Modernism and Literature: An Introduction and Reader edited by Mia Carter and Alan Warren Friedman, and: A Handbook of Modernism Studies edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (review)

Where’s Wallace? A Stevensian scanning the crowded pages of two recent state-of-the-art surveys of literary modernism may feel a bit like a toddler straining to spot the familiar round glasses and red-and-white-striped cap of the nomadic Waldo, perpetually lost within a succession of densely populated landscapes. Here the landscapes include the well-charted cosmopolitan terrain of high modernism, its capitals in London and Paris, its outposts in Dublin, New York, and Frankfurt (little room for a backwater like Hartford on this map). Among the figures thronging these storied streets and cafés are such familiar titans as Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and Eliot, along with a host of other European luminaries. Theorists and philosophers, both contemporaneous and contemporary, occupy many nooks and crannies, with Benjamin and Adorno especially ubiquitous. Several groups more recently included in cartographies of modernism are also strongly in evidence: Anglophone writers from Africa, India, and the Caribbean, and African Americans associated with the Harlem Renaissance (the latter in fact serving as the primary representatives of U. S. literary culture in these volumes).

While the two books are quite distinct in conception, they’re remarkably similar in size and appearance, despite having different publishers. Both are heavy tomes that feature black covers with minimal graphics, evoking the stark Bauhaus side of modernist aesthetics rather than the more efflorescent style Stevens tends to favor. Both are formidably wide-ranging anthologies: Modernism and Literaturegathers essays by modernist writers and their contemporaries, generously supplemented by editorial introductions, head notes, bibliographies, and other apparatus; A Handbook of Modernism Studiescomprises twenty-five chapters by many of the leading scholars associated with the New Modernist Studies. Given the sheer scale of these collections, it’s somewhat perplexing that so little attention is devoted to Stevens, a poet whose stature has risen steadily since mid-century. He is not among the nearly seventy essayists represented in Modernism and Literature(his name appears three times in editorial matter, always as part of a list), though Pound and Eliot each get two slots. And while Jean-Michel Rabaté twice lists Stevens among the “usual suspects” of modernism in his editor’s introduction, only one piece in A Handbook of Modernism Studiescites him, and then only for two sentences. Maud Ellmann’s essay “More Kicks than Pricks” offers an engaging account of what she playfully calls “podiatric modernism,” with Stevens getting a cameo appearance, via the “horny feet” of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” in a chapter whose primary instances are Joyce and Beckett.

Stevens is by no means the only literary figure of note who proves hard to find in these collections. American poets in general receive remarkably short shrift here, with the conspicuous exceptions of Pound and Eliot, and, to a lesser extent, H. D. and Stein, expats all. William Carlos Williams fares slightly better than Stevens, receiving two paragraphs of commentary in Bill Brown’s chapter, “Materialities of Modernism.” Though both collections clearly set out to grant women writers considerable space, Marianne Moore is almost nowhere to be found. Similarly, efforts to incorporate queer perspectives do not yield a place for Hart Crane. Most striking, perhaps, is the complete occlusion of Robert Frost, whose name appears nowhere in either volume. While Frost’s relationship to modernism has always been ambiguous, one might expect the pioneer of vernacular “sentence sounds” to warrant at least a passing mention in these pages. And though Joyce and Woolf are major presences throughout, American novelists barely register; even Faulkner gets a mere name-check. It would perhaps be cynical to detect a programmatic bias against American modernists (especially those who stayed home) in these books from British publishing houses. It might be truer to say that the modernist label has never adhered as securely to...