghame Graham and the Geography of Politics in the 1890s," GoGwilt introduces the concept of an imaginary geography to explain the ideological appeal of Cunninghame Graham. Though this paradigm is too allusive and...