Précis Reviews

ELT 49 : 4 2006 Précis Reviews I Nadine Cooper University of North Carolina at Greensboro Seelow, David. Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud I Reich ID. H. Lawrence and Beyond. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 163 pp. $65.00 THE DIFFERENCE between a "threshold" and a "frontier," according to Seelow, is that "a threshold once crossed brings one into another clear distinct world whereas a frontier can keep moving without being crossed." Seelow considers Freud, Reich, and Lawrence to be "frontier thinkers" moving toward the vague boundaries of the postmodern; he defines these writers as "radical moderns" who form a "modernist triad" in taking a subversive stance against the norms that modern culture, influenced by industrialization, creates . The shifting attitude about sex and human relationships is the conduit through which Freud, Reich, and Lawrence maneuver, and Seelow makes a comparison to earlier "sex radicals" who functioned as societal prophets (the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier). Seelow investigates the influence of Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebbing's pioneering work in the study of modern sexuality , Psychopathia Sexualis, and posits that Freud, Lawrence, and Reich all position themselves on "the circumference of Krafft-Ebing's biological center ." For example, Seelow claims that Lawrence sees Freud as the "epitome" of the scientific view of sexuality, a "rational attitude that "destroys sexuality just as surely as censorship destroys it." Seelow sets out the premises for his argument in chapters one and two, describing the emergence of sexual discourse in the nineteenth century and considering how Reich is more closely allied to Lawrence through his "more optimistic and libertarian understanding of the body." Chapters three and four analyze Lawrence's works in depth with chapter four providing a close reading of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lastly, chapter five contemplates the postmodern writings of Jean Baudrillard and George Bataille with reference to Lawrence. Radical Modernism and Sexuality provides an erudite and well-organized study of three seemingly disparate writers who are linked by the "underlying affinity" of a radical agenda. Vickery, John B. The Modern Elegiac Temper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. ix + 251 pp. $45.00 IN HIS BROAD-RANGING STUDY, Vickery compellingly argues that the modern elegy is quite different from the elegiac tropes used by the Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian poets. In fact, Vickery asserts that the modern poets who employ an elegiac form are in many ways polar opposites from their predecessors in that the earlier poets are able to avail themselves of "the full resources of rhetoric" which they invoke "in order to match and reconcile the grief-stricken and the celebratory responses to the subject's death." Conversely, for the modern poet, there is no language that can fully encompass elegiac expression. Why such a difference? Vickery revisits the effects of twentiethcentury apocalyptic events—the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depres486 BOOK REVIEWS sion, the atomic bomb. In the works of twentieth-century poets, not only is there a fear that there is no satisfactory explanation for an individual loss, but also there is an emergent "anxiety and apprehension about the entirety of human life." One could make the argument, of course, that there is that anxiety within Renaissance writers (Donne, for example), and that the treatment of personal detail of a character who represents a cultural presence can be found in Homer 's Iliad, yet Vickery indicates that there is a keen sense of the inevitable, and often the futile, that so differentiates the modern poets from their elegiac precursors . Instead of panegyrics, the modern poet's touch on death and mourning is brief and oblique: "the confrontation with the fact and nature of the loss suffered, which forms a critical stage in the older elegiac form, is extended, deepened to a greater and more intimately individualized level of the psyche." What is most impressive about Vickery's study is his vast ability to reference so many poets to support his thesis; not only does he focus on a breadth of works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden but also brings in less-studied writers such as Edith Sitwell and George Barker. This is an important work for anyone interested in...