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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Modernism

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Modernism by Suzanne Hobson LAST REVIEWED: 20 September 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 20 September 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0042

Modernism is an area of literary research particularly subject to contest and revision. Most studies converge on the period between 1890 and 1940 in their attempts to date modernism, but there is wide variation, with some accounts stretching this time frame back to the early 19th century and others forward to the beginning of the 21st century. For the major touchstones, there has long been consensus over the inclusion of writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, and that would now probably extend to the likes of H.D., Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence. But there has historically been less agreement over whether avant-garde movements such as the futurists and Dadaists should appear in the “canon” of modernism, or whether “high” modernism is inherently hostile to the kinds of mass cultural and political movements with which these groups engaged. More recent studies have pointed out that if modernism is to include writers outside the usual metropolitan locations of Berlin, London, New York, and Paris, then it needs to become a more flexible and polycentric category that is less firmly attached to a period that favors Western—and more specifically English-language—writing. Modernism has always had a close relationship with the academy, making it particularly susceptible to changes in critical approach. It entered the academy along with the New Criticism in the United States and Practical Criticism in the United Kingdom, both formalist approaches that modernist poetry seemed to legitimate and, insofar as it resists easy reading, to demand. Modernism has also been usefully subjected to, and sometimes seemed to anticipate, the rigors of feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, post-structuralist, and cultural studies readings. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine feminist literary theory without Woolf, or Derridean deconstruction without Joyce. This bibliography provides a sense of the way that modernist studies has evolved over the last fifty years or so, and how this has changed the scope and the makeup of the category of modernist literature itself.

The earliest overviews of modernism tended to emphasize formal innovation and experimentation in poetry, following the example of the Cambridge school in the United Kingdom and the New Critics in the United States. Wilson 1931 and Leavis 1932 (the latter cited under Poetry ) are often mentioned as the first examples of monographs on modernist writers. Modernism is still closely identified with a set of formal characteristics, including emphasis on the fragment, inconsequential events, contingent and weak plots, literary impressionism, stream of consciousness, in medias res beginnings, incomplete endings, unstable or partial focalization, and unreliable narrators. Personalities and influence have also played a major role in overviews of modernism. The first major book in this category was Kenner 1971 , which identified modernism with Ezra Pound and the group of writers who gathered around Pound in the 1910s, especially T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. Revisionist studies, including Scott 1995a and Scott 1995b , have emphasized the influence of women writers, including Virginia Woolf and H.D., while other overviews have adopted a flat and pluralist (rather than hierarchical) approach to networks or groups. Levenson 1995 traces the genealogical roots of Eliot’s and Pound’s modernism back to French political and philosophical thought, and to now largely forgotten figures such as T. E. Hulme and Allen Upward. Goldman 2004 looks forward to see how affiliations formed in the 1910s and 1920s were renegotiated in response to the changed political and artistic landscape of the 1930s and 1940s. From the 1970s onward, overviews of modernism tended to stress cultural upheaval and crisis as the background and driving force behind modernist innovation and critique. Bradbury and McFarlane 1991 (originally published in 1979) set the standard for subsequent accounts of modernism as a code-switch developed in response to a sense of wider cultural catastrophe. More recent studies play down the emphasis on crisis, preferring to show how modernist developments in the representation of character, events, objects, space, and time respond to changes in, and in attitudes toward, the matrix of narratives—personal, familial, imperial, national, religious, artistic, sexual—that formed public culture at this time. A variation on this approach, seen in North 1999 , is to focus on a particular year as a limited test case of the relationship between modernist cultural production and the public scene to which it belonged. For more on this kind of approach, see Cultural and Material Histories . The essays in Eysteinsson and Liska 2007 show how modernism developed unevenly throughout the world—sometimes independently, sometimes with reference to a “global” movement in the arts, and always showing evidence of regional or national influences.

Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 . London: Penguin, 1991.

A seminal overview of modernism as a literature of crisis and upheaval. For Bradbury and McFarlane, modernist literature represents a cataclysmic break with the civilization and the culture of the past. Originally published in 1976.

Eysteinsson, Astradur, and Vivian Liska, eds. Modernism . 2 vols. Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.

A collection of essays looking at modernism in an international context. Here, “modernism” is treated flexibly to cover diversity in the ways modernist cultural production is understood, periodized, and translated across different languages and cultures.

Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

A guide to some of the major transitions that determined the background, the content, and some of the formal innovations of modernist texts. Goldman interrogates the thinking behind the demand for change as well as the backlash against some modernist tendencies, including the patriarchal bias and political conservatism that led to regroupings in the 1930s and 1940s.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era . London: Faber, 1971.

A foundational book for the study of modernism as a historically specific and recognizable literary project beginning in London in 1914 and most closely associated with the experimental work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. Influential in returning Pound to prominence after World War II.

Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Detailed study of the intellectual roots and political and aesthetic affiliations of the individuals and groups that emerged in the 1910s and early 1920s.

North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

An important attempt to return modernism to the public world from which earlier studies had sometimes removed it. The year 1922 is a “test case” allowing for detailed investigation of key events and debates alongside the major works published that year ( The Waste Land and Ulysses ).

Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism . Vol. 1, The Women of 1928 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995a.

Redraws the map and chronology of modernism to give precedence to the women who had been neglected in earlier overviews of the period.

Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism . Vol. 2, Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995b.

Influential in promoting new scholarship on writers such as Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D.

Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 . New York: Scribner, 1931.

Often identified as the first monograph on the modernists, who in this version find their origins in the symbolists. Contains individual chapters on W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.

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8 Classic Works of Modernist Literature Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle

‘A literary movement’, the Irish novelist George Moore once observed, ‘consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.’ Few literary movements better exemplify Moore’s point than modernism. Modernism was a hugely significant movement in art, literature, architecture, and music in the early twentieth century.

In this post, we’ve attempted to condense English-language modernist literature into eight key works of poetry and prose. We reckon a reader looking to take a crash-course in modernist writing could do worse than seek out these finest, defining works of literature.

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness .

First published in three instalments in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, and then in book form in 1902, Heart of Darkness thus straddles the Victorian and ‘modern’ eras: it first appeared when Victoria was still on the throne, but by the time the book version was published, Britain had a new monarch and was firmly in a new century.

This novella examines the evils of Belgian imperialism in Africa, but also interrogates the very nature of storytelling itself – and all that comes with it, whether truth, trust, the reliability of language to convey one’s experiences, and a whole host of other quasi-metaphysical issues.

The book also inspired the 1979 film Apocalypse Now about a modern ‘imperialistic’ mission, namely the American presence in Vietnam. Mr Kurtz became Colonel Kurtz.

2. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land .

This 1922 long poem features (as it must) in our pick of Eliot’s best poems , and it’s one of the landmark works of modernist literature – perhaps the most important poem in all of modernism.

A medley of Arthurian legend, Greek myth, quotations from Shakespeare, jazz rhythms, and Wagner – among much else besides – the poem as we have it was beaten into shape by Ezra Pound, to whom Eliot dedicated the final poem.

We offer a detailed summary and analysis of the poem here .

3. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please’.

Written during WWI and focusing on the men and women who work on the trams in Nottingham, ‘Tickets, Please’ examines the shifting gender roles in the early twentieth century and the latent desires and impulses which Freudian psychoanalysis had lain bare.

If you need another reason to read this short story, the principal male character is named John Thomas, after a slang term for ‘penis’. Typical Lawrence.

You can read our analysis of the story here.

4. Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’.

Like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound was born in the United States but moved to Europe – and London – as a young man. His two most famous works are among the longest and shortest in canonical ‘English’ literature: The Cantos runs to nearly a thousand pages, while ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) is just two lines in length (you can read it online here ; we offer an in-depth commentary on Pound’s poem here ).

It’s one of the defining poems of the imagist movement in modern poetry, which would pave the way for later, more ambitious works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land (as well as ‘ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ‘, which, although not imagist, reflects some of the central principles of imagism).

5. Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’.

This story has variously been described as a satire on literary criticism and simply ‘a joke’. It is narrated by a rather odd and self-absorbed critic for a fictional newspaper; this narrator is told by a leading novelist, Hugh Vereker, that he – Vereker – has concealed a ‘secret’ within all of his fiction.

Every one of his novels contains this secret which, like a thread in a Turkish carpet, has been so carefully woven into the fabric of the novel that only the most careful reader will find it.

The story that ensues is part mystery, part detective story, part exposé of the worst aspects of the literary world. We have offered an analysis of it here .

6. James Joyce, Ulysses .

Published in the annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922, Ulysses is Joyce’s masterpiece . It’s also one of the best modernist novels ever written. The novel is a retelling of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey , about Greek hero Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan Wars (a journey which took him ten years, but which Joyce condenses to a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904).

7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway .

Like Joyce’s Ulysses , this novel is set over the course of one day, in June 1923. And, like Joyce’s work, it’s one of the finest modernist novels in the English language.

Originally titled ‘The Hours’, Mrs Dalloway is perhaps Woolf’s best-known work . Indeed, the structure of Woolf’s novel was inspired by her reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. Woolf liked the idea of writing a novel set over the course of just one day.

But Woolf had her reservations about Joyce’s obsession with what she saw as the more squalid side of life – sex and bodily functions – and went as far as to describe Ulysses as ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. Her approach to the ‘one-day novel’, then, would be different.

The character of Mrs Dalloway didn’t make her debut in Mrs Dalloway (1925). She’d first appeared in print a decade before, in Woolf’s first ever published novel, The Voyage Out , in 1915. (This was a very conventional novel in comparison with Woolf’s later novels such as Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse , and The Waves .)

8. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’.

Katherine Mansfield was the one writer Virginia Woolf was jealous of, according to Woolf herself. Mansfield never wrote a full-length novel, but wrote a number of classic modernist short stories.

This story, from 1920, is probably her most famous: it focuses on a young woman, Laura Sheridan, whose family is holding a garden party at their home in New Zealand. Shortly before the guests arrive, tragedy strikes: one of their neighbours from the poor part of the village dies in an accident.

The story is told in a spare, simple style, but with moments of trademark modernist features: in particular, stream of consciousness and the idea of the ‘epiphany’ or moment of consciousness.

We’ve offered a short summary and analysis of ‘The Garden Party’ here.

If you enjoyed this pick of the best works of modernist literature, you might also enjoy our short modernist poems everyone should read .

Image (top): T. S. Eliot (picture credit: Ellie Koczela, 2015), Wikimedia Commons . Image (bottom): Mrs Dalloway , London, Hogarth Press, 1925 ; Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

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10 thoughts on “8 Classic Works of Modernist Literature Everyone Should Read”

Reblogged this on nativemericangirl's Blog .

Well, read half of them.

I think one can overdo with such focus on the past. Great mind, or not, there are plenty of present problems which could be solved instead.

The Modernist movement has become my favourite literary time period to study-the experimentalism and the growth within the feminist movement makes for such diverse and compelling reading. These picks are great, although I have to admit that I do find Ulysses a difficult read, ‘Dubliners’ is a much more accessible option of Joyce’s.

Must get round to tackling Ulysses again! Pale Fire by Nabokov isnt up there with the others but nevertheless, a modernist/post modernist book of some fascination!

The Modernist movement is our last unit of study. I draw attention to how WWI changed creativity’s output forever. This selections reflect the horror felt by the artists of that time period.

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The more I revisit it, the more convinced I am of the brilliance of Heart of Darkness.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of divergent tendencies within a longer period, from the 1890s to the present. Modernism is an international movement, erupting in different countries at different times; in fact, one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of national and generic boundaries. My main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism. As a historically descriptive term, then, “modernism” is misleading not only because of its varying applications (to the historical period or to a highly organized style characteristic of some but not all writers of the period) but also because it is typically more evaluative than descriptive. In its positive sense, “modernism” signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and an experimental investigation into the future. As a negative value, “modernism” has connoted an incoherent, even opportunistic heterodoxy, an avoidance of the discipline of tradition. This critical overtone has sounded periodically since the eighteenth century, from the time that Jonathan Swift, in A Tale of a Tub (1704), lampooned the “modernists” as those who would eschew the study of the ancients through the late-nineteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic church, which was labeled “modernist” and condemned as the “synthesis of all the heresies” in the papal encyclical Pascendi of Pope Pius X (1907). It is interesting to note that in the recent debates over modernism versus postmodernism, the characteristic unorthodoxy of modernism has been displaced onto the postmodern; in a motivated reversal, modernism is characterized as the corrupt, canonized orthodoxy (identified, misleadingly, with the new critcism attributed to T. S. Eliot, among others), with postmodernism as its experimental offshoot.

The project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is vexed not only by the imprecision and contradictory overtones of the word “modernist” but also by the category “theory.” Certainly many modernist writers wrote criticism: Virginia Woolf published hundreds of essays and reviews; W. B. Yeats’s most important literary criticism has been collected in Essays and Introductions ; Ezra Pound’s voluminous criticism is well known for its informality and directness; Eliot was as important a critic, especially in his later years, as he was a poet. But the most interesting theoretical dimension of modernist writing is not always explicitly presented as either criticism or theory but is instantiated in the writing itself; the theory can be deduced, however controversially, from the practice.

One axiom of modernist theory that was importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913-14, posthumously published in Speculations , 1924) is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism. Hulme argues: “The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas” (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a cheerful “dry hardness” (126). He asserts that “it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (131); Hulme’s preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are “intensive” rather than extensive (139).

Hulme’s sounding of the note of classical style as one that is local, limited, intensive, and fresh resonates widely through the work of other modernist writers. Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” Eliot’s objective correlative (“Hamlet,” 1919, Selected Prose 48), James Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being, and the explosive power of the concrete image celebrated in Imagism are all instances of a “classical” technique, a preference for the local and well-defined over the infinite. In Dubliners, Joyce defined the sickness of modern life as paralysis, a loss of local control, and he set about designing his fiction in a way that requires the reader to understand its individual, local parts before the whole can assume a meaningful shape.

The classical style is characteristic of much, but not all, modernist writing (D. H. Lawrence’s work being one well-known exception). However, the classical theory begins to bifurcate, producing political implications that are diametrically opposed, when the insistence on finitude is applied to the individual. Both groups of classical writers accepted the view that the individual is limited, but one group, which included Woolf, Joyce, and Yeats, began to develop a theory of supplemental “selves” that points toward a celebration of diversity as antidote to individual limitation. In Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf has Clarissa propose a theory that she is many things and many people, “so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them” (1925, reprint, 1981, 52-53). Yeats worked out an analogous idea in his theory of the anti-self in “Per Arnica Silentia Lunae” (1917), a notion that each individual is implicit in his or her opposite, which eventuated in the complex theory of interlocking personality types outlined in A Vision (1925, rev. ed., 1937). In Ulysses (1922), Joyce also pursues the idea that the self is luxuriously heterogeneous, a heterogeneity brought to the surface by multiple encounters with difference. He makes his hero an apostate Jew who is defined on either extreme by a “spoiled priest” and an adulterous woman, and in these slippages between limited individuals he celebrates such limits, such insufficiencies, as conditions of communal possibility. As Stephen Dedalus explains in the library, the varied world represents the potential scope of a disunited selfdom: “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” ( Ulysses , 1922, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 1984, chap. 9,11.1044-46).

The same recognition of the limitation of the individual produced in other modernist writers an insistence on strict, authoritarian regulation of the individual, the germ of fascist tendencies for which the movement became notorious. Hulme again articulates the premises of this position: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (116). He speaks of liberty and revolution as essentially negative things, citing the French Revolution as evidence that when you remove the restraints on individuals, what emerges is their destructiveness and greed. Like Eliot, Hulme appreciated religion for its power to control human depravity through traditional order.

The problem with controlling “human depravity” through institutional restrictions is that the controlling “order” tends to legislate sameness, so that some orders of existence are seen as preferable to—less depraved than—others. And this is where the seams of “classical” modernist theory split: not over the limited nature of humanity, but over the question of the value of difference. The split was a jagged one; some writers, such as Pound, could cultivate difference in their writing and denounce it in society (as he did in his infamous radio broadcasts of the 1930s). The different premium accorded to ethnic, social, religious, and sexual differences by writers who agreed on the limited nature of the individual, however, explains how the offensive tirades of Wyndham Lewis and the brilliant feminism of Woolf, the anti-Semitic propaganda of Pound and the Jewish hero of Joyce’s Ulysses could stem from the same “classical” root.

Virginia Woolf

In a period that was to culminate in World War II, racism was an inevitably controversial issue. The related cause of feminism was also hotly debated during the period, since women had only been granted suffrage after World War I (1920 in the United States, 1928 in Great Britain). Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own , details clearly and unpolemically the historical and material restrictions on women that prevented them from full participation in artistic and professional life. Her best illustration of the greater circumstantial constraints on women is her invention of a wonderfully gifted sister for Shakespeare named Judith, his counterpart in everything but freedom and opportunity. Woolf outlines what would have happened to this young girl if she had wanted to act in London, as her brother did; she sketches in the ridicule to which she would have been subjected, the ease with which more experienced men could have taken advantage of her, and the passion with which, upon finding herself with child, she would have killed herself: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (1929, reprint, 1981, 48). Woolf’s main argument is that women need space—a room of their own—and economic freedom (a fixed income) for their hitherto pinched genius to flourish.

Finally, no discussion of modernist criticism and theory is complete without an account of the collapse of plot and its replacement by intertextual allusion and the “stream of consciousness.” In a much-cited review of Joyce’s Ulysses called “ Ulysses , Order and Myth” (1923) Eliot argued that developments in ethnology and psychology, and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough , had made it possible to replace the narrative method with what he called the “mythical method,” which was first adumbrated by Yeats. The mythical method works not through narrative but through allusion to different mythical narratives that, when fleshed out and juxtaposed, illuminate both the text in which they appear and each other in surprising and often revisionary ways. For example, Yeats’s early poetry worked to contextualize his hopeless love for Maud Gonne within the competing and mutually reinforcing contexts of Greek myth (Helen of Troy) and Celtic myth (Deirdre of the Sorrows; the magic of the Sidhe). In Ulysses , the main mythic parallels are the Odyssey and Hamlet , although individual episodes are further complicated by allusions to other intersecting narratives, historical, fictional, or mythic. Eliot’s The Waste Land provides the densest illustration of the mythical method, where the range of allusion includes a variety of Christian, Greek, occult, Scandinavian, Judaic, and Buddhist references, as well as allusions to music, drama, literature, and history.

Eliot chose to highlight myth as the key to modernist stylistics, but actually myth was just one category of narrative accessed through allusion; one might say that all kinds of narratives were situated behind the page, identifiable only through “tags” in the text, and that the interplay between these narratives produces a submerged commentary on it that imitates the pressure of the cultural unconscious (in narrativized form) on any individual performance. The stream-of-consciousness technique is yet another way of drawing the reader’s attention from conscious, deliberate, intentionalized discourse to the pressure of the unsaid on the said, of the repressed on the expressed. The apparent randomness of associative thought prompts the reader to question the submerged “logic” of connection, to listen for the unconscious poetry of repressed desire. This attention to the unknown as the shadow of the known is reversed in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , in which it is the known that is obscured by the highly organized distortions of language and history as processed by the unconscious mind and the “mudmound” of the past. It is no surprise, in light of this sensitivity to the muted voice of the unconscious in the literature of the period, that another great modernist theorist was Sigmund Freud .

In fact, the opposing political tendencies of modernist writers bear a significant relationship to their different attitudes toward the unconscious. Bounded by the eruption of two world wars, the modernist period can be read as a historical enactment of the tension between Friedrich Nietzsche ‘s Apollonian and Dionysian forces. The Dionysian power of the unconscious was making itself felt, and the writers who sought to contain or deny it through the Apollonian power of civic or religious authority were, like Pentheus in the Bacchae , torn apart. Others sought to express the creative potential of the unconscious, its capacity to unify without homogenization, to proliferate via division, and it is the writing of this group that is most animated by the zest of manifold contradictions. As Yeats wrote near the end of his career in the voice of a crazed old woman,

‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff When on Love intent; But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’

(“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition , ed. Richard J. Finneran, 1983, rev. ed., 1989, 259-60)

Bibliography T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923, reprinted in Selected Prose of T S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 1975);T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (ed. Herbert Read, 1924, 2d ed., 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927); Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism, 1900-1970 (1972); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929, reprint, 1981); W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1961), Mythologies (1959). Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (1984); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (1985); Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Article contents

Contemporary fiction and modernism.

