Modernism & Feminist Criticism

ELT 39:4 1996 sufficed) about that play, in order to understand why Lawrence might have referenced it. The blue bird of happiness motif is something I figured out on my own, my education not being a total loss; but even the most common allusions can escape us, as noted above. At any rate, the notes did provide useful commentary on the real-life personages who served as models in some sense for the characters in "Two Blue Birds," although I find it helpful to look into Harry T. Moore's biography and other secondary sources to supplement the information in the Cambridge edition. All teachers worth their salt use a multitude of resources when constructing and presenting a course ... of course! My ultimate assessment of the Cambridge edition of The Women Who Rode Away is that, all questions of cost and controversy aside, it is one of the most important and useful tools at hand for scholars and teachers alike. Judith Ruderman ___________ Duke University Modernism & Feminist Criticism Lisa Rado, ed. Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism . Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture, TV. New York: Garland, 1994. viii + 395 pp. $60.00 THE EYE of a busy scholar might well be caught by Rereading Modernism, which promises access to articles about current revisionist trends and discoveries in two lively areas, feminist criticism and modernist studies. Now that we have had a few decades to discuss altering critical directions and including marginalized or underappreciated authors, such revisionist approaches are most useful when they offer full and convincing demonstrations of how they work when applied to particular topics. This book offers some excellent material in this regard, particularly in the examples set by Lynette Felber, Margaret D. Stetz, Suzette Henke, Marianne DeKoven, and Bonnie Kime Scott, whose lucid approaches and careful explanations are highlights of the book and suggest ways that their particular methods might lead to broader applications. Overall, however, this volume does not provide much that is "new" either in modernist or in feminist studies—at least not enough to satisfy specialists. Editor Lisa Rado's introductory essay does a respectable job of identifying the main modes of critical inquiry that have predominated in feminist studies to date, particularly the divergence between critics who presume that separatism is essential to women's experiences and those 482 book Reviews who prefer to dispense with "gender" as a category necessary to analysis. However, Rado neglects to delineate the precise qualities by which she would define a truly "new" or revivified feminist critical project. Such a statement would be particularly helpful because the articles comprising the rest of the volume are uneven in style and methodology. This unevenness is unfortunately reflected in Rado's own rhetoric. When Rado observes, for instance, that "these days it is a commonplace to point out that feminist theory has gone from the marginal to the mainstream," her claim is undercut by language that problematizes feminist critical projects, as when she presumes there is a "growing sense of fissure, destabilization, and discord in the ranks" of feminists (6-7), which many feminists may not feel to be the case. As well, Rado's equation of experimental writing by modernist women with a "gendered avant garde" is misleading, particularly if one expects that a volume of new feminist criticism might include an attempt to discard binarism as an inevitable constituent of gender. As a brief overview of ways in which feminist theories have developed in recent years, Rado's piece offers a useful summary as well as an implicit demonstration of the need for critics continually to reassess their methodologies and language. After the introduction, the volume is divided into three sections, the first two of which announce approaches to "rereading modernism" and "rereading feminist criticism" respectively. These supposedly new methods of "rereading"—arguing for inclusion of overlooked or underappreciated writers, or using unexpected juxtapositions in building critical frameworks—are already familiar to scholars and, while still helpful, do not offer the sort of radically revised methodology that Rado's readers expect. The third section, consisting of four articles under the not-veryenlightening heading "New Directions," shows the strain of editorial jump-cutting...