Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences ed. by Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson, Mark Sandy (review)

The moment is clearly ripe for a full-scale reconsideration of twentieth-century literature, beyond the confines of modernism, however capaciously defined. Recent critical studies have challenged the boundaries between “Victorian” and “modernist” literature, unearthing continuities between aestheticism, decadence, and modernism.¹ The narrative of literature in the early decades of the twentieth century is shifting away from the decisive rupture between “modernist” and “non-modernist” towards a vision of continuity and connection. To borrow a Woolfian image, we are increasingly inclined to imagine Arnold Bennett and Woolf as occupying (however ambivalently) the same railway carriage, although they might be ultimately headed to different destinations.

Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences aims to present a wide and varied picture of twentieth-century literature that is not confined or defined by modernism, although it occasionally encompasses or overlaps with it. The introduction makes a compelling case for the role of coteries in defining modernism in terms of “inside” and “outside,” productively uncovering tensions within modernist cliques. Through reconstructing the process of canon formation, the introduction reveals how modernism came to dominate narratives of twentieth-century writing, turning other approaches into marginalized “dissenting voices” (2). To counteract this distorted narrative, the collection’s authors seek to reconstruct “how the avant-garde felt for people within the period,” including those outside of it, or on the margins (10). While acknowledging the significance of experiments with vers libre in poetry and realism in fiction, the volume “attempts to see those gestations anew without the heavy filters of New Critical and post-1960s academic canon-building” (9). By considering works that offer alternative responses to modernity outside of modernism, the collection builds a picture of a diverse twentieth-century literature in which modernism is only one of several aesthetic developments.

The ensuing fourteen chapters do not always live up to this enticing premise. While some authors aim to argue certain texts or writers into established modernist canons, others propose an alternative set of values through which to address their subject. In terms of the former approach, “modernism” itself remains a fixed category, with outsider authors being positioned (and valued) in relation to it. The most successful essays are those which genuinely consider their subject on its own terms, in refreshed, nuanced contexts.

The volume subsections are somewhat arbitrary. This is certainly true of Part I, entitled “Unsettled Voices: Imaginative and Cultural Encounters.” This section might more accurately be titled “Male Poets of the Twentieth Century.” Andrew Hodgson’s chapter on “Rhetoric and Feeling in Rupert Brooke” offers a convincing re-reading of Brooke’s poetry, often dismissed for its patriotic sentimentalism. Through a series of deft close readings, Hodgson shows how an ear for irony is essential to grasping the complex tone of Brooke’s works, which have often been misread as one-dimensional earnestness. Hodgson’s essay offers a genuinely new perspective on this ‘rhetorical’ poet that could be productively applied to other, similarly misconstrued poets. The following two essays are less revelatory. Mark Sandy’s essay draws comparisons between Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and the Romantic poets, particularly Shelley (the Keatsian echoes are more obvious, though Sandy seems hesitant to pursue this connection). However, the significance of such continuities to twentieth-century poetics is left implicit, with the essay instead devoted to listing intertextual examples. Michael O’Neill’s essay considers the poetic “I” in Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Stephen Spender, who all exhibit sustained confidence in poetic subjectivity (in contrast to the Eliotian suspicion of “personality”). Again, although the poetic readings are detailed, they are not fully embedded within contexts of the poets’ career development or the poetic cultures of the twentieth century, and thus the wider significance of the argument remains unclear.

In Part II, “Dissenting Voices: Aestheticism, Gender and the Art of Identity,” Katharine Cockin addresses the fascinating artist, writer and occultist Pamela Colman Smith. Cockin...