Ryan Trimm Ryan Trimm University of Rhode Island
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.186
Published online: 28 March 2018

Modernism stands as the signal literary upheaval of the long 20th century, and yet the tenuousness of its appeal to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound commanded, entails the period or periods that follow are likewise uncertain save in their reference to modernism. However, even here there is ambivalence: contemporary authors might be charted regarding their modernist literary forebears, yet many explicitly reject modernist methods altogether; others continue this legacy, and still more look to complexly incorporate and negotiate modernist methods. Likewise, theoretical accounts of postwar fiction mark what comes after in reference to modernism: postmodernism, post-postmodernism, and the like. Modernism’s outsize shadow stems from its association with literary experimentation, aesthetic innovations elevating its austere emphasis on form above such traditional concerns as telling stories and creating characters. Though swaths of Anglophone fiction reject these modernist impulses and return to realist narratives, contemporary fiction must also be viewed as occurring within an era in which modernism has become institutionalized in university reading lists and the practices of their creative writing programs. Fiction after modernism thus might be best viewed as encompassing competing impulses, often within the same text or author: to revert to traditional modes of storytelling and thereby reject modernism; to borrow aspects of modernist technique but develop them so form might convey not only a sense of interior experience or textuality but also situate characters and texts socially (and globally); and to return afresh to those literary experiments, investing them with new relevance. These divided relations between contemporary fiction and aesthetic modernism underscore a complex and conflicted temporality operative within the very conceptions of both modernism and the contemporary.

contemporary fiction
postmodernism
post-postmodernism
20th-century

Fredric Jameson warns “we cannot not periodize,” an obligation incurring a rhetoric of ruptures and continuities. 1 However, such exercises must be equivocal fictions, less an exact distinguishing of how one literary species begat another and more a useful fudge enabling discussion of how rough groupings of texts relate to each other in some sequence of development and divergence. These difficulties are all the more salient in discussing modernism and the period (or periods) that follow. In its assertion of novelty, modernism famously offers an antagonistic self-articulation, one marking division from all that preceded it. As Paul de Man notes, modernism functions to disrupt, making it consequently unstable and oppositional: “Modernity invests its trust in the power of the present moment as an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present.” 2 Consequently, the modernizing impulse to make it new discloses “the impossibility of being modern.” 3 Newness, particularly that marshalled around a self-imposed imperative to innovate, entails an inability to connect to those prior sources of one’s own identity and a compulsion to move away from what constitutes one’s very present. If modernism is an impossible task, then its supersession positions the contemporary as what follows after such a fractious event, a modernity divided against itself (as this entry necessarily focuses on our own present, fraught questions of defining modernism as well as its relation to the contentious concept of modernity must be left to the side, even though these issues impact how contemporary fiction is perceived; further, modernism and contemporary fiction will both be largely discussed in terms of Western Anglophone fiction). In such circumstance, modernism’s new is fractured and no longer fresh; it thus stands as an uncertain progenitor or prior figure, a now-antiquated novelty. Moreover, if modernism as a label functions as less historically certain than previous periods defined around definite centuries, historical figures, or movements, then the contemporary situates its own newness with even more doubt, highlighting the hollow and deictic nature of the contemporary as a term. Indeed, the vagueness of the contemporary deprives it even of modernism’s oppositional stance, one supplied through manifestos, aesthetic pronouncements, and jarring stylistic difference. Consequently, the contemporary becomes an uncertain and belated moment, one ending we know not when. Given its open-ended nature on one side, the contemporary necessarily turns to modernism as the only frame that might allow its own identity to take some shape. The rationale for Jameson’s double-negative imperative becomes clear: as the uncertain period of modernism gives rise to one even more inchoate, articulating lines of relation becomes ever-more necessary for developing something approaching a grasp on moments that do indeed appear distinctive, permitting us to begin identifying major features; and yet these features pull in different directions, do not allow neat summative statements, sketch multiple lines of relation. In sum, periodizing the contemporary is a necessity, one for which the modern stands as the key figure; however, this task is also necessarily an impossible one or, rather, one whose work cannot be conclusively completed.

Both modernism and the contemporary depend on suggesting a faultline of newness. However, this sense of the new changes as modernism has given way to the contemporary. As Raymond Williams observed, the divergence of these terms is a relatively recent occurrence, one helping signal fraught relations between modernism and the contemporary: during the 20th century , “‘modern’ shifts its reference from ‘now’ to ‘just now’ or even ‘then,’ and for some time has been a designation always going into the past with which ‘contemporary’ may be contrasted for its presentness. ‘Modernism’ as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment has been retrospective as a term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between, say, 1890 and 1940 .” 4 Peter Osborne develops this line of thinking, observing “the contemporary acted there mainly as a qualification of (rather than a counter to) ‘the modern’: the contemporary was the most recent modern, but a modern with a moderated, less ruptural futurity.” 5 As the modern became an historical period, the techniques associated with its imperative to “make it new” now marked literary historical categories, while the contemporary becomes an ill-defined period in its own right, one less well distinguished regarding standout techniques. Moreover, making the contemporary its own distinct period serves at once to separate it from previous moments while raising the problem of connection between these pasts and our present. Consequently, the contemporary comes to the fore only by situating modernism as something already accomplished, then defining itself as that which transpires after the modern. This recursiveness renders the contemporary something of a problem, a present in search of itself. Accordingly, the contemporary—or, better, the competing impulses within contemporary fiction—might be best defined through articulations of how this present now relates to modernism. This article accordingly sketches the major features of these lines of relation.

Genealogies

Modernist self-presentation, with its assertion of disruption and innovation, makes any subsequent gesture problematic: What comes after the absolutely new? The self-conscious belatedness of a contemporary after the modern lends itself either to what appears as recursive returns (showy turnings-back to some tradition defined around realism) or a reflexive problematizing of modernism’s formal focus (postmodernism). But these postwar waves might be seen to crest and recede, so what comes after what follows the new? Or might we after all still somehow be in the modernist wave, in the new? These formulations help foreground the manner in which such literary histories seem clear only that there was a prominent modernist tide, a movement that the contemporary still defines itself against, relations taking the form of some version of rejection, supersession, or continuation.

Here difficulties in pinning down modernism regarding both definition and historical limits are paralleled by an equal haziness around the contemporary: What constitutes the contemporariness of contemporary fiction? When did it begin? Even confining discussion to Anglophone fiction in Britain and the United States, uneasy parallels and jarring discrepancies appear. If the contemporary begins after 1945 , the American literary landscape encompasses the final phase of high modernists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, as well as the blossoming of late modernists such as Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin. For the British scene, although the decades immediately following the war might contain late modernists (Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green), the main lines (as defined by literary historians such as Malcolm Bradbury) seem oriented more around a return to 19th-century realism: the Angry Young Men and following them a wave of Kitchen Sink writers. This discrepancy not only entails different relations to modernism (with the immediate postwar decades appearing either as a final flowering of modernism or an attempt to return to some prior style and technique), it also means the appearance of the first wave of postmodern authors in the 1960s and 1970s generates conflicting accounts: figures such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, and E. L. Doctorow seem to move away from the elitism of high modernism while authors such as B. S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, John Fowles, and Doris Lessing represent a reprise of the modernist foregrounding of fragmentary narratives stressing their own textuality. Moreover, the 1960s are now exceeding half a century away: its fiction can hardly be called contemporary. Then how does the relation between our new contemporary period and modernism compare with that of the postmoderns? Further, postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie complicate these lines of relation. How does this ever-more-global scope of the contemporary transform our understanding of a purportedly cosmopolitan modernism? Attempts to answer such questions necessarily privilege some authors or national lineages rather than others; a more balanced assessment might be developed by providing a rough map of how competing contemporary trends strike varied relations with modernism.

One line of attack involves straightforward literary influences and genealogies. If early postmodernist authors such as Pynchon and Barth might be seen as reacting against modernism, subsequent authors appeared to consciously hark back to high modernism. Novelists who came to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s appear to align with modernist forebears: Toni Morrison with William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston; Jeanette Winterson with Virginia Woolf; Cormac McCarthy with Faulkner (as well as Ernest Hemingway); Peter Ackroyd with T. S. Eliot; Kazuo Ishiguro with Ford Madox Ford; V. S. Naipaul with Joseph Conrad; Percival Everett with Ralph Ellison; John Banville with Beckett and Henry James; Paul Auster with Franz Kafka (as well as Raymond Chandler); the familiar comparison of Salman Rushdie’s excess and J. M. Coetzee’s minimalism with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, respectively. Subsequent decades yield more such lines of descent: Alan Hollinghurst and Henry James; Michael Chabon and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster. A growing number of contemporary writers have also foregrounded a relationship to modernism through fiction explicitly invoking high (and early) modernist authors: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours traces Woolf’s composition of Mrs Dalloway , paralleling that narrative strand with characters who decades later echo Woolf’s Clarissa; Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words employs Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (the fictional “poet” of Ezra Pound’s eponymous poem) as its main character; Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy revolves around war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital; Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde takes the form of a diary by the playwright; J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg follows Fyodor Dostoyevsky in an imagined scenario launching his writing The Devils ; Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot follows a retiree obsessed with the French author’s biography; Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt centers on a character who is the cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Colm Tóibín ( The Master ), David Lodge ( Author, Author ), Cynthia Ozick (“Quartet”), and Alan Hollinghurst ( The Line of Beauty ) all invoke Henry James. In addition, contemporary authors have engaged with modernism in other forms such as music (Toni Morrison’s Jazz , Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter , Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time , Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo ) and the visual arts (Don Delillo’s Underworld ; Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ; William Boyd’s Any Human Heart ). Modernism constitutes a rich source of influence as well as a growing field for fictional topics and themes.

However, this warm embrace of the modernist legacy does not comprise the entirety of contemporary fiction, for many authors consciously position themselves against the stylistic and narrative innovations that had, per its self-characterization, constituted the soul of modernism. Spurning a reflexive textuality, whether of the modern or postmodern variety, these authors hark back to a realist tradition, a self-conscious aversion to and rejection of modernism. Philip Roth, for example, has pronounced high modernist experimentation as “outlandish.” 6 Dale Peck has more violently repudiated modernism, summarizing its genealogy as a progression from Ulysses ’ “diarrhoeic flow of words” to Faulkner’s “incomprehensible ramblings and the sterile inventions of Nabokov.” 7 Indeed, for realist authors such as Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Jonathan Franzen, their fiction relates to modernism primarily by attempting to move as far as possible from its techniques. This vein of contemporary fiction thus treats modernism as a mistake or an experiment gone too far, an era that should be treated as a regrettable lapse.

Retrospective Relations: Modernism and Postmodernism

In all these accounts, modernism appears as the exceptional literary event, the major tectonic literary upheaval of the past century plus, its formal innovations transforming genres and narrative techniques for good or ill. Consequently, the very identity of the literary waves breaking after 1945 (and modernism’s apparent completion) take shape against this self-perception, whether as reversal, return, or complex negotiation. Indeed, the contemporary is often defined against a canonization of modernism: many critics argue that contemporary literature in its various guises, waves, and impulses is articulated around the institutionalization of modernism within university curricula. 8 Moreover, modernism’s academic enshrinement has coincided with an increasing theorization of literary and cultural studies, so modernism and its relation to contemporary literature has been a major concern for theoretical engagements. In addition, authors (and theories) rarely fall neatly into one camp or another, for a varied diet of influences and a complex menu of techniques entail that in a single author, Zadie Smith, say, the influence of both modernism and 19th-century realism might be witnessed. Smith’s fiction largely returns to realism and as such appears to move away from the experimentation associated with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; however, at the same time, Smith’s fiction also includes open homages to modernist figures (E. M. Forster in On Beauty ), the use of modernist devices (stream of consciousness in NW ; a disordered temporality in White Teeth ), and postmodernist riffs (most especially in White Teeth and The Autograph Man ) indicating a complex relation to modernism. Taking Smith as an exemplary figure for most (if not all) contemporary novelists, a neat map depicting which authors reject modernism, which continue with or return to modernist devices and themes, and which negotiate a complex relation to the modernist legacy is impossible. Rather, these different lines of relation might be discussed better around critics and theorists who trace specific connections between modernism and contemporary fiction. These shifting patterns of relation for contemporary fiction appear less as neat genealogies or rejections and more as unstable weather systems, ephemeral fronts where competing pockets of pressure produce changing lines of relation.

Here, postmodernism stands as the movement where relations between modernism and the contemporary are made most explicit. The growing rift between modernism and the contemporary after mid-century led to “postmodernism” being coined as a periodizing stopgap, a signal that some movement had occurred away from modernism but without a clear account of what this next act might be save in relation to the modern. Now that postmodernism itself seems increasingly consigned to literary history, the postmodern stands in uneasy relation with the contemporary. As most accounts of contemporary fiction date this phenomenon from after World War II or after 1960 , postmodernism comprises an (or perhaps the) opening movement of the contemporary. However, even as something fully completed, postmodernism also stands as the historical bridge between our own moment and the era of heroic modernism. Indeed, accounts of postmodernism provide the clearest articulations of how modernism relates to contemporary fiction.

As many have observed, the advent of postmodernism during the 1960s foregrounded relations with modernism: Douglas Kellner notes, “utilizing the term ‘postmodern’ in a meaningful way requires that one develop a systematic contrast with the ‘modern’.” 9 Accordingly, major postmodern theorists in the 1970s and 1980s stressed lines of relation between modernism and postmodernism. Ihab Hassan charts counterpointed lists of traits associated with each period, modernism’s drive for qualities such as form, design, and a sense of purpose contrasting with postmodernism’s “antiform,” an emphasis on the aleatory, and a general spirit of playfulness. 10 This schematic highlighted some shared sense of technique between the two periods but also foregrounded a sense of openness and inconclusiveness witnessed in early postmodern fictions such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman . For Andreas Huyssen, the contrast between these ends of the century revolves around different relations to mass culture. Modernism had distinguished itself from rising mass cultural forms such as cinema, radio, and the tabloid press, a divorce from the marketplace granting austere purpose to modernist literary experimentation, an asceticism that emphasized its aestheticism. Labeling this separation the “Great Divide,” Huyssen argues “postmodernism rejects [its] theories and practices. . . . Indeed, the birth of the postmodern out of the spirit of an adversary avant-gardism cannot be adequately understood unless modernism’s and postmodernism’s different relationship to mass culture is grasped.” 11 Huyssen’s argument appears to best address particular lines of post-1960s American fiction where mass culture genres or commercial products are foregrounded, encompassing authors such as Pynchon, Don Delillo, Bret Eaton Ellis, and Mark Leyner, and distinguishing them from seemingly more high-minded high modernists. Similarly, Wendy Steiner agrees the first wave of postmodernists reacted against the “difficulty” of modernism, its elite experimentation. Steiner suggests these 1960s and 1970s authors wished to retain the notion that formal distinctiveness would retain a properly pure aesthetic focus. However, here, the emphasis on form was a blind alley, leading to a calcified self-conscious style and lamentations regarding the novel’s extinction. 12 Modernism is then seen as having inaugurated an unsustainable emphasis on a purity of aesthetic form that produced an exhaustion of possible narrative techniques and stylistic modes in following the “ ‘high road’ of art.” 13 In this account, writers disparaged because of gender (Joyce Carol Oates) or race (Alice Walker), a relegation due to practicing purportedly outdated modes of realism, help resolve this impasse by rejuvenating old forms. 14

Other theories stress the way apparently similar narrative devices and styles between the two periods actually foregrounded different orientations toward self and world. Brian McHale suggests that, though the periods shared numerous devices and themes such as fragmentation and a self-conscious formalism, the difference was a shift from an internal to an external inclination: “the modernist novel explored interior experience ” through representing “embodied consciousness—the mind in its engagement with the world—which underlies and motivates many of modernism’s experiments in narration, perspective, the representation of interiority, temporality, and language, as well as its problematizing of knowing and unknowing. Modernist fiction was epistemological , knowledge-oriented.” 15 Modernism is conceived here primarily around stream-of-consciousness fictions such as those by Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, fiction defined primarily through its depiction of subjectivity evoked through the play of perception and memory. In contrast, McHale suggests postmodernism “was ontological in its orientation . . . ask[ing] ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ . . . postmodernist fiction did not take the world for granted as a backdrop against which the adventures of consciousness could be played out but rather foregrounded the world itself as an object of reflection and contestation. Postmodernism multiplied and juxtaposed worlds; it troubled and volatized them.” 16 Authors such as Barth, Pynchon, and Fowles whose fiction foregrounds multiple possible realities are envisioned as generating the central impetus of contemporary fiction. The differences between modernism and postmodernism appear as divided orientations, modernism’s “centripetal” drive for “strategies of inwardness” versus postmodernism’s “centrifugal” inclination with its “‘openness’ to the world outside and beyond consciousness.” 17 This assessment might be extended as modernist texts often have the sense of a center (or perhaps pine for a center) toward which the allusions, fragments, and disparate narrative foci gravitate: a “mythic method,” a master intertext, a shared moment/place/event, a longing for a reassembled culture. In contrast, postmodern texts fragment into uncertain constellations, at best unsure anything might firmly forge the pieces back together again into a fully signifying whole or system. Postmodern constellations appear unstable and doubtful of any plenitudinous meaning: these fictions conjure conspiracies that might not actually exist, histories and stories that ultimately pull in different directions, glimpses of a sublime that seem half farcical.

Precisely this sense of a rupture in representation led Jean-François Lyotard to offer one of the most influential theoretical accounts of the relation between modernism and a contemporary defined around postmodernism, a difference less about period tendencies and more regarding how such techniques expressed contrasting attitudes toward modernity. Lyotard suggests the distinction between modernism and postmodernism transpires through the “disappearance of the close bond” between aesthetic endeavors and “an ideal of the progressive realization of social and individual emancipation encompassing all humanity,” an evaporation ending any possibility of centripetal movement. 18 Consequently, postmodernism “finds itself condemned to undertake a series of minor modifications in a space inherited from modernity . . . there is no longer any horizon of universality, universalization, or general emancipation.” 19 The contemporary in its guise as the postmodern accordingly resorts to “‘bricolage’: the multiple quotation of elements taken from earlier styles or periods . . . this ‘rupture’ is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is, repeating it and not surpassing it.” 20 Postmodernism is a reassessment of the past, not in the form of adherence to some tradition, but more from a state of blockage or inability to construct the entirely new; beyond exhaustion or replenishment then, the pastiches of Barth and Ackroyd appear as a recalibration. Modernism, in contrast, is precisely the attempt to jettison techniques from the past in a sublime attempt to articulate the wholly new, as in the way Joyce and John dos Passos developed innovative styles and narrative strategies. For Lyotard, the postmodern sense of belated exhaustion in fact precedes endeavors to embark on wholly new paths: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” 21 That is, a self-conscious awareness of form and presence within a history is necessarily a reflexive step intervening before the development of new forms striving to refine the powers of representation for fresh assaults on the unrepresentable.

Fredric Jameson builds on this argument in his own account of modernism and postmodernism, a theorization persistent still as the reference point regarding relations between modernism and postwar cultural forms. Modernism and postmodernism, for Jameson, correlate with the oncoming tide of modernity and capitalism. The essential difference between the two eras is that modernism still retains a sense of something outside capitalism, an exterior lost during the postmodern regime: “In modernism . . . some residual sense of ‘nature’ or ‘being,’ of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that ‘referent.’ Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” 22 For him, modernism emphasized temporality through such means as reworking narrative form and its focus on conveying consciousness. Contemporary fiction during the postmodern regime accordingly demonstrates a contrasting stress on space. 23 Though Jameson somewhat agrees the postmodern era in fiction has ended, he still views contemporary fiction as unable to provide a proper historicizing assessment of its own moment, an echo of his account of postmodernism. Current fiction operates with an emphasis on “suddenness,” a “singularity [that] is a pure present without a past or present.” 24 Texts like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder invoke modernism’s formal experimentation but do so through “one-off” narrative and stylistic techniques, “one-time unrepeatable formal events” that in inventing a mode that will not be replicated formally stress the text as pure irruption. This instantaneity through non-replicable forms, for Jameson, carries postmodern schizophrenia into the age of the financial derivative, investment vehicles and products themselves based on mysterious and arcane logarithms which are not extendable to or exemplary for any other situation or financial scheme. 25 Such assessment finds in contemporary fiction an echo of modernism’s focus on the new but, against such now-canonical techniques, offers instead a novelty whose newness is always purely now for it could have neither progeny or a developmental arc as it resides solely in a present moment. Some critics, however, have warned that here theories of postmodernism collapse with their object of critique. Timothy Bewes, in particular, has warned that theorists such as Jameson (as well as Hassan) produce a depthless, consumer-driven spectacle world purged of traditional narratives, emotions, and full-fledged identities, a realm where “events are no longer possible,” a closure of history echoing the smug assessments of conservative figures such as Francis Fukuyama. 26 The presentism of such accounts entails they are unable to articulate meaningful relations with specific legacies of the past such as the modernist project.

