Continuity, Not Rupture: A New Vision for T-20 Studies American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity ed. by Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith (review)

In American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity, editors Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith approach modernity as a category that requires dismantling. The editors' well-argued introduction positions the book in dialogue with scholars like Cody Marrs, Christopher Hager, Eric Hayot, and Wai Chee Dimock, all of whom have challenged received notions of space and place. The mission to help readers see modernity as a period that contains and continues the past rather than rupturing it is an especially challenging one given how constantly the separateness of the "modern" gets reinforced in everyday vocabulary. Rhetoricians ranging from undergraduate writers to presidential candidates use the phrase "modern times" to refer to something vague and undefined; sometimes the phrase seems to encompass everything since the advent of the assembly line, while at other times it seems to indicate the post-Bezos era. Always, though, it means something decisively separate from what came before. Yet readers of Dawson and Goldsmith's collection may begin to see Ezra Pound's famous dictate to "make it new" with fresh, skeptical eyes, and come to understand that many writers at the turn of the twentieth century—or "T-20," the preferred shorthand used in this collection—perpetuated traditions of form, content, and style from the nineteenth century and blended those traditions with new ones, not merely due to old-fashioned tastes but for deliberate, strategic reasons.

The volume is organized in three sections: "Literary Pasts and Presents," "Contrasting Cultures," and "Gender, Marriage, and Sexuality." The collection's nine essays take on topics as diverse as non-teleological time in Sister Carrie (Myrto Drizou), student poetry in Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Cristina Stanciu), ideology surrounding companionate marriage (Melanie V. Dawson and Donna M. Campbell), and female sexuality in popular fiction (Dale M. Bauer). Despite only one of the three sections overtly referencing gender, I counted six out of nine essays in this collection that could be classified under feminism and gender studies, making these disciplines a sort of unofficial thread running through the text. Of these six essays, several reveal the extent to which the T-20 literary world continued its inhospitality to female authors; in this way, it neglected an obvious opportunity for the kind of transformational action many T-20 authors purportedly wanted to undertake.

Karin L. Hooks's "Sarah Piatt and the Construction of Literary History," for instance, serves a dual recovery purpose: it simultaneously discusses neglected poet Sarah Piatt and two neglected female literary historians, Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Leonard Gilder, who promoted Piatt's career while their male counterparts passed her over. The idea that men propped up the careers of other men at the exclusion of women should hardly come as a revelation to readers, but Hooks's essay adds an important layer to this familiar pattern: the very men often praised for and described in classrooms as "making it new" in the T-20 landscape often played a central role in keeping things exactly as they always had been. By erasing the work of progressive literary historians like Hutchinson and Gilder, Hooks shows, many current literary historians look past an essential way that the T-20 literary world actually was making new its enterprise, and instead choose to reinscribe more familiar male-dominated forms of transformation. Progressive voices who chose to elevate women's writing existed—we have just forgotten many of them.

In another essay that foregrounds female authorship and its relationship to progressivism in the T-20 landscape, Kristen Renzi dissects Jane Addams's complicated relationship with a phantom that came to interrupt her time running Hull House: the "Devil Baby." While the essay does not make clear (perhaps because Addams herself did not know) why this phantom was thought to haunt Hull...