Historical Modernisms

Challenging, thoughtful, and informative. * The Year's Work in English Studies *
Modernism, as Terry Eagleton points out in his witty foreword to this volume, “involves nothing less than the fashioning of whole new forms of human subjectivity.” But this emphasis on newness and nowness conceals the dependence of modernism on the past. Even Ezra Pound’s famous rallying cry “Make it new” implies a pre-existing “it” to be transformed anew. This volume brings together leading scholars to question the idea that modernism breaks free of the past or escapes what Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus calls “the nightmare of history.” Instead, these scholars show how modernism interrogates the methods and meanings of history, challenging any facile division between now and then. * Maud Ellmann, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago, USA. *
This is a magnificent collection which conjugates modernism and history in marvellously illuminating essays. Modernism often promised to awake from the nightmare of history but it found it difficult to ignore its own historical origins. These essays which range from a reflection on the small magazines in which modernist writing found its most congenial setting to a consideration of Andre Breton as an office manager emphasise the very specific histories in which the general category of modernism took shape. * Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh, USA *