Post-Postmodernism and After

As postmodernism is seen as having arisen in the 1960s and then reached a high summer of accomplishment in fiction and theorization during the 1980s, it is small wonder the movement is increasingly viewed as having expired some time during the decade or so that followed. Consequently, many critics suggest the postmodern moment has itself given way to something else, a supersession entailing transformation of relations between the contemporary and the postmodern. The apparent faltering of postmodernism, though, means that whatever period follows (and “contemporary” has been the most prominent literary label) must be assessed as well regarding its relation to modernism. Some view a movement away from the postmodern as entailing a similar shift away from modernism’s concern with difficult styles and techniques, a concern with form seen as foregrounding the separateness of these literary texts. Madhu Dubey suggests that “if postmodernism ended some time around 1990 , American fiction in the following decades . . . is said to be marked by a renewed engagement with the social world . . . [constituting] a new kind of fiction that once again aspires to represent and critique the social world.” 27 The emergence of these new realisms—dirty realism, neo-realism, new realism, and the like—signify the modernist project is now truly over, that fiction has returned to traditional modes. Dubey characterizes the 1980s moment of high postmodernism as mirroring the previous era of modernism, as both had occurred during eras when the “lineaments of a political-economic system” were undergoing transformation; when a new dominant later installed itself (for the contemporary, a “flexible regime of accumulation” constituted on a now truly global scale), this newfound stability makes it easier for plots and subjects to be charted in a social world. 28 That is, formalist experimentation, whether modernist or postmodernist, only rises to prominence during times of socio-economic transition. Josh Toth and Neil Brooks concur, suggesting the dominant feature of the return to realism is that this neorealism has eschewed postmodern metafiction, a move away from formalism that “seems to be indicative of a more general epistemological relinquishment of aesthetic imperatives as such .” 29 Here the contemporary in moving away from postmodernism also firmly leaves behind the modernist legacy, shifting from a self-conscious formalism to relatively straightforward representations of the contemporary world.

In contrast, Mark McGurl emphasizes less stylistic dominants/experiments distinguishing individual literary periods and more institutional transformations bridging them together. Postwar fiction, particularly in the American scene, increasingly revolved around university campuses as the locus where novels where written, read, and rendered canonical through institutionalization in course syllabi. As such, the growth in creative writing programs—and the style of fiction they practiced, taught, and championed—should be seen as mirroring the explosive rise of the “modern cold war laboratory.” This new fiction might be usefully seen as “technomodernist,” a term stressing “continuity of much postwar American fiction with the modernist project of a systematic experimentation with narrative form, even as it registers a growing acknowledgement of the ‘scandalous’ continuity of the literary techne (craft) with technology in the grosser sense—including . . . mass media technology . . . modernist narrative becomes visible not as the antithesis of debased genre fiction but as a genre in its own right called literary fiction—which relativization does not . . . disable the distinction between high and low . . . but situates it in a larger cultural industrial system.” 30 That is, modernist fiction develops itself as a highly evolved discipline much like nuclear physics or biochemistry, generating a field of knowledge (and an outpouring of sophisticated products) that increasingly appear arcane to outsiders. Postwar authors are apprenticed into this genre of literary fiction. Consequently, self-conscious modern and postmodern prose might be thus seen not as “radically ‘deconstructive’ ” but rather as “radically conventional, as testaments to the continuing interests of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research.” 31 McGurl suggests this research foregrounds literariness, “as moments in the operation, the autopoiesis, of a larger system geared for the production of self-expressive originality,” a self-conscious concern with craft institutionalized through the spread of creative writing programs. 32 Contemporary fiction is then only an official instantiation of modernism, house-training literary experiments into house style for creative writing programs. Fiction written by those associated with such programs distinguishes itself from popular fiction and extends these techniques across a range of minority cultures, “synthesizing the particularity of the ethnic—or analogously marked—voice with the elevated idiom of literary modernism.” 33 These developments help “partially democratize” modernism, moving it from an elite literary practice to a practice extended to all who undergo academic training in this trade.

Similarly, Amy Hungerford suggests that since postmodernism was characterized by a certain institutionalization of modernism, the arc of an extended 20th-century literary history might best be labeled as “long modernism.” 34 The closure of this era then appears less antagonistic and more uncertain—Hungerford suggests “the period formerly known as contemporary” and then “post 45,” the latter designating a bare chronology that nonetheless swallows up both the immediate post-war reactions against modernism and the following postmodern era. 35 Along these lines, Jeremy Green likewise notes the apparent closure of postmodernism occasions reassessment of the relation between the apparently austere formalism of modernism, and a more generous and demotic postmodern, for the relation between high modernism and the contemporary “now looks a good deal more variegated and complex; an awareness of modernism’s internationalism has begun to offer a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of the literary periods.” 36 Likewise, Matthew Hart and Amy Elias suggest the apparent closure of the postmodern moment occasions a larger re-assessing of how the contemporary relates to modernism, foregrounding not only ruptures with modernism but also how contemporary fiction maintains a number of continuities. 37

Consequently, as David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris indicate, marking the end of postmodernism is an uncertain process, for “its legacy still has a persistent influence” and claims that it is definitively over “carry with them the implications that first, it is clear what ‘postmodernism’ means; second, its meaning is stable and unitary; and third, the proposed finishing moment . . . neatly encapsulates both the essence of the postmodern and the clear evidence of its downfall.” 38 Here they echo Jameson, for though postmodernism might be superseded as a period term, the techniques associated with it might still be observed flourishing in the wilds of literary fiction. 39 Authors such as Colson Whitehead ( John Henry Davs ), Margaret Atwood ( Oryx and Crake ), David Mitchell ( Cloud Atlas ), Hari Kunzru ( Gods Without Men ), and Nicola Barker ( Darklands ) all have produced fiction returning to—or perhaps continuing—postmodern techniques. However, if postmodernism still persists within the contemporary as a stylistic mode, then increasingly modernism itself is also making a reappearance.

Beyond the direct invocation of modernist figures in fiction by Barnes, Cunningham, Hollinghurst, Toibin, and the like, a growing number of contemporary authors have adapted modernist modes. Tom McCarthy in fact has proclaimed that “the task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism.” 40 Many authors have followed through on this sentiment: McCarthy’s own C is not only set during the years of high modernism but also returns to its interior focus; Ian McEwan’s Atonement toys with both stream of consciousness and the late modernist styles of figures like Elizabeth Bowen; Will Self’s trilogy ( Umbrella , Shark , and Phone ) employs wandering streams of consciousness that not only move between characters present within a given contemporary frame but also subsume thoughts of other characters encountered decades before; Monique Truong has employed stream-of-consciousness narration in both of her novels to date ( Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth ). David James and Urmila Seshagiri label such recent fictional efforts as metamodernism, a movement regarding “modernism as an era, an aesthetic, and an archive”—in sum, a resource for creating contemporary works. 41 The fictions thus addressed to high modernism comprise “narratives of modernism,” a phrase referring “on one hand, to experimental fiction shaped by an aesthetics of discontinuity, nonlinearity, interiority, and chronological play,” while on the other, it “describes fictions—overtly experimental or otherwise—plotted around the very creation of modern art and letters.” 42 Such fictions reappropriate modernist techniques as well as addressing modernism’s “sociopolitical, historical, and philosophical contexts.” 43 It seems striking that a rough assessment of metamodernism finds the practice more prevalent in British authors than American ones, a tendency that might speak to the power of American creative writing programs to move would-be authors away from techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration. Such an observation thus reveals limits to the suggestion that such programs domesticate modernist experimentation—or perhaps the limiting effects of this domestication.

Elsewhere, David James characterizes this return to modernist aesthetics as contemporary fiction’s negotiation of the legacy of modernism: “fiction today partakes of an interaction between innovation and inheritance that is entirely consonant with what modernists themselves were doing more than a century ago, an interaction that enables writers to work with their lineage in the process of attempting new experiments with form.” 44 This assessment continues to foreground the conception of modernism as an acme of innovation regarding narrative form and style. And representing consciousness too returns as a central objective of this reworked aesthetic but in a manner reflective of the world structuring these perceptions: “contemporary writers reveal the potential for modernist fiction to be more than simply a laboratory for examining consciousness as a hermetic domain . . . [by] incorporat[ing] techniques for showing how mental experiences are shaped by material circumstances.” 45 Fiction over the long 20th century abandons the lurch between centripetal interiority and centrifugal exteriority, now looking to interweave epistemological and ontological interrogations. Such re-engagements, according to James, refashion not only our understanding of modernism but also what constitutes the contemporary: “The contemporary itself . . . is no longer what it was.” 46 However, this uncertain contemporaneity is matched by a transformed vision of modernism. James maintains “a more complex account of fiction’s transitions from mid-century to the present can only be achieved by an understanding of what modernism was but also of what it might still become.” 47 This reassessing impulse is also behind the endeavor represented by the “New Modernist Studies,” an “expansion” reconsidering the temporal, spatial, and vertical (regarding divisions between high art and popular culture, changing canons, problems of reception, and inclusion/reevaluation of works by authors of “marginalized social groups”) boundaries of how modernism has been traditionally understood. 48 Indeed, for some time, the contemporary has been viewed as something revising our understanding of modernism itself: not only does the modern stand as some prior moment to which the contemporary must reply, but contemporary fiction might transform how modernism is understood. 49

Of course, the reason for these widely differing positions on the legacy of modernism in contemporary fiction, one ranging from something largely superseded to a return to modernist methods, is that the contemporary is an impossibly broad category and even individual novels house competing impulses. A novel like Ian McEwan’s Atonement , for example, amply illustrates this division: it employs a mostly realist opening section but does so as part of a deeper metafictional device in which a variety of narrative modes are employed that evoke specific moments and literary strategies from the long 20th century . Atonement thus seems to hark back to an older realism, one that would eschew modernism; yet at the same time that realism is self-consciously subsumed into techniques gleaned from modernism’s legacy—a metafictional deployment of a panoply of narrative and stylistic techniques. The novel illustrates Peter Boxall’s argument that contemporary fiction is defined precisely around the question of relation to previous literary movements. Boxall suggests the developmental arc of the novel after the high moderns be viewed around the “negotiation of the political and ethical relationship that prose fiction has with the historical past. It is possible to trace the passage from the modernist fiction of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Faulkner, through the forms of realism that emerged partly as a reaction against modernism . . . to the postmodern fiction of Rushdie, Barth, Marquez and Carter, in terms of the novel’s engagement with the past, and the forms with which it seeks to record and manipulate it.” 50 Contemporary fiction, given the rise of creative writing programs and Anglophone literature as an academic field of study, cannot but see itself as an epigone: every stylistic and narrative choice necessarily invokes forebears. As such, modernism stands most prominently as the largest debt, at once providing a rich archive to navigate and also clearly underscoring the reflexive sense of textuality linking modernism with much contemporary fiction. Whether through explicit or implicit rejection, self-conscious reclamation, or complex and ambivalent negotiation, modernism is the most significant prior period to which contemporary fiction relates itself.

Consequently, this relation between modernism and the contemporary reveals the uncertain and gravid potential of our own present. Peter Osborne suggests this contemporary moment might be best seen as a “con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries—as if time is indifferent to this existing together—but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times’, a temporal unity of disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times .” 51 Accordingly, modernism would thus be the most prominent moment in our divided and ecstatic present, the most jarring such moment unsettling the present. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben highlights a Nietzschean “untimeliness” at work in the contemporary. 52 This sense of being out of season means the contemporary is never fully present to itself as such, for it is always at odds with one’s own time: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism .” 53 If such a present is disrupted by the unrealized nature of particular pasts that linger significantly, by the specter of futures that might visit again through shades who never truly departed, then modernism remains the most persistent of these disjunctive literary ghosts.

Discussion of the Literature

Questions of modernity, postmodernity, and the contemporary have provoked major theoretical endeavors as in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Osborne, and Raymond Williams. Critically, endeavors to define the postmodern necessitated distinguishing it from the modern. 54 Central to these distinctions has been the argument that fiction from the 1960s represents a reaction to the institutionalization of modernism within reading lists, syllabi, and creative writing programs; Mark McGurl provides the most sustained and supported version of this argument. 55 All such arguments might be too briefly summarized as suggesting that postmodernism and the contemporary incorporates some elements of the modernist method but distinguishes itself by key differences in technique and outlook, with the contemporary being more demotic regarding mass culture, offering a stronger sense of being open-ended (an emphasis on centrifugal forces for it is no longer able to fully conceive a socio-economic totality or any outside to capitalism), etc. Such accounts are opposed to those critics and novelists arguing that modernism (and postmodernism) constitute a blind alley of formalism, a wrong turn from which fiction must return to traditional byways of realism and straightforward narration. 56 Overall, the key reference point for periodizing relations between modernism and postmodernism/the contemporary within the literary historical narrative of the long 20th century has been the long arc of Fredric Jameson’s arguments from the 1980s on.

Since the turn of the millennium, there have been several collections and journal special issues garnering appraisals and post-mortems on the postmodern; the essays gathered there generate useful maps of the apparent passing of postmodernity. The collections include Postmodern/Postwar and After edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden; Postmodernism. What Moment? edited by Pelagia Goulimari; Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century edited by David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris; and the special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature edited by Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden. Amy Hungerford also has been a central figure as well in endeavoring to formulate how the contemporary might be in the process of diverging from the postmodern.

Likewise, shifts in considerations of postmodernism have led to alterations in how the lines of relation between modernism and contemporary fiction are viewed. David James has helped launch this reappraisal; his Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel , as well as his edited collection The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction offer essential forays for considering both the mainlines of relation between modernism and the contemporary as well as interrogations of individual lineages between modernist authors and contemporary novelists. These critical endeavors have also returned focus to more broadly theoretical assessments of both modernism and the contemporary, arguments ranging from classic assessments by Paul de Man and Raymond Williams to more recent arguments by Peter Osborne and Giorgio Agamben.

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“25 Years of Madness and Modernism” A review by James Whitehead

I first encountered Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism about a dozen years ago, when I was studying for an MA in modern literature. I had always been interested in writing about madness and the psyche as an undergraduate, and was looking around for a suitable topic for a dissertation, and perhaps a PhD too. My initial literature review had not been encouraging. I had found the critical literature on ‘madness’ full of lukewarm Laingisms and Freudianisms — which is not to say that I didn’t, or don’t, appreciate thinking in the anti-psychiatric or psychoanalytic traditions. But the second-hand madness-as-liberation and the-insanity-of-daily-life stuff was wearing thin, and I was beginning to think that other topics might be more interesting or productive. Then I read Sass. Madness and Modernism was of a different intellectual order entirely. For one thing, despite the general title, it avoids grand general pronouncements about that tricky term, ‘madness’. The book is instead almost exclusively about the experience of schizophrenia, or schizophrenia spectrum disorders, which it describes with humane insight and great phenomenological richness, drawing on a range of historical and contemporary cases, many of the latter from Sass’s own work as a clinical psychologist . These are discussed in parallel with an equally rich array of examples from (mostly) high European modernism, which seemed to describe a parallel domain of being, only captured aesthetically rather than clinically. It proved indispensable for the dissertation (of which more anon). I held on to the university library copy of Madness and Modernism for as long as possible, but when it had to be relinquished, it was hard to get a copy of my own. The book was out of print, and second-hand copies always seemed to go for exorbitant sums on Amazon. This suggests it had become something of a cult work. I did ultimately get my hands on a cheap copy, but was nevertheless delighted to see at the turn of the new year that it had been republished by OUP , and that a symposium would be held in Durham , organized by Angela Woods, the CMH, and the Hearing the Voice project, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication — another indication of the esteem in which the book is held. So I jumped at the chance to attend the symposium, which took place on Friday 11 th May.

A range of scholars from different disciplines ( Åsa Jansson from the history of psychiatry, Joel Krueger from philosophy, Elizabeth Barry from literary studies, and Matt ffytche from psychosocial and psychoanalytic studies) gave a fascinating set of responses to Madness and Modernism , addressing such topics as the overlap between the symptomatology of schizophrenia and that recorded under now discarded historical psychiatric categories, especially melancholia; phenomenology, the physical world, and ‘unworlding’ in schizophrenia; Beckett, the subject, and ‘ipseity’; and the forms of social judgement involved in discussing ‘outsider writing’. The day ended with a wide-ranging and lucid conversation between Louis Sass himself and Patricia Waugh , Professor in English Studies at Durham. The papers and conversation were too interesting and intricate to attempt further (inevitably crude) summary, but those who missed the event may console themselves with the prospect of a recording of the last session becoming available at some point in the near future. Questions from the floor also brought in important topics such as stigma, the nature of psychiatric classification and diagnosis, and the contested coherence — or even use altogether — of terms such as schizophrenia and schizophrenic (Sass has a robust defence of this in the preface to the revised edition). I am an inveterate question asker in conference Q&A sessions, and had more than my turn earlier in the day, so can’t claim any lack of opportunity, but I was left with these thoughts. With so many questions in the air about schizophrenia, we didn’t quite get a chance to turn the arrow of interpretation, to use Sass’s phrase, back to modernism, the other half of the equation in Madness and Modernism . What I’d found so useful but also provocative about the book in 2006, apart from its wonderful range of reference both to primary materials and to the various contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia made by medical-model psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and other areas of philosophy, was its relatively non-critical (in the sense of non-judgemental) use of literary and cultural texts. In that now distant-seeming dissertation I began to take some faltering steps towards interrogating Sass’s ‘parallelism’ (his word), addressing a question that Madness and Modernism largely sidesteps: namely, not how literature might innocently illuminate madness, but how and why modernist authors might have been deliberately motivated to imitate, appropriate (more or less knowledgably or cynically), or otherwise draw parallels between their creative output and the experience of the mad; faltering because not remotely achievable in the space of an MA dissertation, of course! I am still working on this question today, in one form or another, having gone back to the nineteenth century and earlier to think about the cultural history and complicated politics of identifying or claiming links between the arts and psychopathology. There was — is — a lot more to say here.

The other question I wanted to ask was about Madness and Modernism ’s impeccable taste. Its choice of literary examples is clearly the result of Sass’s obvious enthusiasm for, and no mean ability to understand and interpret, experimental work in the high modernist tradition from several European literatures: Baudelaire, Kafka, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Musil, Borges, Artaud, Sarraute, and others all feature — and that’s just the writers. I wondered how much this was due to Sass’s own penchants, and his early education, which I was not previously aware of, as an English major, and how much to a notion that there is something about experimental writing that gives it special insight into the world of the schizophrenic. Can examples drawn from more popular or generic writing provide equal insight into this world? I am thinking particularly of science fiction, and an author like Philip K. Dick, who, while not quite a modernist formally speaking, has passages in his work reminiscent of what Sass calls the stimmung , or prodromal mood of schizophrenia, which are almost as compelling as the texts cited in Madness and Modernism . Do they count in the same way? Or not? Perhaps this would be complicated by that fact that Dick had read quite a lot of psychiatry, including touchstones of phenomenological psychiatry like Binswanger, and even some case histories, or Schreber’s memoirs at least. But then the same could be said of earlier modernist writers’ knowledge of psychiatry. So it may be useful for future work in this area to break down such barriers as exist between the ‘high’ modernist canon and ‘lower’ genres of modern literature. (Waugh asked Sass a question about ‘ordinary modernism’ in the discussion session which may have been suggested by a similar thought, though I’m not sure this is what she meant.)

