The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms ed. by Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (review)

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms is an indispensable handbook for the new modernist studies. It reflects the contours of a field, which, from the 1990s onward, has steadily shifted from the internationalism of England, France, and Germany to an expansive engagement with non-European literatures; from a focus on high art to an investment in modes of exchange between elite and popular culture. Global modernism differs from its international predecessor in large part because it has adapted the lessons of postcolonial studies to its own methodologies even as the term “global” continues to raise suspicion within that adjacent field and will no doubt continue to do so. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough are aware of the potential land mines embedded in their keyword, which some might see as synonymous with imperialism and appropriation, but Wollaeger’s introduction convincingly addresses and, for the most part, eludes such collusions. The definition and practice of the global in Global Modernisms is “decentered comparison” (6), the object of which is to provincialize the cosmopolitan critic’s own position while drawing on strategies of enlargement, accumulation, and partial synthesis to expand modernism beyond a focus on any single region. With such a program and with such heft—Global Modernisms is 750 pages long—the volume might seem like something of a culmination or capstone to recent changes in the field. However, the book is more than that. Its twenty-eight essays enrich conversations within the new modernist studies with diverse geographical units of analysis, inventive modes of periodization, and a rigorous discourse on comparison itself. The volume is an exercise in meticulous historical recovery, theoretical innovation, and genuine collaboration among scholars housed within English, area studies, and comparative literature departments.

Although Wollaeger makes it clear in his introduction that the editors have not aimed for encyclopedic completeness, they do achieve an impressive comprehensiveness. Global modernism takes shape here through aesthetic production from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, eastern and central Europe, Scandinavia, and the Caribbean. The volume features studies of literature not just written in English, French, German, and Spanish but also Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hindi, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. In addition to being comparative, many essays also adopt transnational approaches. Some map genres like poetry, the little magazine, and film across diverse locations (see the essays by Jahan Ramazani, Eric Bulson, and Miriam Bratu Hansen), while others engage in the crucial work of recovering and reconstructing transnational networks among the modernists themselves (see the pieces by Gayle Rogers and Anna Westerståhl Stenport). Such approaches raise questions about what the modernist canon will look like in its “global” form. According to Wollaeger, long-standing figures of the older international modernism like T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann are “provisionally peripheral” in this volume, just as writers like Nigerian Ben Okri, Algerian Berber poet Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche, and Turkish writer Yahya Kemal Beyatli are “provisionally central” (6). This emphasis on provisionality may be a way of allaying anxieties about the western European canon, a reminder that studies of Eliot, Proust, and Mann will not stop being of interest just because new modernists are being identified in this study. Yet, I would argue that committing to provisionality is about more than just allaying anxiety. It is a field-defining element of global modernism. Like the ongoing discourse on world literature, the discourse on global modernism is not about generating a canon of set texts; it is about a way of reading that elevates contact and comparison across a growing modernist field. Global modernism is about method.

Indeed, methodological reflection is central not only to individual essays within the collection, but to the editors’ organization of it. This handbook is divided into eight categories, Wollaeger’s introduction, and an afterword by Laura Doyle. Each category names a conceptual problem, genre, or movement (e.g., “Forms of Sociality,” “Film as...