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  • Making it New?
  • Charlotte Charteris (bio)
The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers edited by Maren Tova Linett. Cambridge University Press, 2010. £50 hb; £17.99 pb. ISBN 9 7805 2151 5054

In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, editor Maren Tova Linett outlines with clarity what she sees as the aims and achievements of the collection. Briefly acknowledging the debt owed by herself and her fellow contributors to the feminist critics of the 1980s and 1990s, she emphasises the volume's efforts to depart from simplistic models of female modernism as inherently 'different' from its male counterpart, and to convey instead an understanding of women's modernism as the product of changing historical, intellectual, and political contexts experienced and assimilated by both men and women. This collection, she asserts, contributes to this more 'nuanced account by seeking to understand women's modernism in its own terms. It does not excessively compare women's modernism to men's, but neither does it shy away from acknowledging areas in which women's modernism does speak back to, or simply speak to, modernism practised by men'. Arguing for a variety of approaches to literature within women's modernism — though seemingly unwilling (as are most of her contributors) to speculate upon whether these divergent approaches in fact constitute a multiplicity of 'modernisms' or, indeed, upon what might be the broader implications of [End Page 188] such plurality — Linett highlights the range of writers considered in the volume 'whether or not their work is evidently and formally experimental', and stresses that they are discussed there because they all 'break new ground by approaching modernity from women's perspectives, as diverse as those perspectives turn out to be'.

Linett thus positions this Cambridge Companion within the expanding realm of the 'new modernist studies' which demonstrate that 'there is much more to modernism than was apparent when analysis of "the men of 1914" with occasional mention of Virginia Woolf dominated courses and conferences about modernist literature'. It is at times, however, quite tempting to characterise this collection as an analysis of Virginia Woolf with occasional mention of her literary favourites: of thirteen chapters (including Linett's introduction) only five fail either to make reference to or to quote from Woolf within their opening paragraphs. Nonetheless, the volume does attempt to contribute to the expansion of the accepted canon of women's modernism, as Linett explains, 'along the axes of location and time'. The volume, she argues, 'reaches toward a transnational account of modernist literary production in English' and 'participates in the parallel temporal expansion of modernist studies'. The Cambridge Companion is broadly successful in achieving these aims, particularly when considered alongside comparable texts such as the hefty Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) edited by David Bradshaw as part of the Blackwell Companions series. One cannot help wishing on occasion, though, that the critics featured in the Cambridge Companion were a little more aggressive in their approach, reaching out and grabbing, rather than tentatively reaching towards, the authors and locations (both temporal and spatial) that might expand the modernist canon.

The twelve chapters proper of the Cambridge Companion are separated by Linett into two sections, the first constituted of four articles dealing with questions of genre and modes of production. Bonnie Kime Scott discusses the transformation of the novel, Miranda Hickman the problem of form as encountered and resolved by female modernist poets, Penny Farfan considers women's modernism in performance and Jayne Marek the little magazines, presses, and salons central to women's cultural and intellectual exchange during the early twentieth century. A second section, comprising the remaining eight chapters, is dedicated to introducing and engaging with a variety of contextual and thematic issues. Women's writing of the modernist era is discussed in this latter, weightier section in relation to gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, political activism, visual culture, trauma, and religion and spirituality. By organising the collection in this way Linett avoids many of the discontinuities engendered in critical [End Page 189] companions that are arranged schematically around apparently sealed readings of isolated texts — articles on specific modernist publications, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Mina Loy's Lunar...

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