But it strikes me that Sass’s approach is still compelling, such questions notwithstanding, partly because I think it does implicitly insist on, and demonstrate, a special quality of experimental modernist writing, outside of, if not entirely free of, questions of authorial motivation, context, or cultural politics. It can be easy as an English academic nowadays not to venture beyond the confines of models derived from historicism and cultural materialism. In the quarter of a century since Madness and Modernism was first published, most periods of literary study have been marked by the ascendancy of such models, and modernism, with its ‘material turn’ since the 1990s, is no exception. Of course this has produced much fine work, including scholarship on the relation between literary and medical or scientific cultures and discourses. But I’m not sure a modernist scholar from this milieu could write Madness and Modernism , even if they were to master the clinical and philosophical literature it draws on. The book’s full-throttle insistence on the insight of literary texts, entirely on their own terms, or in a philosophical frame of reference drawn from perhaps unfashionable (because once so fashionable) areas such as existentialism or phenomenology (and it was refreshing to hear Sass challenge this directly: why wouldn’t we be interested in these intellectual traditions?) was a great and somewhat audacious feat to pull off, even then. I’m not sure who would even publish it now, if it were a new and unknown book. Perhaps this is unjust to academic publishers. Madness and Modernism shows us, in any case, that interdisciplinary work is not always or not only about the give and take of new and innovative methods and knowledge between disciplines, but also, perhaps, how the disciplinary ‘outsider’ can remind us of the value of what has been set aside or forgotten by the vicissitudes of our own disciplines.

Dr James Whitehead is a Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. His research and teaching interests include Romanticism and its legacies, psychiatry and mental illness in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, including modernism and contemporary literature, and life-writing (autobiography and biography). He has three main research projects completed or underway, one on the figure of the mad poet in the nineteenth century, now out with Oxford University Press , one on the representation and appropriation of schizophrenia in twentieth-century culture, to appear in Liverpool University Press’s Representations series, and one on autobiographical narratives of mental illness and confinement.

‘Complaint!’ A (Complaint) Collective Book Review: Part II

‘Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind’: Book Review

One thought on “ “25 years of madness and modernism” a review by james whitehead ”.

A fascinating read; I am about to start a doctorate exploring madness memoir and would like to probe the language of psychosis, even whilst realising this can be very diverse,

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Review: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China , by Emily Sun

Nan Z. Da is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (2018).

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Nan Z. Da; Review: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China , by Emily Sun. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 182–188. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.182

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When the colorized version of the 1902 film The Flying Train became available on Youtube and therefore available for viewing for most people, we in the twenty-first century were levered back into modernism’s alternate universe. When the colorized version of the 1909 film of Beijing at the end of the Qing dynasty became available as well, one could feel that order of magnitude shift at scale—at the right order of magnitude. That combined modernity, in the distinctive lighting and movements of the early-twentieth-century global cosmopolis, is tensing for an unhappy future in ways that Paul Saint-Amour has described of Anglo-European modernism, and also subtly, swiftly registering the imminent imperial showdowns, semantic and material, that Lydia Liu has described of modernism. Here is somewhere between the end of empire and the beginning of nationhood, a moment enfolded in poetic lyrics as new literary forms take hold. Colorized moving images can do a great deal to help you enter that shift as if it were real to you and extrapolate that to the scale of all the places in the world, but they cannot do everything. You need literary pairings to become conscious of modernism’s widest possible geographical span and its most intricate correspondences with emancipation, liberation, and revolution.

In her previous scholarly book, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2010), Emily Sun employed the early-modern epistemological method of finding true pairs. The art of analogizing makes for an extraordinary reception theory. It must explain resonance through actual pathways of transmission and through something transcendent—in today’s parlance, a vibe shift happening differently to everyone. When Sun claims that Shakespeare’s King Lear has originative force in modern literature from William Wordsworth to James Agee—that they share what Sharon Cameron calls “the bond of the furthest apart”—she is not simply interested in genealogy. Rather, the trace-an-influence project forces the critic to articulate why King Lear has “a succession of readers that keep returning to the play as an originary locus for grappling with a problem,” and what that unique, unsolvable problem might be (Sun, Succeeding King Lear , p. 2). Finding a match—between something in China and England, or in the Ottoman Empire and the Qing, between the dozens of generic literary forms in each region —means that you are committed to solutionism in a real sense.

The achievements of Sun’s comparative practice of finding significant, surprising matches are empirical and artistic: they show you the global modernity outside of the living-room lights of the one you remember, from reading or generationally or otherwise. Duplicate forms and their implications for modernism have a special place in literary studies (in the work of Sianne Ngai and Kent Puckett, for example). In On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China , Sun reads in pairs to access the vantage point where you can see the aspirations and predicaments felt “on the horizon of world literature.” She does not mean “about to discover world literature” or “about to become recognizable by features and traits as ‘world literature.’” Instead she is after Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling.” Heteroglossia, mixed media, neologisms, the clash and hybridization of usages, fashions, and lexicons—all of this can only be modernist to a certain extent. Sun’s comparative methodology always wants to capture the transformative at the operational level, where people on a “middling plane” see themselves as “agents of a decentralized, distributed power” (p. 69). In Niklas Luhmann’s systems-theoretical terms, modernity occurs in loose couplings. Highly formalized flexibilities, ways of choosing this over that, also characterize, for Sun, Williams’s “social experiences in solution , as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (Williams, quoted on p. 72; emphasis added). Estrangement itself is logistically difficult, and we often need a first-order strangeness in someone else’s codified world to activate a second-order strangeness in our own.

Just to give a sense of the erudition of Sun’s pairings, consider the highest common denominator between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” and Lu Xun’s “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” or between Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Eileen Chang’s The Rouge of the North . There are known routes between these works, but Sun is speaking of elective affinities as well as actual, book-historical pathways. The shared aspirations in the twinned modernities she is studying—Romantic England and early Republican China—adhere to the received narratives, especially in her introduction. Insofar as Sun wishes to tell you a story about what authors in each of these realms wished for, it is much what you would expect, period- and politics-wise: revolutionary agitations, emancipation and republicanism, the envoicing of ordinary people, and so forth. At no point does Sun wish to tamper with the revelations of historical materialism (empire, colonialism, capitalism); in fact her book keeps careful track of publishing histories and other power and material imbalances. Her contributions lie elsewhere. All of the chapters outperform the introduction, which makes standard disciplinary polemics—e.g., that modernism studies does not pay enough attention to the global scale or that “logically speaking, literary modernity in the singular and world literature do not exist” (p. 11). I doubt anyone would argue with Sun on this point. Literary modernity’s geographical and perspectival pluralization occurred long ago. These rather perfunctory parts of the book only offset the strange luminousness of her dogged interest in precipitant world views. On the Horizon of World Literature is out to demonstrate to the point of felt reality how certain mental processes shift with shifts in human activities, with literature as a technology of those changes.

The most extraordinary chapter of the book, “Between the Theater and the Novel,” evinces through a pair of novels Lionel Trilling’s description of modern intellectual history as one in which it is “possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself” (Trilling, quoted on p. 95). On course to an Ibsenite naturalism, two novels about larger households in an empire disintegrating under its own weight suddenly take up the theater. As a result, a freedom is ventured that is distinctly modernist in its political and intellectual constitutions. In this freedom, the “habitat of the ordinary” emerges as comprehensible but also strange, and thus subject to remaking as a stage for action and happiness. Theater—the reminder that at any moment the household could be a stage—leaves a countervailing record of editability and irreversibility, changing collective psychic life. Mansfield Park , the one in the pair likely more familiar to Sun’s readers, is given a global, comparativist treatment that little resembles postcolonial, Global Anglophone readings except peripherally, in the gestures I have already described. Sun’s business with the novel concerns the trait that made it a fixture in Anne-Lise François’s custodial eco-consciousness, the open secret ethics of Fanny Price’s famous recessiveness and forfeiture. Sun’s Fanny Price is someone who comes with others in the world like her to a limited utopia, the “constrained liberty [that] is liberty nonetheless,” one that “emerges immanently from the everyday arrangements of ordinary life—and that survives the disillusion of a purer, untrammeled conception of freedom” (p. 132). Distant perspectives, the sense of audiences even farther away, urge (counterintuitively) narrower calibrations of “moral-political systemic revision” (p. 106). This is what the overlay of the theater and household realism reveals at an anthropological level for Mansfield Park and its obliquely resonant twin, The Rouge of the North . A technology for the visibilization of reflexive meaning, the Peking opera parts of Eileen Chang’s novel, like the English theater in Mansfield Park, offers an inward-folding, second-order observation. Theater abstracts anthropologically hierarchical positions in life that the modern subject can see as both elemental and optional. With this technology in place both novels could “pursue the dehierarchizing impulse of the play [or theatrical acts] by other means” (p. 112). The Rouge of the North is not modernist because it is from the perspective of Yindi, a woman whose social status is as ambiguous as Fanny’s, or because it intersperses scenes from traditional and modernizing life. Rather, that most important of modern social evolutions—the evolution of the perspectival—turns medium into form and form into medium in a pinch. With that comes an unprecedented appreciation of the degree of freedom within “ordained” structures, an appreciation timed to a new awareness of lifelong infrastructural roles. You need to see this possibility of adjustment twice—once in Georgian England, once in early Republican China—to not confuse technologies of self-estrangement and second-order assessment with “foreignness” as such. Otherwise, the only things we can recognize as exotic or foreign in national literature are literally exotic or foreign things; the comparative/analogical vantage allows you to isolate the nonoverlapping parts between modernity and globality.

The third chapter, “Estrangements of the World in the Familiar Essay,” benefits greatly from Sun’s extensive knowledge of Shakespearean reception in China, and the crucial role of Charles Lamb in that history. Formal resonances include that period’s essayistic excursions, the salmagundi of early republicanism in both parts of the world. Lamb qualifies for this comparison because he wrote an essay called “Old China” and has empirical ties to China’s translingual modernization. He is paired with the Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun’s younger brother, because both achieve formal innovations in the “ledger,” the conceptual motif in this book that, again, proves even to the ordinary person that here can be a written record of life against which to run simulations and tests in order to ponder the exact requirements of loftier goals like emancipation and envoicing of the masses and quieter, no less significant acts of perfection. Literary forms of modernity, Western and non-Western, such as bricolage and referential eclecticism act as transactional ledgers that allow you to better compartmentalize and alchemize novelty with tradition. You can then determine, as Lamb and Zhou did, which determinisms and novelties can be picked up at different times, to different emphases. You can intimate “decentralized sources of normative potential whose expressive instruments and medium are language itself” (p. 80). For Lamb, ledgers of an idyllic, pastoral life are quite useful for experiments in changing the “distance, scale, and calculability” of reference (p. 83). Likewise, Zhou Zuoren’s essay “Wild Vegetables of my Hometown” layers quotations and allusions not “simply for the sake of restating knowledge or information” but to “facilitate ‘borrowed views’ onto the sensibilia of ordinary life” (p. 89). This layer-by-layer estrangement grows with childlike wonder in Lamb’s and Zhou’s “dioramic” views until it reaches its cognitive limit, which also happens to be a political threshold of consciousness. The future is activated in the present narrative of 1924 Beijing and reactivated in the practices of reading. What Zhou Zuoren, writing after the Revolution, wanted from the literary past was not a reversion to traditionalism. Instead, he was “recovering in the ordering tendencies of traditional Chinese thought and discourse terms for a decentralized and pluralist inhabitation of the ordinary” (p. 90). Literary modernity’s dimensional increases in consciousness cannot help but be resourceful, going over the past for real glances at futurity, including parting glances.

Chapter 2, “Shakespearean Retellings and the Question of the Common Reader,” spends more time with Charles Lamb, specifically his Tales from Shakespeare and its translation/adaptation in Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu ( Recitations Heard from Afar ), a text that turns Shakespeare into someone more like Jin dynasty writer Gan Bao or Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling—transmitters of the strange. One reading stands out in this chapter: how the logically estranging asks of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Lin Shu’s version is called “Storm Ruse”) can be plied into even stranger cross-cultural structures of feeling. The storytelling device that lets Lamb turn Miranda into a proxy for the common reader licenses a comparable creation in “Storm Ruse.” This business of remaking a world that has enough cosmic magic in it to truly reverse an injustice (one aware of its colonial trespasses) gets stranger as it extends outward; “The crux of strangeness at which the foreign and the supernatural converge is, precisely, freedom” (p. 68). Lin Shu’s envoicing of Ariel, one that adds an acceptance speech for her freedom, gives Lamb’s description of social interactions a provisional “outside”—a human-spirit relationship that is not Chinese but that can be made to speak its moral grammar, its stratagems, and its own appeals to higher law.

Chapter 1 takes up, among other works, the 1908 essay “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices” by Lu Xun, the writer known in the West for “Diaries of a Madman” and as the father of Chinese national literary modernity. “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” along with the more famous “On the Power of Mara Poetry,” is read for its distant adherence to Kantian definitions of Enlightenment as “a process of coming to speech that entails release from the guidance of others” (p. 46). We might instinctively associate Lu Xun’s call for the “voice of the heart” ( xinsheng) with liberationist movements, including emergent leftist internationalism, but, again, the association has a few more mechanisms to it. Similarly, it is easy enough to see the poetic capacity for renewal and reorigination as a precondition of revolution (as Romanticists have been saying all along), but even this, on the horizon of world literature, involves steps we do not consider. In Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” the compared text in this chapter, “imagination has priority over reason insofar as it is the former that generates and creates objects for the operations of the latter” (p. 39). Lu Xun’s “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices” contends with instrumental rationality in a similar way—that is, beyond mere disavowal. A claim for poetic voice proceeds as a defense in Shelley’s sense—as a genre that teaches you generic and intentional differences between genres and the social orders that employ them. Thus, among the “malevolent voices” that impede the xinsheng are both “avant-gardist,” undemocratic calls for “the eradication of ‘superstition’ or folk culture and popular religion in China” and “clamors for a chauvinistic nationalism” (p. 43). Self-congratulatory modernisms in which Westernization secures “competitive expediency” must be disambiguated at the practical level from modernist stirrings, “the externalization and activation of an ‘inner brightness’” (p. 43). One might say that Lu Xun and Percy Bysshe Shelley are grasping a Romantic modernity on the cusp of totalitarian, fascist, and other authoritarian schemes of social engineering. For Shelley, the rise of human and administrative sciences alongside nineteenth-century reforms and revolts demands alternative resonances that must be heard and repeated. His intimation of a cosmic order—“every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem” (Shelley, quoted on p. 40)—is that which unbinds a Prometheus or an ordinary Chinese soul reading Lu Xun whose chains are equally uncaricaturable, equally hard to shed. In both cases, curses laid upon the human spirit are turned to mantras; this comes with a profound understanding of how language really does bind, and where to start pulling the thread, where to apply pressure.

Sun’s way of pairing things is rare and missed in literary scholarship. It is a model for comparative work, not least because it speaks with the confidence of someone who believes that more and more people will traverse these impossibly distant bodies of knowledge, people who will have knowledge of Zhou Zuoren and Charles Lamb at their fingertips. Sun writes with the conviction that modern literary technologies of shared referentiality will evolve into a “genuine cosmopolitanism” (p. 134). Of all the things that we say are unevenly distributed in dimensional space, modernity itself is perhaps the most unevenly distributed. Sun’s precise and deprovincialized close readings in On the Horizon of World Literature reestablish the availability of a literary modernity that feels, proclaims, and wishes for much and understands the engineering of the world in its actual expanse.

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The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology

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10 Modernism

Cleo McNelly Kearns is a non-resident fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.

Published: 02 September 2009
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While a literary and critical modernism seems on the surface independent of and at times oblivious to theological modernism, the modernist stances taken by major twentieth-century artists and writers raise theological issues and concerns with which they are very much engaged. These issues are incarnated in their stylistic and formal innovations as well as in their range of interests, often sensitive as well as challenging to conservative and orthodox understandings of Christianity and prescient with respect to problems to come. These include problems of comparative religion, esotericism, spiritualism, and pagan and natural theology, as well as questions of politics, ethics, and revolutionary change. Engagement with these matters did not prevent many moderns from finding their way towards religion, Christian and otherwise, on terms both new and old.

To introduce the term ‘modernism’ into a discussion of the intersections between literature and theology is to risk complicating rather than clarifying the issues at stake. In the first place, modern literature and modern theology are two relatively distinct discourses with different orientations and contexts—and each term is within its own domain highly contested and perhaps even, many would argue, counterproductive. Modernism in theology has its roots in the Enlightenment and in nineteenth-century philosophy and biblical criticism, and in Romantic and Victorian liberal and progressive thought. It draws upon Kant, Hegel, and the higher criticism, and it enters into dialogue with, among other things, Darwinian science and the general high bourgeois culture of its time. However, though the influence of its orientations and engagements persists to this day, many of the towering figures of twentieth-century theology, from Karl Barth to Hans Urs von Balthasar, were not modernists strictly speaking, and were often highly critical of liberal suppositions and methods even where they sometimes drew on or deployed them. Modernism in literature and the arts, by contrast, is an almost purely twentieth-century phenomenon and is to some extent a matter of style and form rather than content and ideas, though it has more ties to theology and more concern with theological issues than literary and cultural critics have often appreciated.

Theological modernism effectively began in nineteenth-century Germany, where theologians such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch began to perceive that one way out of scholastic and Calvinist aporias and the subsequent dismissal of religion during the Enlightenment lay in Kant's philosophy of religion. This philosophy delineated a clear separation between reason and faith, and it thus opened a space in which the latter could be articulated on a new basis, a basis of immanence, feeling, and contemporary cultural and personal experience. Modernism of this kind went hand in hand with a Hegelian historicizing of the unfolding of spirit and a sense of the providential evolution of divine manifestation towards universal salvation. These affirmations translated, perhaps too readily, into romantic vapours, cheap progressivism, and perennial philosophy, but they helped theology to recover from what many had thought were the devastating blows of eighteenth-century British Enlightenment critique. Furthermore, they also led to a willingness to embrace the surrounding culture and were patient of engagement with the rising cultural prestige of science. This general theological outlook also inspired and informed the higher criticism and new initiatives in textual approaches to Scripture and tradition, the sphere in which modernism in theology bore its most lasting fruit.

From Germany, and building on a strong internal discourse of enlightenment, modernist ideas quickly reached the British intelligentsia, their original source. Among the most prominent expositors of the new and modern point of view was the English Jesuit George Tyrell. Writing to his friend and like-minded colleague Baron von Hugel, Tyrell summarized his position, a useful statement, in brief, of the modern religious point of view:

Hence I am driven to a revolutionary view of dogma. As you know, I distinguish sharply between the Christian revelation and the theology that rationalizes and explains it. The former was the work of the inspired era of origins. It is prophetic in form and sense; it involves an idealized reading of history past and to come. It is, so to say, an inspired construction of things in the interests of religion; a work of inspired imagination, not of reflection and reasoning. It does not develop or change like theology; but is the subject-matter of theology…The whole has a spiritual value as a construction of Time in relation to Eternity. It gives us the world of our religious life. But I do not feel bound to find an independent meaning in each element; or to determine prematurely what elements are of liberal, and what of purely symbolic value—which is the core of historic fact and which of idealization. My faith is in the truth, shadowed by the whole creed; and in the direction it gives to spiritual life—in the Way, the Life and the Truth. (Petre 1920 : 57–8)

The extent to which these views sound conventional or uncontroversial today is the extent to which a generalized modernism was rapidly diffused in British and American culture in the twentieth century and became well established, at least among the intelligentsia, both within and without the Catholic Church.

This diffusion did not occur without resistance. There followed on this nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expansion something of an immediate countermovement towards repression. It was foreshadowed in Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). Pope Leo, believing that a return to a repristinated and reified understanding of scholasticism was the only possible position for a church under political and cultural siege, exhorted the magisterium to ‘restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas’. Some thirty years later, Tyrell was suspended from his ministry and expelled from the Society of Jesus for modernist tendencies, and Pius X in the papal document Pascendi (1907) formally condemned modernism and attempted to make a return to scholasticism the official theology of the Church. (This stance would probably have horrified Thomas himself, who was in many ways the modernist of his day.) This attempt by the papacy to close the door on a widespread and intellectually compelling movement had the ironic effect not only of destroying several great careers and setting Catholic biblical scholarship back by generations but of putting the term ‘modernism’ itself on the general cultural map. The major figures condemned in this document include Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) as well as Tyrell (1861–1909) and von Hugel (1852–1925). As Marianne Thormahlen notes in her introduction to an important recent anthology of essays on the modernist movement in literature, none of these figures made use of the word ‘modernism’ itself in public until after the papal condemnation (Thormahlen 2003 : 124). That condemnation had, however, the unintended consequence of making the term part of the general intellectual commerce of the period.

Eventually, however, modernism's best offspring—the movement its conservative opposition dubbed nouvelle théologie —succeeded just before, during, and after the Second World War in reorienting Catholic intellectual life to a new direction, modern in a somewhat different sense. This theology, developed by such deeply reflective and learned figures as Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and M-D Chenu, arose from a discreet but persistent exploration of Christian texts and traditions with an eye both to their historical context and to their contemporary relevance (Daley 2004). As Danielou describes its challenges, a theology of this kind

must treat God as God—not as an object, but as the Subject par excellence, who reveals himself when and as he will; as a result, it must be penetrated, first of all, with a religious spirit. Second, it must respond to the experiences of the modern mind, and take cognizance of the new dimensions which science and history have given to mind and society. Finally, it must become a concrete attitude before existence—one unified response that engages the whole person, the inner light of a course of action in which the whole of life is engaged. (Cited ibid. 5)

The nouvelle théologie contributed to what was perhaps modernization's most stunning public success: the reform movement culminating in Vatican II. This reform not only ‘purged’ the liturgy and many of the thought forms of the Church of centuries of scholastic elaboration, but opened the path for Catholic theology and biblical criticism to draw on contemporary methods and experience and on philosophical movements from existentialism and hermeneutics to phenomenology and deconstruction.

This was not the whole story, however, for Catholic resistance to these new currents remained important, both within the magisterium and in the pew, and Catholic conservatism in doctrine and morals had from the first a deep cultural impact, not only on the faithful, but on the wider culture as well, creating a conservative profile for the Roman Church still operative today. At the same time, the Catholic understanding of and reaction to this phenomenon influenced a number of the writers of the twentieth century, not always in the direction of dissent. For as we shall see there was something in religious and philosophical modernism—as opposed to modernism in the arts—that seemed to many twentieth-century writers inadequate to the experience of two world wars and a holocaust, and antithetical to the complex, sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes classical, symbolic, imaginative, and restorative energies they sought to reclaim.

Protestant modernism in Britain and America had roughly the same nineteenth-century seedbed as did Roman Catholic modernism: the higher criticism, political liberalism, the rise of science, anticlericalism, and a desire to break down dogmatic reification and moral absolutism and bring Christian belief into better contact with contemporary realities. These assumptions quickly flowed not only into a flourishing biblical scholarship but into the Broad Church and Anglican modernist movements in Britain and into Unitarianism in America. The major figures in Britain—such divines as B. F. Streeter and Dr. Sanday—are now no longer household names, but the positions they held and defended are widely accepted in Christian circles and often the more powerful for being tacitly assumed. Paul Badham ( 1998 : 78), in his useful study of Anglican modernism then and now, defines the still important issues these positions raise in terms of the following axioms:

Belief that the objective existence of God can be shown to be compatible with modern philosophy and science.

Belief that religious experience is foundational for faith and that such experience is part of the common heritage of the world's faiths.

Belief in the reality of life after death understood in terms of the immortality of the soul.

Belief that the divinity of Christ must be expressed in such a way that it is compatible with the equally important doctrine of his humanity and oneness with us and that it genuinely reflects what historical study of the Gospels tells us about Jesus' life and thought.

In the USA, a German-influenced, broad Unitarianism and the philosophies of religion—Emersonian, idealist, and eventually pragmatic—to which it gives rise were immensely influential in the nineteenth century, though from the first they had their critics. Emily Dickinson, for instance, was able to be acid as well as acute about this tendency.

He preached upon ‘Breadth’ till it argued him narrow— The Broad are too broad to define And of ‘Truth’ until it proclaimed him a Liar— The Truth never flaunted a Sign— Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence As Gold the Pyrites would shun— What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus To meet so enabled a Man!

This poem captures well the complexities at issue in the reception of modern theological ideas, for while it pokes fun at a so very up-to-date, so very enabled clergyman, it does so in the name of what is also a highly modernist construct: a humane and innocent Jesus upon whom tradition has thrown a false and elaborate overlay, and whose very name serves as a kind of touchstone for simple faith and historical truth.

Within a few years of the papal condemnation of modernism in 1907, the modernist movement in both Catholic and Reformed circles also began to gather steam among the general educated public, accruing a wide range of connotations and implications, both intellectual and cultural. These connotations included what S. M. Hutchens ( 1999 : 1) describes succinctly as ‘a posited end to the assertion of religious dogma as prescriptive public truth’. Great interest at this time followed and continues to follow initiatives in biblical criticism toward stripping away secondary and mythological elements from the faith in favour of a new understanding of its historical manifestations and of a rational though not dismissive reappropriation. The desideratum, as many see it, is to disestablish Christianity and cleanse it not only of the weight of gothic and scholastic mediations and constraining social conventions but of the more fanciful, symbolic, allegorical, and apocalyptic and apocalyptic-messianic interpretations of its truths, even those of Scripture itself. As Hutchens (ibid. 2) also notes, modernism in this sense posits ‘as an epistemological entrance requirement’ that all prior canons of knowledge and method and their condensed symbols be subject to critical reconstruction, though it cannot tell us by what canon this is to be done once these prior canons enter the door.

This positive invocation of a general, across-the-board examination and critique of religion, based on criteria outside the realm of faith, targeted as antiquated and mystified any position smacking of apocalyptic and/or participating in what previous ages had elaborated as a full messianic understanding of the figure of Jesus. Robert Jenson ( 2004 : 12) puts it pungently, if somewhat tendentiously: ‘modernity's great theological project was to suppress apocalyptic, and to make messianism into [mere] guru-worship’. A new understanding of Christianity, it was thought, might arise from this suppression, an understanding based on a progressive sense of history and a submission to scientific criteria. This basis would not leave the church without faith and tradition, but it would value these without the sacrifice of intellectual rigour, scientific advancement, rigorous textual criticism, and radical cultural and political engagement. The figure of Rudolf Bultmann comes to mind here, the New Testament scholar who inaugurated a project of ‘demythologizing’ the Gospels that, as it seems in retrospect, only a dyed-in-the-wool modernist could imagine as possible or desirable.

Bultmann is instructive here, however, in another way, for his religious vision was not confined by exegetical method. He was a profound man of faith, and he was open to and inspired by the extremely rigorous anti-modern theological perspective offered by the work of his younger colleague Karl Barth. Barth, perhaps the most outstanding theologian of the twentieth century, challenged in many ways the liberal political and revisionist predispositions of his time and sought to restore an apocalyptic, engaged, and deeply messianic vision to Christian understanding. To Barth we shall return in a moment. First, however, we must note among the moderns a number of somewhat younger and later figures, including Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose base of operations was the USA and whose engagement with the liberal politics and art of the 1930s to the 1960s was, like that of Troeltsch and others before them, founded in a historically critical understanding of Christianity and a strong desire to subject the faith to reasonable revision.

To some extent, two other great twentieth-century theologians were in a qualified way moderns as well: Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at least in the sense that they were deeply engaged with contemporary culture and politics, somewhat distanced from ecclesiastical structures and orthodoxies, and completely opposed to the idolatrous power of institutions, both state and church. Tillich, who sought a kind of revision of the doctrine of God in terms of the ground of being, saw theology less as a matter of reflection on revelation than as a search for answers to ‘ultimate questions’, while Bonhoeffer's life of sacrificial political engagement drew upon the prophetic capacity of modern liberalism to witness to a gospel sense of discipleship and to a historical Jesus seen as a model for spiritual leadership in the face of evil.

The attenuations of a nineteenth-century religious outlook, however updated, did nonetheless, here as in Catholicism, breed a certain resistance, a resistance with many opposing, profound, and still-ramifying manifestations, including the rise of neo-orthodoxy on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. Granted, Protestant modernism was neither resisted with such institutional force as Roman Catholic modernism (though many refined theologians vigorously rejected it), nor did it win the day in quite so definitive a fashion. From the first, however, it had its dissenters, both from above, so to speak, in the flourishing movement of neo-reformed-orthodoxy around the great, left-leaning, and philosophically sophisticated figure of Karl Barth, and from below in the hotly and passionately held fundamentalism and evangelical fervour of many clergy as well as laity.

The key moment in this shifting current was perhaps the period just before and during the First World War, a period that inaugurated major shifts in the culture of Europe and America in almost every domain. Among other things, very early, in 1914, as Europe began to fall apart, the modern theologian Troeltsch, like many of his colleagues, compromised himself in the eyes of some Christians by supporting the Kaiser's war policies and by moving from the chair of Systematic Theology at Heidelberg to a chair in the History and Philosophy of Civilization in Berlin. Highly critical of Troeltsch's move, the young Barth began to look to Kierkegaard rather than to Kant and Hegel for philosophical inspiration and to adumbrate a radical apocalyptic vision of Christianity as the encounter with what today, in a different language and context, might be called the tout autre . In 1919 he published his controversial and widely read commentary on Romans. Its attack on liberal theology for failing to provide a sharp enough critique of culture and politics to mount a serious resistance to imperialism seemed prophetic when the so-called ‘Faith Movement of German Christians’ showed itself ready to embrace Nazism, and the official church leadership in Germany seemed to lack either ethical or theological resources to combat this collusion.

The youthful Barth, rusticated for a time in his early years to the leadership of a parish made up largely of the industrial poor, was struck by the impotence of liberal theology in addressing the lives of his parishioners, and had to conclude that the bourgeois religious perspective in which he had been trained offered them very little, and that his pastoral responsibility must carry him beyond its terms and horizons (Jenson 2004 : 5). Giving up definitively on natural theology and on the possibility of a happy collaboration between Christian understanding and contemporary social and political culture, Barth then began the articulation of a theology based strictly on ‘vertical’ revelation from above and not on the surrounding dominant culture, whether enlightened or not.

The first initiative here was the commentary on Romans, a publication which instantly made him a celebrity. He then gathered about him a movement of sorts, drawing the older Bultmann in its train and including Emil Brunner. The group published a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten , defining their moment in history as one of crisis, a moment, as the journal's title indicates, seen as a kind of suspension, ‘between the times’. Robert Jenson (ibid. 6) captures the theological and indeed the aesthetic energies of this movement well:

For what is there zwischen den Zeiten , between the times? Theologically, there is that dimensionless perch between time and eternity, between death and resurrection. Culturally, there is the breathless moment between deconstruction of the established grasp of reality and the gift of a new one—the moment of Cézanne's Bathers . Politically, there is revolution. And in Germany all of these were there at once.

Barth's own work emerged from this moment, and although it later modulated into a somewhat less apocalyptic exposition as he attempted to give narrative and Christological content to the encounter between time and eternity, it was a modulation with an edge. It gave him a critical purchase on both liberal religion and contemporary politics, helping to sustain his profound resistance to National Socialism.

Barth's critique of nineteenth-century assumptions about religion and theology is still widely influential today, though less so perhaps in the pew than in the study. Even those whose perspective remained in some sense more hospitable to the surrounding culture and more engaged with natural theology than his have had to reckon with his cogent analyses. Tillich and Bonhoeffer, for instance, emerging from the same experiences of the trauma of war and holocaust that Barth saw coming, while both loosely speaking ‘modern’ in their move away from ecclesiastical structures and into direct engagement with the world (though both were also profoundly pessimistic and existential, rather than progressivist and scientific in orientation), nevertheless developed their thought very much in conversation with Barth and they shared his personal and principled opposition to the reigning paradigms in society and politics, whether liberal or conservative.

Tillich, for instance, though often contrasted to Barth, saw his theology as in part constructed to ‘answer’ the Barthian call. As late as 1963, in a set of lectures for the general public, he wrote a moving statement that weaves together a new theological vision with a deep suspicion of progressivism and social planning:

Today we have to resist the meaningless ‘forwardism’ determining our inner and outer experience. Most of us can offer this resistance only as victims of the structures of our times. But the scars received in our lives may be the basis for sensitive speaking…But even then we will have to keep on resisting—against control by others, against ‘management’ of persons, against all abuse of men and women. This certainly includes the abuse of forcing them into their own salvation. (Tillich 1996 : 61)

Thus although modernist hopes and perspectives informed and inspired these theologians, they were in various ways as critical of a hyper-rationalized modern identification with the powers that be as was Barth himself. What Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and the leading figures of Vatican II shared, however—and shared in distinction from many of their postmodern heirs—was a sense that it is possible to cleanse Christian tradition of secondary formations and to return to a kernel, a bedrock, a bottom line to be discerned in Scripture and history upon which theological vision may be built anew.

It is interesting to note that none of the figures mentioned so far tackled directly or commented in an extended way on the two major and growing challenges to religious faith in this period: the social theory of Karl Marx and the psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The Marxist view of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ and the Freudian view of it as a form of mystification and unconscious projection gained instant attention and growing currency among the intelligentsia throughout the period, and so as time went on did Jung's association of the sense of divinity with a transpersonal collective unconscious. These opinions influenced—though they did not entirely captivate—many artists and writers. Indeed it might be argued that the most important theological or rather atheological statements of the modern period were Marx's Critique of the German Ideology (1846), Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930), and Jung's Answer to Job (1952). Each of these offers a sharp critique of religion, and each is scornful of theological mystification, but each also arises from within a Jewish and Christian discourse and can hardly be conceived without the valorization of social justice and personal self-examination found in these faith traditions. Each was also eventually to spawn intense engagements from theologians and religious writers in the postmodern period.

Whatever its limitations, the impact of the modernist movement in theology on the literary and artistic modernism of the twentieth century was more profound than many later critics have supposed. It was not, however, monolithic nor was a modern religious outlook always the general theological orientation of choice for modern writers and artists. In the first, place, as we have seen, by the time at which the literary figures we call moderns were making their contributions, not only had the Roman Catholic Church formally condemned the modernist movement, but such major theologians of the period as Barth were already to some extent reacting against or moving beyond modern theology strictu dictu . And although their own innovations were placing them firmly in the camp of the avant-garde, the literary moderns were reacting against some modernizing tendencies in religion and culture, even when they regarded these as inevitable and in some respects liberating. Among other things, as I have said, modernism in the arts is primarily a matter of form, rather than content, of style rather than of thought per se, though form carries, for moderns in particular, its own freight of meaning: philosophical, political and theological.

At a deeper level, however, it must be admitted that the modernist ethos in religion was in many respects counter to the interests of art and artists. Demythologizing? The reduction of complex symbols into linear propositions? The cleansing and rectifying of tradition? A sense of the datedness of the past and its lack of pertinence to the present? Optimism about the forward march of progress? Rejection of apocalyptic sensibility? Philosophical idealism? Pure science? None of these gestures or positions or projects entirely suited the book of a modern writer, certainly not a Joyce, a Pound, a Yeats, or an Eliot, especially not after the traumas and dislocations of the First and then the Second World Wars. For in driving a wedge between the rational and the mythological, the appeal of the new and the beauty of the old, meaning and symbol, personal feeling and scientific consensus, modern theology left little space for either art or genuine engagement with the darkness of human suffering and mass-manufactured death and destruction.

Under the pressure of their need for both aesthetic pertinence and political engagement, many artists and writers resisted not only the absolutisms, moral and political, of various forms of clerical and cultural ancien régime , but the equally barren vistas of the up-to-date liberal response. This response seemed to offer only a denatured and pre-programmed agenda that threatened to ignore or elide political and personal breakdown, to cut itself off from classical and pagan sources of inspiration and renewal, and to flatten out all difference into an unending and sterile same. At the same time, much in a generalized and widely diffused kind of ‘modern thinking’ continued to have its appeal to men and women of letters, due among other things to the critical historicism of its approach to biblical texts, its scholarly approach to other cultures, its potential universalism and hospitality to Bohemian and oppositional lifestyles, and above all to a deep and relatively unconstrained exploration of the experience and meaning of sex. Thus, the relationship of most modern artists to modern theology and religion was and remained ambivalent and hard to determine.

Contributing to the complexity of the issues at stake was a further problem. For though the term ‘modern’ occasionally occurs in nineteenth-century literature and more often in twentieth-century novels, where it is a kind of canting jargon—often used tongue in cheek—for all that is trendy and outré in art and morals, modernism in literary studies is largely the sober retrospective construct of critics of the second half of the twentieth century. Its profile is drawn by those readers for the most part tuned and sympathetic to the new twentieth-century aesthetic and trying to measure a major change in sensibility (cf. Thormahlen 2003 : 124). This change was immediately and intuitively apparent to its first audience, but it was defined more precisely by later critics, for whom modernism was a largely formal innovation entailing a family of features, among them the writing of self-consciously difficult and demanding texts, the representation of sex and violence as constituent elements of human life, a deployment of high learning in a vernacular idiom, linguistic experimentation and the breaking of a certain conventional decorum in social, literary, and religious domains.

Most of these later critics, from F. R. Leavis to Malcolm Bradbury, approached modernism with discernment and respect, but they were often tone deaf to its religious roots, seeing its provocative and impious discourse as arising from nothing more than a kind of enlightened secularism. As we shall see, this was often not the case, and the range of religious reference and dimension of spirituality inherent in modern art seems to have often eluded these otherwise very acute readers. Children of a later, highly secularized cultural moment, they were subject to the notion that religion can be neatly hived off from philosophy and art—indeed that these perhaps supersede it—a view not unrelated to nineteenth-century aestheticism. Literary modernism as usually defined in the critical literature is thus not only different from theological modernism but is often defined in ways divorced from religious issues altogether.

We can now see, pace these critics, that modern artists—like the ‘terribly modern’ young things who liked, bought, and indeed flaunted their work—were probably more aware of the serious theological and religious issues underlying this new art and aesthetic, and more engaged with these matters, than the literary and cultural critics who followed them. Certainly this is true of the major figures of the period. T. S. Eliot is the most obvious example here, at once a major poet, an innovative critic, and, in his mature years, a practising Christian of great theological and philosophical subtlety and sophistication. Not only did Eliot deal with Christian themes in his work, but he made a direct contribution to Christian thought both through his participation in the Anglican Lambeth Conference and through his work on the committee for a revised translation of the New Testament.

Equally engaged, though from a dissenting point of view, were such writers as Yeats, Pound, and Joyce. The latter, for instance, was explicit about the difficulty and yet necessity he found in escaping the constraints of ethnicity, traditional faith, and identification with a single cultural heritage and social location. ‘When the soul of man is born in this country,’ says his young Irish hero in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’ (Joyce 1991 : 206). At the same time, it must be said that Joyce's disengagement from Catholicism and Irish politics and his movement toward a kind of gnosticism and pan-European cosmopolitanism emerged not from some merely rationalist and secular set of assumptions and presuppositions, but from a highly charged and consciously developed countervailing spiritual vision, one still informed and illuminated by the past. Among other things, his profound appreciation of the tension between Hebraism and Hellenism—to borrow the phrase of the great nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold—emerged from and depended on this spiritually informed vision.

(It might be noted here that a great many manifestations of modern sensibility, though not all, are closely tied to a persistent strain of gnosticism in Western culture, where gnosticism is defined as general orientation toward a dualistic theology according to which orthodox institutional religion is no more than a mask for a profoundly dark human situation, caught between an ideal notion of divinity and an equally strong sense of moral and ethical chaos. This gnosticism is explicit in the work of Lawrence Durrell, who is well aware of its historical roots, its theological implications, and its possible intersections with the new psychologies of Freud and Jung; and it marks the sensibility of, among others, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer as well, most extravagantly in the latter's neglected magnum opus, Ancient Evenings .)

Yeats is yet another modern poet who departed from Christianity, but not in order to move towards a modern, rational liberalism in religion, but rather to embrace (though perhaps never quite literally) an esotericism the extent of which continues to astound the more secular of his critics and readers. His poem ‘Vacillations’, among his most important, ends with an apostrophe to Baron von Hugel, the Christian modernist noted above. It concludes:

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity? The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb, Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come, Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once Had scooped out pharaoh's mummy. I—though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb—play a pre-destined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said? So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

As his inclusion of pharaoh's mummy in this list of miracles might signal, Yeats was more interested in the belief in a world of spirits hidden from and more ‘real’ than obvious earthly phenomena, spirits that may be invoked to intervene actively in human life, than he was in orthodox Christianity, though he was insistent that these forms of spirituality were by no means as far apart as many thought. His interest in the occult, like that of many of his contemporaries, was in part a provocative gesture, in part a way of courting the muse, and in part a genuine spiritual commitment. The fine line between and among these motives is traced with great finesse and theological sophistication by several recent scholars (Helmling 1988 ; Longenbach 1988 ). In general, however, the increasingly high level of scholarship in matters cultural, some small but growing measure of direct contact with other traditions once thought to be entirely mystified and inscrutable, and a deeper philosophical and historical sophistication prevented many modern writers from falling into the sillier forms of spiritualism.

Ezra Pound, another dissenter from the modern Christian consensus, was also deeply engaged with religious and spiritual issues, though he did not think theologically in quite the way that Joyce or Eliot did. He shared with Yeats an interest in the occult and in gnosticism (Longenbach 1988 ; Miyaki 1991), but his apprehension of these was tempered by a finer sense of cultural mediation and a more honed aesthetic sensibility than many others could deploy. (The greatest of his contemporaries recognized in Pound this superior sensibility, and were the more mortified by the curious intellectual and ethical failures of his later political and social vision.) Indeed, Pound stands as primus inter pares among modernism's several great heretics, figures whose opposition to orthodox Christianity arose neither from liberal revisionism nor from secular materialism, but from a deep and impassioned concern with matters spiritual and an engaged critique of the attenuated forms Christian life and belief had come in their time to take.

Not every modern artist departed from Christianity or from traditional forms of representation in such extreme directions, either in terms of beliefs or aesthetics. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, after many experiments in both painting and writing involving both form and content, returned not only to traditional religious constructs but to portraiture and to the conventional structure of the novel. Eliot, having written the echt-modern poem The Waste Land , perhaps the greatest single achievement of modern poetry, took up dramatic lyric, the popular theatre, and something resembling more the meditative devotional poetry of the past than the innovative forms of the modernist sense of the future. Joyce, Pound, and Woolf, to mention only a few other representative figures, continued to be committed to a break with conventional form as well as content, but their later work moved, in the judgement of many, very close to the edge of unintelligibility and seemed to approach a cul-de-sac, aesthetically, personally, and to some extent ethically as well. So, at least, in the case of Woolf, who ended her life, and Pound, whose tragic investment in Italian fascism brought not only his reputation but in many respects his poetry to grief.

Thus many major figures in the modern arts, while avant-garde in orientation, were far more antagonistic to modernist revisionism in religion than might be supposed—or at least to modernist revisionism in its more reductive and unimaginative forms. Indeed, a surprising number of these figures remained or became close to traditional pre-modern forms of religious belief and practice. The Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and/or converts Eliot, Stevens (late in life), David Jones, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Paul Claudel all come to mind here, a list to which we must add the names of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the eccentric but interesting Charles Williams, and the great American modern literary critic Cleanth Brooks. A certain nostalgie du cloître may be observed even in figures who did not formally embrace high Anglicanism or Catholicism, such as Hilda Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and Henry James. In the reformed tradition there was among others Marianne Moore, whose letters reveal not only a regular churchgoer but in many respects a deeply Protestant sensibility.

An important context for both the orthodox and the unorthodox theologies of modern artists remains to be discussed: the phenomenon the French historian of letters and cultural critic Raymond Schwab ( 1984 ) long ago identified as ‘the oriental renaissance’, an influx of Eastern philosophy and religion into European and American culture beginning in the nineteenth century and growing exponentially in importance today. For during the modern period, and with a depth of effect that we are only beginning to measure, the discovery of the huge, relatively unknown and unmapped ‘old worlds’ of Indic and Chinese culture and religion (to which we might add the ‘primitive’ world of African rhythms and forms) not only challenged European hegemony over religious truth but profoundly relativized the context in which that truth was understood and pursued. While arrogance and colonial myopia often dominated the reception of this infusion of new visions and perspectives, the effect of this intercultural contact was profoundly transforming, both in religion and in the arts.

Even in the very early modern period, many theologians and divines in Britain already wrote in the light of this oriental renaissance. The eminent Rowland Williams began his career with a major study on Christianity and Hinduism, while such equally prominent figures as B. H. Streeter and A. C. Bouquet took up the relatively new term ‘comparative religion’ and advocated its pursuit. These initiatives were largely based on a model of progressive revelation that makes Christ the fulfilment of all prior forms of religious understanding. Though this model now seems inadequate, the very gesture of placing, say, early Buddhism and the early church on the same plane, if only for purposes of comparison, was radical in both its immediate and long-term implications. This gesture was informed by the work of, among others, the great scholar of oriental texts and languages Max Muller and the early mythographer Sir James G. Frazer. Muller's remarks on these new perspectives capture both their potential and their limitations:

If we have once learned to see in the exclusive religion of the Jews a preparation of what was to be the all-embracing religion of humanity, we shall feel much less difficulty in recognizing, in the mazes of other religions, a hidden purpose; a wandering in the desert, it may be, but a preparation also for the land of promise. (Muller 1872 : 23; cited in C. Kearns 1987 : 132–3)

The effect of this oriental renaissance appears even more extensive in literature, though here again the new vistas opened out by comparative culture and religion are explored as much from a need to escape from modernist reductions as to harvest the scholarly, philosophical, and theological fruits of openings to the East. Yeats was intrigued by Eastern traditions and collaborated on a translation of Patanjali's yoga sutras, which was to become an influential text among the American intelligentsia in the next century. T. S. Eliot was long engaged with Buddhism and Hinduism, among other things for its refinement of meditative technique and its validation, though with great critical and philosophical sophistication, of mystical experience (ibid.). Ezra Pound not only rendered a number of classics of Chinese religion and literature into English, but was deeply steadied and guided by his understanding of Confucianism (G. Kearns 1980 ).

Eliot himself best understood the cultural possibilities and tensions arising from liberal, enlightened modernism in religion. Though the conservative positions on these issues he came to embrace displeased the politically correct both then and now—‘how unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot | with his garb of clerical cut’, to quote his own spoof—his analysis of the issues at stake was without peer. His key critical terms, ‘dissociation of sensibility’, ‘the objective correlative’, and ‘tradition and the individual talent’ all arise form modernist concerns. The first of these points to an inability to feel thought on the pulse and is for Eliot the result of a modern divorce between sense and sensibility. The second represents a modernist attempt to bridge the subjective world of philosophical idealism, private experience, and esoteric knowledge, with what he calls ‘open wisdom’ and the new realism of science. The third, and the rich discourse of tradition in Eliot's work to which it leads, is perhaps the most productive of his critical concepts, arising from his study of American philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Royce in particular, though Eliot could critique his philosophical arguments with a rapier mind honed on the finer work of F. H. Bradley, helped move him towards an understanding of cultural hermeneutics as spiritual practice.

Eliot saw in the initial moment or insight of artistic inspiration a necessarily heterodox impulse, an impulse in the best work then classically chastened and disciplined into an orthodoxy of both form and content that re-envisions the tradition even as it carries that tradition forward. (This is an understanding remarkably similar to that of Wallace Stevens, whose great poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ is in part a meditation, less resolved than acutely stated, on the problem of revelation and interpretation.) He fully took on board the Kantian and later the proto-phenomenological and deconstructive critique of Thomism in philosophy, the importance of the higher criticism in biblical studies and the appeal of cultural relativism when faced with, among other things, the profound influx of Eastern philosophy and religion into the Western cultural matrix. Alert to the modern heresies of esotericism, gnosticism, and paganism in his own work as well as that of his contemporaries, Eliot also understood that to meet with an adequate poetics and ethics the deep questions and traumas of contemporary life, not to mention the dislocations of a debased sexuality, required stronger medicine than a simple nineteenth-century Hegelian and idealist revisionism.

In 1927, after a long period of interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, Eliot joined the Anglican Church. He did so to some extent for practical or more precisely for pragmatic reasons in the philosophical sense. To ‘become’ a Buddhist, he thought, was to require of himself a change in mental orientation that would take him too far from his own language and culture to bear fruit (Kearns 1987 : 131–59). In reflecting on this decision, Eliot articulated well the journey he himself had traced through both the appeal and the critique of modern thought to an understanding of the need for some traditional religious framework in which to carry on spiritual practice. ‘The difficult discipline’, he writes, ‘is the discipline and training of emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great that it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only attainable through dogmatic religion’ (Eliot 1930 : 156).

This return to orthodoxy, though orthodoxy far more relativized, nuanced, and deconstructive in philosophical location than might appear, must, however, be counterbalanced by a recognition of its roots in Eliot's profoundly modernist project, both in literature and theology. In his early years, he put this project in terms that almost any modern theologian or writer could endorse: ‘The life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from one or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them’ (cited in Kearns 1987 : 85).

Thus while a literary and critical modernism seems on the surface independent of and at times oblivious to theological modernism, the modernist stances taken by major twentieth-century artists and writers raise theological issues and concerns with which they are very much engaged. These issues are incarnated in their stylistic and formal innovations as well as in their range of interests, both often sensitive as well as challenging to conservative and orthodox understandings of Christianity and prescient with respect to problems to come. These include problems of comparative religion, esotericism, spiritualism, and pagan and natural theology as well as questions of politics, ethics, and revolutionary change. Engagement with these matters did not, moreover, prevent many moderns from finding their way towards religion, Christian and otherwise, on terms both new and old.

Works Cited

Badham, Paul. 1998 . The Contemporary Challenge of Modernist Theology . Cardiff: University of Wales.

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Daley, Brian. 2005 . ‘La Nouvelle Théologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology’. Unpublished paper. Center of Theological Inquiry. Princeton, NJ. Cited by permission.

Eliot, T. S. 1930 . ‘Religion without Humanism’, in Norman Foerster (ed.), Humanism and America . New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Helmling, Steven. 1988 . The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman and Yeats . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hutchens, S. M. 1999. ‘Modernism and Theology: Book Review of The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth‐Century Thought by William R. Everdell ’, in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity . July/August: 1–2. Available online at ‹http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-04-101-b› .

Jenson, R. W. 2004 . ‘ Apocalyptic in Twentieth Century German Theology ’. Unpublished paper. Center of Theological Inquiry. Princeton, NJ. Cited by permission.

Joyce, James. 1991 . Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . New York: New American Library.

Kearns, Cleo. 1987 . T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kearns, George. 1980 . Guide to Ezra Pourd's Selected Cantos . New Brunswick. Rutgers University Press.

Longenbach, James 1988 . Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miyake, Akiko. 1991 . Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Muller, Max. 1872. Lectures on the Science of Religions . Cited in Kearns.

Petre, M. D. (ed.) 1920 . George Tyrell's Letters . London: Fisher Unwin.

Schwab, Raymond. 1984 . The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 , trans. G. Patternon‐Black and V. Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press.

Thormahlen, Marianne (ed.) 2003 . Rethinking Modernism . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tillich, Paul. 1996 . The Irrelevance and Return of the Christian Message . Cleveland: Pilgrim.

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Coffee & Classics

Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’

Capitalism, tradition and the modernist revolution.

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” — Virginia Woolf

Literary movements born from the Age of Enlightenment dealt with the rational, observable world in their art.

Much of the literature that emerged during the time accorded with the principles of Science. Literature of the Modernist movement, however, did not follow this as stringently. Instead, it strived more to contend with the rebuttal of the unseen and the abstract. Its utopian philosophy argued that the seen is always, in some shape or form, fashioned by the unseen.

Experimentation was one of the chief stimuli guiding Modernist literature. In Modernism and Close Reading (2020), David James explains how Modernist literature, exhausted of conformity and the out-dated, desired to incite a literary revolution through the introduction of innovative methods of writing.

Literary modernism, by its very nature, encompasses a diverse range of artistic and cultural traditions.

Critic Antoine Compagnon discusses the modernist tradition in his book, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (1990), characterising it as one “made up wholly of unresolved contradictions”. These contradictions, Compagnon argues, depict modernism’s struggle against itself, the traditions of the past and the present.

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), explores the themes incited by Modernism. It is, in essence, a search to disclose, depict and understand the elusive aspects of life.

The novel begins by casting the reader into the ongoing thought-process of Mrs. Dalloway, rather than establishing a formal beginning to which we might be acquainted with whom she might be or what she might be doing.

The novel thus challenges the traditional Victorian novel. Victorian novels were written in a way which often sought to introduce the protagonist before any events. Modernist writers, however, argued that such a structure was not representative of how real life played out.

Like any real-life individual, Mrs. Dalloway does not exist in a vacuum. So it follows that she does not spontaneously begin her existence at the commencement of the novel. She has a pre-existence and, much like a radio, we are merely tuning into the thoughts of this one, specific individual whose life goes on — and has always gone on — irrespective of whether or not we have been aware of her.

Time is accordingly being handled as a process of constant fluidity. This accentuates the complexity of time and brings one to wonder whether it is truly linear at all. Mrs. Dalloway does not adhere to the quantitative clock time of a Capitalist society, but operates by her own internal, emotional one, and so submits to the authority of nature.

Historian Lewis Mumford explains how the shift from a qualitative classification of time to a quantitative one arose chiefly during the Industrial Revolution when changes in labour necessitated the use of a standardised, universal notion of time. Before this, time-keeping had always been reliant upon some external, nature-led measure, such as water or sand.

To Mumford, the mechanical clock was a revolutionary invention that single-handedly managed to “disassociate time from human events” within the political and social arenas.

Naturally, its effects were unprecedented; it shifted the authority from nature to Man.

In the novel, Big Ben may be viewed as the quintessential symbol of mechanical clock time. We are not informed of the exact time that Big Ben has marked so that we might be orientated in time; only that it “strikes . . . the hour” (p. 4). Clock or event time is rarely ever referred to during the course of the text, to the extent that even the authority of one of the chief symbols of clock time i.e. Big Ben, is subjugated.

Mrs. Dalloway participates in an active struggle against the dominating effect of historical time. What is further being subjugated is language itself, where it does not follow a linear trajectory nor describe one. The fragmented, dislocated style in which it is written is quite typical of a Modernist novel.

The character’s individual senses of time are being looked to as the source of authority to orient one in time, not the external clocks.

Woolf’s main concern was that traditional writers were not paying much attention to the true nature of life itself, which she regarded as an “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”.

Mrs. Dalloway aims to address this issue through the continuous construction and deconstruction of complex notions like time and the human spirit. Human beings, Woolf contends, are much more than the sum of their external environments and cannot merely be restricted to the pages of a book.

It might be argued that Mrs. Dalloway does not endeavour at the complete dismissal of traditional writing; like building a new civilisation, it simply develops upon what can be utilised and leaves what cannot. For one, there is still much use of standardised paragraphing and an omniscient narrator can be found at times.

T. S. Eliot argues for the need for the past and present to work together, rather than negate each other. Just as Mrs. Dalloway does not exist within a vacuum, nor does any work of art. Novels like Mrs. Dalloway exist within a broad continuum that continues to evolve over time — a literary conversation that continues throughout history. Eliot argues that criticism is “necessary for any culture . . . it is as inevitable as breathing” and renovations serve, not to denounce traditions, but to rejuvenate them.

For T. S. Eliot, there can be no such thing as an original piece of art.

Mrs. Dalloway experiments with both new and old styles of writing in order to generate a fresh angle of reading literature. It is an active process of working alongside the past.

Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway participates in an active struggle with the traditions of the past in an effort to discover an innovative way to converse with it. It operates on its own spectrum, introducing a new design to literature.

Mrs. Dalloway argues that life is indefinable because the human spirit is indefinable. The abstract and concrete are continuously being pitted against each other throughout the text in an effort to bring awareness to the nature of life.

In the era of modernity, Mrs. Dalloway subverts all expectations of the traditional reader.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Nancy Mason, and Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock In Late Medieval Literature’, The Chaucer Review 43, 4 (2009), 351–75.

Compagnon, Antoine, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity, (U nited States: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Perspecta 19 (1982), 36–42.

James, David, Modernism and Close Reading , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway , (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).

Woolf, Virginia, and Andrew McNeillie, The Essays of Virginia Woolf , (London: Hogarth, 1986).

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EVE ANNECKE

Death and modernity: literature review (part a).

This paper firstly applies a literature review in order to address the question of how death is generally perceived within the Western framework of modernity. In light of this inquisition, the notion of ‘decontextualization’ in relation to death is introduced, whereby it is argued that the notion of death is deliberately avoided to the greatest possible extent, whether as a topic of conversation or as an imminent natural phenomenon in one’s life. Ultimately, it is posited that the current stance toward death within a modern, Western framework is one that is inherently detrimental to people’s psychological wellbeing, in that death is perceived as the unnatural ‘other’. In response to this, the case study (Part B) of this paper explores the notion of death from a traditional African perspective, with particular emphasis on Tshivenda speaking communities. This is done in order to show an alternative approach to death and bereavement, whereby a more community-centred grieving process is argued for, in conjunction with specific rituals surrounding death, that have a more positive and dignifying outcome on the psychological wellbeing of both a dying person, as well as the left-behind relatives of such a person.

Part A – Literature Review

1. Introduction

Upon being interviewed about his feelings toward death, Woody Allen infamously remarked, “My relationship to death remains the same. I’m strongly against it”. Despite his distinct black humour in this excerpt, Allen’s stance towards the notion of death and dying is a stance that mirrors how the majority of people feel. In modern society, the philosophical understanding of death remains as enigmatic, elusive and unexplainable as ever before. In a world that is marked by complexity, multiplicity and immense cultural diversity, death and dying has been approached from a vast amount of different angles and perspectives throughout history. In this essay, I aim to explore the cultural understanding of and perspective towards death within the context of the ‘Western world’. Without attempting to over-generalize, the ‘West’, for the purpose of this essay, implies the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions on the one hand, and the secular, humanist world on the other; both within a modernist, 21st-century framework. Through this cultural exploration, I aim to show that the modern stance towards death is one that ultimately tends to ‘pathologize’ and ‘decontextualise’ death, leading to both psychological despair for the bereaved, as well as a lack of human dignity for the dying, especially within the context of medical advancement, technology and modern hospitals. In the case study (Part B) of this paper, the topic of post-humus burial rites and traditions within an African context will then be analysed in order to portray that there are ways to contextualise death, for example through certain community practices, which both restore dignity to the deceased, and offer constructive consoling to the deceased’s left-behind loved ones.

2. Problem Statement

Within a modernist setting, whereby the majority of people are caught up in a race towards progress, advancement and improvement, the notion of death within life is often overlooked, neglected or quite frankly unexplored. The fear of death is a universal fear, and it is a fear that infiltrates the ways in which we cope and deal with the deaths of those around us. This fear, in combination with a ‘westernized’ world view, whereby an emphasis is strongly placed on the preservation of life through the advancement of medical technology and science, has led to the view of death as being an unnatural ‘taboo’, in that it is something which modernity has failed to overcome. From an anthropological perspective, a general consensus exists that Americans- and by extension the ‘western world’ have a problem in dealing with death (Palgi & Abromovitch, 1984). This problem is partly characterized by a psychological “denial of death”, and partly by a more general kind of apathy towards death, “characteristic of a situation in which one does not know quite what to do” (Palgi & Abromovitch, 1984: 3). Thus, this essay firstly aims to understand the underlying assumptions and historical developments that gave rise to this morphed, modern view of death, whereby it is strongly “decontextualized” from the reality of our lives. In seeking an alternative perspective towards death, a traditional, African perspective is then used in the case study section (Part B) to portray the influence that rites and rituals, from a community-based approach, can have on a person’s perspective towards death and the means in which they deal with and overcome the deaths of loved ones.

3. Death and Modernity

Robert Lifton (1979: 18), a psychiatrist who synthesized knowledge from his own profession with historical theory, anthropology and philosophy, made the claim that in Western society, “the link between life and death has been severed”, leading to what he called “the broken connection”. In understanding how this severance arose, it is helpful to firstly understand the more natural fear of death that people generally face. Van Niekerk (1999: 226) attributes our fear of death to the fact that life is itself a “scarce commodity” that can be taken or lost at any given moment. Furthermore, he posits that we fear death because it places us before what is inherently and radically unknown, as well as what is ultimately “incomprehensible” (Van Niekerk, 1999: 226). Bringing this fear into the frame of modernity, there are various crucial implications for the notion of death. Modernity hereby implies the “era in which human reason becomes the measure of all value”, that stems from the resistance to outdated authority by thinkers such as Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon (Van Niekerk, 1999: 226). Ultimately, modernity can be described as the striving towards perpetual progress, on the foundation of science and technology’s seemingly limitless potential. In light of this apparently infinite scalability of human advancement, the notion of death has itself become a “ Fremdkörper ”, whereby it is perceived as an anomaly or an “embarrassment” (Van Niekerk, 1999:226). Bauman (1992: 137) hereby describes death as the “skeleton in the cupboard” or “guilty secret” of our time, in that death is one of the few things that the project of modernity has failed to address and overcome. Aries (1981: 568-70) hereby notes that in the modern age, death is depicted and perceived as something “improper” and “indecent”, which ought to be avoided at all costs, and which is perceived as “taboo” in terms of being a conversation topic (Kubler-Ross, 1969: 8).

4. Decontextualisation of Death

In understanding death in a modern context, it can ultimately be described as being decontextualized from our everyday lives, in that we generally avoid confronting death as a reality within our everyday contexts and actions.

Baumann (1992) describes the phenomenon of death in the modern era as the “deconstruction of mortality”, which can be understood as a strategy in terms of which death is broken down into many pieces for the purposes of making it more manageable. This trend is arguably manifested in our need to have an explanation for every death which occurs, whereby each individual death must be “certified” by a doctor, and in terms of which a “cause of death” is required in each instance (Van Niekerk, 1999: 230). By continuously “rationalising” death in such a way, even if a person’s death comes about naturally due to old age, a cultural obsession arises in terms of which we become preoccupied with the objective of doing everything possible to postpone our own death. An effect hereof is that within our own thoughts, and within the general realm of conversation amongst people, we fail to ever truly address the notion of death as something inherently natural, necessary and imminent. It is worth quoting Baumann directly in this regard, whereby he states that:

“The big carcass of mortality has been sliced from head to tail into thin rashers of fearful, yet curable (or potentially curable) afflictions; they can now fit neatly into every nook and cranny of life… Fighting death may stay meaningless, but fighting the causes of dying turns into the meaning of life. (Baumann, 1992: 140)”.

The decontextualizing of death in a modern setting is furthermore evident in everyday facets of our lives. For example, in the pre-modern ages, the dead were buried closer to their circumstantial contexts, namely in churchyards or cemeteries within their community settings, which had the effect of reminding their remaining loved ones (and Sunday church-goers) “of their own inescapable fate” (Van Niekerk, 1999: 229). Death was thus in many respects “normalised” as a natural phenomenon, whereby today, the departed are predominantly buried in large-scale graveyards, often in removed settings, outside of cities, which are only visited occasionally by family members and relatives.

In further understanding this decontextualisation within a modern context, Palgi and Abromovitch (1998) comment on the “bureaucratization” of death, which has resulted as a logical consequence of people generally dying in hospitals, which leads to further im-personalization from the perspective of the bereaved. Despite the pragmatic benefits of such bureaucratization in the form of efficiency, when for example dealing with the disposal of the corpse and registration of death, such rationalised processes create a distinctly impersonal “thinness” when it comes to the grieving process of those left behind. Blauner (1966) furthermore notes that if we look at modern funeral ceremonies in terms of their private and rapid nature, the “classic” function of them, whereby the bereaved can cope through grief amongst relatives, is lost.

Ultimately, the significance of such decontextualisation and bureaucratization is that from the perspective of the grieving and bereaved, an understanding towards death exists which can be described as unhealthy and laden with adverse psychological implications. This is because death is not perceived as a natural phenomenon, but rather as something abnormal and aberrant. Furthermore, Blauner (1966) highlights the contradiction that the same society which so precisely controls the nature of a person’s death, “through medical bureaucracy and funeral parlours”, has made it significantly difficult to die in a dignified manner, from the perspective of the deceased. Blauner furthermore concludes that the “modern American (insert: Western) death”, which generally takes place in a hospital, and most often being that of a person considered to no longer be useful in a society, epitomises the “dying alone” symbolism that encapsulates existentialism, as well as “the essence of social inappropriateness” (Palgi & Abromovitch, 1998: 406).

5. Drivers of Decontextuality

In order to make sense of this ‘decontextualisation’ or sequestration of death from our day-to-day lives, the underlying assumptions of our ‘modern’ thought structures need to be understood, so as to accurately frame and understand this relatively new and ultimately unnerving approach towards death. Hereby, Walter (1991) points out two contradictory traditions that have shaped our modern understanding of bereavement. On the one hand, we have inherited a “Victorian romanticism” which portrays the loss of a loved one as being utterly and absolutely unbearable (Mellor & Shilling, 1993: 412). On the other hand, we are caught up within a realm of “twentieth-century denial", whereby death is in many respects hidden, as well as being forbidden, from our every-day contexts. Baumann (1992) has also pointed out these conflicting traditions in thought, and has identified their manifestation as the “ultimate failure of rationality”, whereby humans are unable to reconcile the “transcending power of the time-binding” mind, and the fleeting impermanence of its “time-bound flesh casing” (Mellor & Shilling, 1993:412).

In further understanding these “drivers of decontextuality”, the modern understanding of self-identity plays a large role in morphing our perspective toward death. Specifically, as argued by Giddens (1991), a person’s self-identity is nowadays created and reinforced through the perpetual “re-ordering of self-narratives”. In this regard, the movement towards “self-help” and “life guides”, compounded in a digital era of ‘Google’, has led to the idea of the ‘self’ no longer being a homogenous entity within a system of social norms and codes. Rather, a ‘sense of self’ is constructed in a modern context by means of reconstructed and reinforced personal narratives against the backdrop of a “seemingly hostile and threatening world” (Rose 1989).

Furthermore, in light of modern science, the significance of religious guidance in a quest for meaning has greatly dwindled, which additionally contributes to the “decontextualisation” of death from our lives. According to Mellor and Shilling (1993: 413), this is evident in the “extensive de-sacralisation of social life”, whereby religious certainties have become obsolete, but have not been replaces by any concrete, scientific certainties. Thus, in a ‘high-modern’ context, the quest for meaning itself has become privatised, leaving people to establish life-guiding principles and values for themselves, and furthermore leading to a greatly reduced “scope of the sacred” (Mellor and Shilling, 1993: 413).

Lastly, one of the major drivers of this decontextualisation is the modern attitude towards the body as a component of the self. In light of the dwindling relevance of religious frameworks that attributed ontological and existential value to a higher form of life, outside of the individual, more emphasis has been placed on the human body as a conveyor of value (Giddens, 1991). Crucially, due to the role of consumer culture in terms of which a healthy, young and sexual body is glorified, more importance has been placed on the body as a fundamental component of the self (Mellor & Shilling, 1993: 414). Thus, as the self and the body are prioritised within a modern context, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to come to terms with the realisation that the self and the body will eventually cease to exist.

6. Death and Modern Medical Technology

Not only has the stance towards death been affected by the mental models and thought paradigms that encapsulate modernity, but this stance has also been affected by one of the most important manifestations of modernity, namely the rapid advancement of science and technology within the context of the health industry. As argued by Gordon (2015:1), the “miracles” of modern medical science are in the process of replacing age-old traditions relating to how death is dealt with. Traditionally, within a “western” framework, a person’s death would stereotypically be followed by an assembly of relatives, the chanting of prayers and rituals. Such symbolic, religious practices form part of the grieving process for the bereaved, and also offer a dignified rite of passage to the dead person (Gordon, 2015: 1).

In taking an example from Judaism, rituals in Orthodox Judaism begin as a person’s death becomes imminent, whereby friends and family take part in farewell rites. During this phase, the dying person asks forgiveness for committed sins, and expresses wishes of wellbeing towards his or her survivors, following which goodbyes are offered by immediate family, and prayers of affirmation and hope are made (Gordon, 2015: 4). Similarly, in Catholicism, a person on their deathbed is offered last rites by a priest and is afforded the opportunity for final confessions, upon which absolution is granted. Within the framework of contemporary medical practice however, with specific regard to “salvage medications” and innovations such as pacemakers, respiratory support, antibiotics and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), many of these long-standing traditions and rituals have either become obsolete, or have been modified to a large degree (Gordon, 2015: 2). Crucially, it is not to say that such innovations are problematic or ‘bad’ in nature. Quite contrarily, such advancements have led to copious amounts of lives being saved and to the general improvement of people’s quality of life, as well as a universally increased average life span.

Nevertheless, such technologies have adversely affected our perception and understanding toward death, perhaps because our cultural views toward death have not been able to keep up with the rapid rate of technological change.

From the perspective of ethics, the language surrounding death in hospital settings has also become problematic, in that the way ethical questions relating to death are framed makes it difficult for families of dying patients to make decisions that encourage a dignified death, as opposed to a prolonged, dragged-out alternative. For example, a ‘substitute decision maker’, usually a spouse or child of a dying person, would be asked “What do you want us to do if your mother/father’s/spouse’s heart stops beating suddenly? Should we try to start it again through CPR or just let him/her die?”. Merely based on the grammatical formulation of such a sentence, the person making such a decision is placed within an ethical predicament, in that the sentence implies a genuine life-or-death decision between “almost (if not completely) futile CPR”, which is extremely painful and often leads to the breaking of already frail ribs, and the alternative option of a more comfortable, dignified death (Gordon, 2015: 5).

These days, a general presumption exists that “everything” which can be done, ought to be done in an effort to “save” a dying person in the name of modern medicine. This however has a severe impact on the concept of rituals in relation to death. In discourse surrounding the death of a deceased person, family members are comforted by the thought that all possible interventions were tried to prevent the process of dying, which has arguably itself become part of the “ritual narrative of dying” (Gordon, 2015:7). Bellemare (2014: 16) argues in this respect that in ceremonies surrounding death, “chants, candles and prayers” have been replaced by “beeps, flashing lights, screaming of medication orders, and the shocking of resuscitation paddles”. Because such interventions are often futile or marginally effective, especially in the case of the elderly and “natural” deaths, they can lead to an added layer of disappointment on top of the grief that the bereaved are already left to endure (Gordon, 2015: 5). Ultimately, within the context of the medical and health industry, death is fought tirelessly by doctors. When a death occurs however, it is perceived as a failure of medicine, as opposed to being naturally considered as a natural, normal phenomenon.

7. Conclusion

Thus, it is evident that the current, modernist stance towards death is an inherently unsustainable and arguably unhealthy one, in that it strongly decontextualizes death from our lives, placing it within dark, far-removed crevices of our everyday thoughts, mental models and conversations. In the age of modernity, especially within a ‘western’ context, the concept of death itself has been ‘broken down’ and deconstructed, in order for it to be a more bearable obstacle to overcome. To understand this distancing and decontextualisation, the underlying assumptions of the self and the body within a modern era have been outlined, which have severely compounded this issue, especially in conjunction with the dwindling scope of the ‘sacred’ in a humanist, secularised setting. Furthermore, due to the rapid rate of technological advancement and innovation within the medical sphere, the manifestation of such a ‘bureaucratised’ stance towards death is evident, in that rituals and rites surrounding death are arguably being replaced by the endless striving towards life-preservation in a hospital setting. Ultimately, it is put forward that the modern stance towards death is a psychologically concerning one, in that it negatively affects grieving processes of bereaved individuals on the one hand, whilst furthermore affecting the dignity of the dying on the other. In the case study (Part B) of this paper, it will thus be argued by means of an example (in an African setting) that alternative ways of perceiving death and understanding death may be more psychologically beneficial and generally dignifying to people, both within their own lives (and towards their own deaths) and in relation to the deaths of loved ones and those around them.

Reference list/ Bibliography

Aries, P. 1974. Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press

Bauman, Z. 1992. ‘Survival as a Social Construct’. Theory, Culture and Society, 9: 1-36.

Bellemare S. 2014. When medicine and culture intersect [Online] Available: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/b89b98bc [2017, April 23].

Blauner, R. 1966. Death and social structure. Psychology 29(1):378-94

Giddens, A.1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity.

Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Gordon, M. 2015. Rituals in Death and Dying: Modern Medical Technologies Enter the Fray. Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal. 6 (1), 1-7.

Kuebler-Ross, E. 1993. On death and dying. New York, Collier Books.

Lifton, R. J. 1979. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster

Mellor, P. Shilling, C. 1993. Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death. Sociology. 27(1): 211-230.

Palgi, P and Abromovitch, H. 1984. Death: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13(1): 385-417.

Rose, N. 1989. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.

Van Niekerk, A. 1999. Modernity, Mortality and Mystery. Philosophy Today, 13(1): 226-242.

Walter, T. 1991. Modern Death: Taboo or not Taboo?. Sociology, 25(1): 293-310.

Part B – Death in an African Context

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Malaysian Crossings review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carlos Rojas’s review of Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature , by Cheow Thia Chan. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rojas2/ . My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature

By Cheow Thia Chan

Reviewed by Carlos Rojas

Cheow Thia Chan, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xviii + 298. ISBN: 9780231203395 (Paperback); ISBN: 9780231203388 (Hardcover); ISBN: 9780231555029 (E-book).

In 1831, Charles Darwin left England for a trip to South America that included a five-week stay in the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Darwin was struck by how these islands were home to numerous endemic species, many of which appeared to have adapted in response to the specific environmental pressures found in the Galápagos. It was these observations that provided the basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution, which seeks to explain processes of species differentiation not only in the Galápagos but throughout the world.

Meanwhile, in 1826, at nearly the same moment but half a world away, the British East India Company established a group of colonies in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore known as the Straits Settlements. These settlements were redesignated as the Crown Colonies in 1858, and they subsequently became British Malaya, the Federation of Malaysia, and ultimately the Republic of Malaysia. Just as the evolution of the flora and fauna of the Galápagos was shaped by the unique evolutionary pressures that characterized their isolated archipelago, the distinctive sociopolitical environment of former British Malaya—including British, Japanese, and Chinese imperial legacies, multiple waves of migration, a large indigenous population, and so forth—has similarly helped shape the distinctive configurations of what has come to be known as modern Malaysian Chinese (“Mahua” 馬華) literature.

In 2014, in his keynote address at a conference on Global Chinese literature at Harvard University, the Mahua literary scholar Ng Kim Chew (黃錦樹) offered the Galápagos archipelago as a model for reexamining the status of Mahua literature as an alternate way of understanding world literature. Cheow Thia Chan opens Malaysian Crossings with a reflection on the significance of Ng’s use of the Galápagos to anchor his vision of a “world republic of southern Chinese letters.” Although Ng did not specify why precisely he selected the Galápagos metaphor, Chan suggests that one reason may involve the significance of the Galápagos for Darwin’s theory of evolution. More specifically, Chan argues that the archipelago’s geographic isolation and biological diversity offer a useful prism for reflecting on Mahua literature’s distinctive body of literary and cultural production, together with its marginal position in relation to what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters.”

Malaysian Crossings offers detailed analyses of four different Mahua authors, but just as the study takes as its starting point the marginalized status of the entire field of Malaysian Chinese literature, each of these authors similarly occupies a marginal position in relation to the field of Mahua literature itself. In fact, none of the writers conforms to a model vision of a Mahua author: which is to say, an author who writes in Chinese but who lives and publishes in Malaya/Malaysia. Instead, Chan examines a collection of authors who include a Chinese-Malaysian author whose only novel was published in China; a China-born Eurasian author who wrote in English and French, but not in Chinese; a prominent author from China whose father was from Singapore, but who only visited Singapore for a short trip; and a Malaysian-Chinese author who relocated to Taiwan for college, where he became a naturalized citizen. Through analyses of works by these authors positioned at the margins of the category of Mahua literature, Chan offers an insightful analysis of how Mahua literature’s own position at the margins of a China-centered notion of Chinese literature or a Euro-American-centered notion of world literature helps to destabilize some of the assumptions on which the latter literary categories are grounded.

Chan’s first case study focuses on the 1936 Chinese-language novel Thick Smoke (濃煙), which was published in Shanghai but is set in British Malaya. Authored by Lin Cantian (林參天, 1904–1972), who taught in a Chinese-medium school in Malaya in the 1920s, this semi-autobiographical work similarly focuses on instructors from China who travel to Malaya to teach in Chinese-language schools. Chan notes that although the work is often identified as the first Mahua novel, it has not received as much contemporary attention as one might expect. Moreover, Chan observes that most of the novel’s commentaries tend to focus on the work’s “thematic issues and problematic characters,” whereas relatively few devote significant attention to the work’s distinctive use of language (43). Through detailed analyses of several lengthy passages from the novel, Chan traces how the work attempts to reflect the dissimilarities between different Chinese topolects while also seeking to “textualize local languages.” In particular, Chan demonstrates how Lin’s novel employs a variety of textual strategies to represent the multilingual environment in which the narrative is set—including the use of transliteration, foreign script, semantic parsing, and silent translation—and he suggests that this multipronged linguistic strategy reflects Lin’s own “bifurcated address of both Malayan and Chinese literary spaces” (50).

In the next chapter, Chan turns to the Eurasian author Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou (周光瑚, 1916/17–2012), better known by her Chinese penname, Han Suyin (韓素音/漢素音). Born in Henan Province, China, Han moved to Brussels for medical school, and later lived in both England and Switzerland. Best-known for her 1952 novel A Many-Splendoured Thing , a love story set in Hong Kong, Han was also well-known for her works set in China. Han travelled to Malaya and Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s, and she drew on these experiences in composing her 1956 novel And the Rain My Drink and its unfinished sequel, Freedom Shout Merdeka . These latter two works are the primary focus of Chan’s study, in which he argues that Han, in her writings about Southeast Asia, adopted a “bifocal approach” that focused simultaneously on local and global concerns (72). In his analysis, Chan demonstrates that, just as Lin Cantian used a hybridized form of Chinese to depict the multilingual setting in which his novel is set, Han Suyin similarly seeks to “vernacularize English as an acceptable literary language for depicting Malaya,” and specifically “incorporate[ing] locally inflected English . . . to reflect creolized linguistic habits” (73).

Chan’s third case study features Wang Anyi (王安憶, 1954-), who is now known primarily as a Shanghai author. Wang’s father, however, was originally from Singapore, and as an adult Wang became very interested in this Singaporean side of her family background. In the early 1990s Wang travelled to Singapore and peninsular Malaysia, and in 1993 she published a novella inspired by these trips, titled Sadness of the Pacific (傷心太平洋). Chan, however, notes that while Wang is one of contemporary China’s best-known authors, Sadness of the Pacific has nevertheless received relatively little critical attention to date—owing to the fact that readers from Singapore and Malaysia tend to view Wang as a mainland Chinese author, while for “readers outside of Southeast Asia her works about the region have been overshadowed by her more famous representation of settings in China, especially Shanghai” (118). Chan’s analysis of Wang’s work focuses on her use of language, and specifically her attempt to develop what Chan calls a “cosmopolitan Chinese literary vernacular,” referring to “an all-purpose form of written language unbeholden to any social or local constituency” (120). Chan argues that Wang’s use of this seemingly paradoxical cosmopolitan vernacular permits her to free herself “from provincial and national attachments, in order to reevaluate the perpetual association, disassociation, and reassociation of people, places, and languages” (ibid).

In his final case study, Chan turns to the Chinese-Malaysian author Li Yongping (李永平). Although Li grew up in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, in the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo, he subsequently relocated to Taiwan, where he eventually became a naturalized citizen. Many of Li’s literary works, however, continued to be set in his homeland of Borneo. In his analysis, Chan notes that although Li is often identified as a Mahua author, in practice he identifies not with the entirety of Malaysia but rather with “eastern Malaysia”—namely, the states of Sarawak and Sabah in northwestern Borneo, in contradistinction to “western Malaysia,” which is to say the Malaysian peninsula. Moreover, Chan notes that, in several of his works, Li does not focus solely on the Malaysian portion of Borneo, but also includes Indonesian portions in the southern two-thirds of the island. In his analysis, Chan focuses on Li’s two-volume novel Where the Great River Ends (大河盡頭, 2008, 2010), focusing on Li’s distinctive use of language in this work. Suggesting that Li employs a mode of “transcriptive heterolinguality,” Chan argues that this “heterolingualism is embedded in an overarching translational modality that entails Chinese language manifesting the coexistence of multiple languages in Borneo” (164-165).

In addition to his detailed analyses of works by Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, Chan’s “Coda” chapter returns to his dialogue with Ng Kim Chew, whose scholarship features prominently in Chan’s introduction. In addition to being a leading scholar of Mahua literature, Ng is also an influential Mahua author in his own right. Like Li Yongping, Ng relocated to Taiwan for college and subsequently became a naturalized Taiwan citizen. Although Ng is one of contemporary Mahua literature’s most prominent authors, Chan refers briefly to only one of his fictional works, “The Disappearance of M” (M 的失蹤), and instead offers extensive reflections on Ng’s academic writings on Mahua literature. Ng’s scholarship is in fact a touchstone to which Chan frequently returns throughout this volume: Ng’s discussion of the concepts of a minor literature and a “topolectal group” feature in Chan’s analysis of Lin Cantian’s Thick Smoke , Ng’s distinction between the parallel terms Zhongwen and Huawen (中文/華文 “written Chinese”) are incorporated into Chan’s discussion of Wang Anyi, and Ng’s concept of a literary Galápagos archipelago returns in his discussion of Li Yongping. Chan’s volume concludes with yet another dialogue with Ng, where he draws on Ng’s concept of “minor/ity literature” (少數文學) to return, once again, to Ng’s concept of Mahua literature as a literary Galápagos. Here, Chan suggests that Ng’s concept, with its emphasis on isolation and marginality, is the obverse complement of this volume’s master metaphor—“Malaysian crossings”—in that the two concepts “jointly illustrate how ostensibly peripheral authorial pursuits contribute to the collective of local singularities that invigorate the world-Chinese literary space” (203).

Carlos Rojas Duke University

Review: Steve Carell Is a Lovable Loser in a Fragmentary ‘Uncle Vanya ‘

Carrell and a stand-out alison pill lead a strong cast in a modern-dress chekov revival that never quite gels..

It’s Chekhov 101 to say his characters inhabit separate worlds that rarely converge. All those rueful doctors, vain landowners, stoic laborers, and pretentious artists jabber across the samovar without really connecting or changing. Sure, they level pistols at each other (and themselves) or profess undying love, but such flashes of passion smack of solipsistic play-acting. Therein lies the comedy dusted with melancholy. Still, if Chekhov’s people are not in the same play, you hope the actors inhabiting them will be. Such is not really the case in Lincoln Center Theater’s starry but arid Uncle Vanya , staged with noncommittal chill by Lila Neugebauer .

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Mimi Lien’s scenic design bluntly underscores the sense that these “Russians” (scare quotes because they’re vaguely Americanized) are planets whose orbital paths do not intersect. Her set pieces crouch at the edges of the Vivian Beaumont’s broad stage, emphasizing psychic distance by maximizing negative space. The first two acts have a backyard, cottagecore vibe—picnic table, folding chairs, bench, and a huge black-and-white photograph of birch trees covering the back wall. (All very wood-ish.) The second act brings us inside the home of agricultural manager Vanya ( Steve Carell ) and his niece Sonya ( Alison Pill ), but the tasteful, midcentury decor seems equally repelled to the periphery.

If the furniture is having an existential crisis, so are the depressed folks perched on it. Vanya is a middle-aged crank who sacrificed love and happiness for duty, drudging for decades on a farm and funneling money to Alexander ( Alfred Molina ), a pompous fraud of an art professor. Alexander was married to Vanya’s deceased sister, and the homely, naïve Sonya is the product of that union. Elena ( Anika Noni Rose ), Alexander’s much younger second wife, is an exquisitely bored nymph after whom Vanya lusts—as does family friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), a local doctor who moonlights in environmentalism and binge drinking. Oh, almost forgot: Sonya loves Astrov, Vanya hates Alexander, and there’s a non-speaking local youth ( Spencer Donovan Jones ) who casts sad, smoldering looks at Sonya. The last element is an invention by Neugebauer, yet another iteration of unrequited love in this matryoshka of misery.

Uncle Vanya (a new take comes along every few years) is not exactly breakfast—as in, you have to work hard to screw it up—but its performers usually have solid support. Once they’ve polished their patronymics, they can settle into pathos-rich comedy tinged with Chekhov’s prophetic sense that pre-revolutionary Russia was about to crater under the idle protagonists’ feet. One of his signature tricks is musing about the generations to come. “People who are alive a hundred—two hundred years from now,” cynic-idealist Astrov wonders, “what will they think of us? Will they remember us with kindness?” Similar to the way that Shakespeare articulated unseen and unseeable inner life (Hamlet’s inky cloak), Chekhov cultivated anxious futurity in his restless people. Perhaps he was asking himself: Will my extremely specific Slavic material be relevant a century down the road?

The answer is yes, of course. Unless you’re allergic to Dr. Anton’s blend of bleakness and whimsy, the physician-playwright still grabs us with his clinical yet sympathetic dissection of human frailty. So, what are Neugebauer, her design team (including Kaye Voyce on costumes and Lap Chi Chu and Elizabeth Harper on lights), and an A-list ensemble doing to keep us focused on Vanya’s angsty journey from surly bitterness to…well, catatonic despair? The current version by the formidable Heidi Schreck ( What the Constitution Means to Me ) doesn’t attempt anything too radical. The language is more or less vernacular American with a light dusting of profanity (three shit s, a fuck , a few hell s and crap s). Despite the modern clothing and furnishings, there are no smartphones or laptops in sight. When I first heard that Schreck was translating, I had this nutty hope she might flip the gender of the title figure. Gimmicky? Yep. But it would be something.

That is, something more than an efficient but lukewarm modern-dress Vanya with fine actors who never quite gel. I’d see Harper ( Primary Trust ) in anything; he’s a sui generis compound of tetchiness, insecurity and warmth, but I didn’t particularly buy his friendship with Vanya or even his status as doctor. By the third act he has traded hospital scrubs for paint-spattered leisurewear, and you wonder if Astrov’s gone on sabbatical to improve his stippling and brushwork. Carell is the celebrity draw, of course, and it’s neat to see him modulate his movie-star shtick—bashful-teen-trapped-in-middle-aged-dude’s-body—to something rawer and more anguished. For Vanya’s hysterical third-act meltdown, bewailing years of waste, Carell leaps on the kitchen table and crawls across it, screaming at Molina like a plump tabby cat having its midlife crisis.

Others onstage seem either miscast (Rose) or under-directed (Molina), but Pill proves to be the evening’s MVP with a painfully yearning Sonya. The gawky spinster-in-training is red meat for young actors, and Pill radiates nervy panic from every pore. Pale and reedy, she scrunches her face into a rictus of pain, yet never tips into overacting. Rendered in English, some of Chekhov’s pet descriptors (not just in Vanya ) are “weird,” “strange,” “stupid” and their variants. To be human is to be a freak, and Pill embodies that brokenness with a palpable heat I wish could have ignited everything around her.

Review: Steve Carell Is a Lovable Loser in a Fragmentary ‘Uncle Vanya ‘

SEE ALSO : ‘Under the Bridge’ Review: A Miniseries That Interrogates the True Crime Genre

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An illustration shows a cluster of buildings, including a cupola, on top of a hill lined with cypresses. A dagger replaces one of the cypress, appearing to plunge toward a headstone.

Crime & Mystery

She Loves Amalfi, Aperol and Killing Off Her Ex in Fiction

Our crime columnist on mysteries by Catherine Mack, Katrina Carrasco, Marcia Muller and K.C. Constantine.

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By Sarah Weinman

April 25, 2024

Eleanor Dash, the Aperol spritz-loving narrator of Catherine Mack’s fizzy series debut, EVERY TIME I GO ON VACATION, SOMEONE DIES (Minotaur, 340 pp., $28) is a chatty, self-aware sort, a novelist with a best-selling series called “Vacation Mysteries.” Her books feature the devastatingly handsome detective Connor Smith, who bears the same name as the man who has vexed her life — romantically and financially — for an entire decade. But no more: She’s going to kill him off in fiction. Too bad someone’s trying to kill the real-life Connor, too.

The cover of “Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies” is a colorful illustration of four women sitting on beach loungers. Each one is reading a pink-jacketed book.

Eleanor has arrived in Amalfi for a 10-day trip with Connor and a group of lucky fans who have won a “once in a lifetime Italian vacation” with their favorite author. Not long after Connor informs her that he was pushed into the path of “one of those hop-on, hop-off buses full of bleeding tourists,” Eleanor starts to think someone might want her dead, too.

Mack, a pseudonym for the veteran Canadian suspense writer Catherine McKenzie, gleefully pokes fun at genre tropes while evoking Eleanor’s zany world. To my shock, I found all of it hilarious and not at all annoying — even the many, many footnotes, which advance the plot and Eleanor’s character.

ROUGH TRADE (MCD/FSG, 374 pp., $28) is Katrina Carrasco’s second historical thriller to feature the gutsy, Pinkerton-trained opium smuggler Alma Rosales, who loves nothing more than a good brawl. The novel brims with the sights, smells and sounds of Tacoma, Wash., in 1888, full of docks and taverns and illicit back rooms where all manner of appetites are explored discreetly, where secrets swirl and betrayals come quickly.

Alma — disguised to (almost) all as Jack Camp — is doing remarkably well in Tacoma, more or less recovered from the chaotic, criminal events that marked her appearance in“The Best Bad Things” (2018). But then she learns that the deaths of two blonde strangers might be connected to the opium she trades, which soon attracts all sorts of unwelcome attention — from lawmen, from a mysterious stranger named Ben and from her former Pinkerton partner, Bess Spencer, who’s now running a very different game.

The mystery smolders; desire and queerness suffuse the pages. When a lover runs her fingers over Alma’s bruised jaw, Alma brushes away her concerns: “It’s the only way I want to have a body,” she says. “Riding it hard. I’m not saving it for the next life.”

Ever since her 1977 debut, in “ Edwin of the Iron Shoes ,” the private eye Sharon McCone has investigated all manner of cases in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her creator, Marcia Muller, was one of the first to introduce a tough-as-nails female character into a largely male-dominated space, years before Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky did. But Muller has never commanded the same love as either of those authors, which is a shame since her hard-boiled novels are so steady, unflashy and consistently entertaining.

In CIRCLE IN THE WATER (Grand Central, 210 pp., $28) , the residents of a gorgeous, private Presidio Heights street have hired the firm owned by McCone and her husband to investigate vandalism occurring there. The police, uninterested, have chalked up broken windows and the like to “anything from neighborhood jealousy to hatred of the elite to just plain cussedness,” but McCone’s gut tells her that more is going on. “The sudden feeling was strong enough to make me reach into my bag for my .38. Tension built between my shoulder blades, as it always did when I found myself in a potentially dangerous situation. The instinct had seldom lied.”

Finally, it’s become an accidental tradition to close one of my spring columns with a posthumously published novel by a beloved crime writer. This year’s it’s ANOTHER DAY’S PAIN (Mysterious Press, 232 pp., $26.95) by K.C. Constantine, the pseudonym of Carl Kosak (1934-2023). He wrote about small-town Rust Belt Pennsylvania and crimes petty and serious in a way that danced around genre conventions, slow when he ought to have been fast and fast when he ought to have been slow. Somehow, it worked. Most of his 18 books featured the Rocksburg police chief Mario Balzic (a standout: “ The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes ,” published in 1982). But upon his retirement, Detective Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci became the series protagonist.

Rugs returns one last time in “Another Day’s Pain,” which Constantine completed before his death. Rocksburg is still operating on an unhurried schedule, where the most exciting events center on the madcap, profanity-laced antics of an older woman who won’t stay on her medication. For Carlucci, approaching retirement himself, things are more fraught, with an ailing mother to care for and a relationship that’s stuck in the wrong gear — and that’s before a gunman goes on a rampage.

The dialogue crackles and the emotions run high without tipping into treacle. It’s a fitting farewell from a crime writer who deserves greater attention.

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For the first six months in our new house, my husband and I slept on a mattress on the floor. Our last home’s main bedroom was twice the size of our new one’s, so we had to swap our old king bed for a queen-size mattress. I snagged a mattress on sale and decided to wait for the perfect bed frame to rest it on—which turned out to be The Bed by Thuma.

The Thuma Bed is an attractive frame for nearly any bedroom.

I knew from the get-go that finding the best bed frame for our oddly-shaped room would be hard. I wanted a pillow headboard for sitting up to read in bed, but it had to be just the right size. Our bedroom is on the upper level of a Cape Cod-style house, so the head of the bed is against a wall that meets the low end of a sloped ceiling. In other words, when it came to the height of our ideal headboard, the lower the better.

After too many years of using cheap metal platform frames, I wanted something that would match the airy, Scandinavian vibe of our new home. But I kept running into the same problem: All of the highly-rated bed frames I liked—mostly from trendy, direct-to-consumer brands—were way outside of my budget of $1,500.

And as all good love stories go these days, I found my promising option in an Instagram ad: The Bed by Thuma, a gorgeous platform bed frame that matched my home’s aesthetic and, miraculously, my budget. After reading the glowing customer reviews, I decided that my days of sleeping on the floor were numbered.

Thuma The Bed (Queen)

Material: Wood | Trial period: 100 nights | Warranty: Lifetime | Shipping method: Free shipping | Return policy: Free returns during trial period

Fans of a clean, minimalist aesthetic
Eco-conscious shoppers
Sleepers in need of a sturdy, wooden frame
Those looking for easy assembly
You want more under-bed storage
You prefer an adjustable bed frame

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The best workout shoes for men, according to trainers and gym buffs, assembling the thuma bed.

This isn’t the first platform bed frame I’ve tried. A few months ago, I’d ordered a platform bed frame from a Thuma competitor. Not only was it a few hundred dollars more expensive, I also experienced majorly frustrating delays. After waiting a month for the other bed, I decided to cancel the order. That’s when I found Thuma.

I was pleasantly surprised when the Thuma bed arrived at my house within two weeks of ordering it. The order came in a few large, narrow boxes, which were easy to haul up the stairs with my husband’s help (though I think one person could easily manage it).

Right off the bat, I was impressed. The boxes were clearly labeled so we knew which ones to open first. And the wood was so smooth and sturdy and definitely higher quality than other more expensive furniture we’ve got in our house. I was in charge of unboxing, and my husband, who’s far handier than I am, offered to do the assembly. I soon realized this was a job that even I—someone who loses it simply opening an IKEA box—could handle.

A look at the bed frame's Lincoln Log-like assembly.

We followed the instructions to a tee, and the process took maybe 20 minutes from start to finish (without any need for additional tools besides the screwdrivers that came with the frame). It was like putting together Lincoln Logs : You secure the long parts of the frame into the legs, then lay the slats over it. I couldn’t imagine an easier assembly process, and my hard-to-please husband totally agreed.

The Thuma Bed Features

Thuma is a San Francisco-based company that designs and manufactures bedroom furniture. The brand sells a few other items, including a nightstand and side table , but its core product is The Bed, a platform bed frame that consists of a wooden base and slats to support a mattress. These are the features that stood out most during testing.

Solid Wood Construction

The Thuma bed frame comes in a variety of wood finishes—natural, walnut, espresso or grey wood—all of which give it a classic, yet modern design. Besides being aesthetically-appealing, the wood construction makes the frame really study and durable. It can support up to 1,500 pounds, and we liked that it doesn’t creak when you sit or lay on it.

The bed frame is considered low-profile because it’s 13 inches tall from the floor to the top of the slats, whereas higher-profile bed frames are closer to 14 to 17 inches from the floor. But there’s just enough room for some storage beneath it.

It’s also a platform bed frame, which is great for those who don’t want to worry about adding a bulky box spring on top of the frame. Just pop the mattress on and get cozy. And because the slats are made from handcrafted wood, you don’t have to worry about any wobbling.

The Thuma Bed's pillow headboard is thick and cushioned.

Plush Headboard

The Thuma bed also includes a PillowBoard, which is Thuma’s fancy way of describing a cushioned headboard. Should you have any spills or messes, simply zip off the cover, throw it in the washing machine on cold and hang to dry.

Great Value

Given Thuma’s dedication to quality and minimal environmental impact, I was honestly surprised by the low cost. My queen-sized natural-finish frame with a pillow headboard is $1,195, which is several hundred less than the comparable options I was browsing online.

Sleeping On The Thuma Bed

Once we put our mattress on the frame, it was the perfect size for our very weirdly-shaped bedroom. The frame was high enough off the ground that it felt like an adult bed, but still low enough to accommodate the ceiling (headboard included). I especially love the PillowBoard, which sits just behind the bed (so you could adjust it if needed without unscrewing anything). It’s a nice linen-y material that’s cozy to sit against and doubles up as a neutral backdrop for whatever color comforter or pillows you decide on.

The Thuma bed is also the sturdiest frame I’ve ever owned. After a month of sleeping on it, I haven’t felt it budge or wobble once—and that includes when my husband and two kids sit on the bed for nightly story time, or when my boys wrestle or jump on the mattress.

Functionality aside, the Thuma bed frame just looks good. I’ve given a few house tours to friends and family, and so far almost everybody has asked where they can get the same one. After so many years of prioritizing cost and functionality over aesthetics, I’m so proud to have a bed—and as a result, a whole bedroom—I actually like looking at.

Final Thoughts On The Thuma Bed Frame

We’ve been sleeping in it for more than a month and my sentiments are the same, if not stronger: The Thuma bed frame is high-quality, convenient to assemble, attractive and an exceptionally great deal considering all the features.

My only somewhat negative feedback is that the white-colored PillowBoard we chose easily shows dirt, especially when we let our dog in bed. I haven’t attempted to tackle the stains yet, but I’m comforted knowing that I can zip the cover off if needed and throw it in the wash. Or simply swap it for a darker color option .

Overall, I couldn’t be happier with my Thuma bed. From ordering the bed and assembling it to spending restful nights in it, the whole experience has been enjoyable so far. In fact, I’m considering snagging two twin frames for my kids’ room. I can’t remember where we’ve put our Lincoln Logs, so putting the new beds together will be a good substitute.

Why Trust Forbes Vetted

The Forbes Vetted sleep and mattress team has published an ever-growing library of sleep guides , including all things bed frames with guides on the best bed frames , adjustable beds and countless others.

Sleep and mattress editors Bridget Chapman and McKenzie Dillon oversee this review and its iterations. They are both certified sleep scientists who’ve tested and reviewed hundreds of mattresses, sheets and pillows.
Forbes Vetted contributor Ashley Abramson is a journalist and commerce writer who enjoys researching and testing products. She’s covered related topics like the best firm mattresses .
We update this review from time to time to make sure our advise is as fresh as possible. It was updated in April 2024 by mattress updates writer Alexandra Garrett .

How Long Does The Thuma Bed Frame Last?

Thanks to its durable wood construction, the Thuma bed frame should last for at least 10 years. With a weight capacity of 1,500 pounds, the Thuma is incredibly sturdy. The lack of creaking or squeaking when we tested it is also a good sign of its durability.

Can You Use Any Mattress On A Thuma Bed?

Yes, the Thuma bed is designed to work with any type of mattress. Because the slats are spaced less than three inches apart, it supports memory foam, hybrid and traditional mattresses equally without showing signs of dipping or sagging.

Keep in mind that the thickness of your mattress will affect the overall look of the bed frame. (Thuma uses mattresses that are ten to 11 inches tall in its promotional images.) Mattress thicker than that will cover more of the pillow headboard and create what Thuma calls a “minimalist look.” Thinner mattresses will cover less of the headboard for a “more accentuated design element,” says Thuma.

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http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5111-7861 Amit K Dutta 1 ,
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2472-3409 Vishal Sharma 2 ,
Abhinav Jain 3 ,
Anshuman Elhence 4 ,
Manas K Panigrahi 5 ,
Srikant Mohta 6 ,
Richard Kirubakaran 7 ,
Mathew Philip 8 ,
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1700-7543 Mahesh Goenka 9 ,
Shobna Bhatia 10 ,
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9435-3557 Usha Dutta 2 ,
D Nageshwar Reddy 11 ,
Rakesh Kochhar 12 ,
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1305-189X Govind K Makharia 4
1 Gastroenterology , Christian Medical College and Hospital Vellore , Vellore , India
2 Gastroenterology , Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research , Chandigarh , India
3 Gastroenterology , Gastro 1 Hospital , Ahmedabad , India
4 Gastroenterology and Human Nutrition , All India Institute of Medical Sciences , New Delhi , India
5 Gastroenterology , All India Institute of Medical Sciences - Bhubaneswar , Bhubaneswar , India
6 Department of Gastroenterology , Narayana Superspeciality Hospital , Kolkata , India
7 Center of Biostatistics and Evidence Based Medicine , Vellore , India
8 Lisie Hospital , Cochin , India
9 Apollo Gleneagles Hospital , Kolkata , India
10 Gastroenterology , National Institute of Medical Science , Jaipur , India
11 Asian Institute of Gastroenterology , Hyderabad , India
12 Gastroenterology , Paras Hospitals, Panchkula , Chandigarh , India
Correspondence to Dr Amit K Dutta, Gastroenterology, Christian Medical College and Hospital Vellore, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India; akdutta1995{at}gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2024-332154

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PROTON PUMP INHIBITION
META-ANALYSIS

We read with interest the population-based cohort studies by Abrahami et al on proton pump inhibitors (PPI) and the risk of gastric and colon cancers. 1 2 PPI are used at all levels of healthcare and across different subspecialties for various indications. 3 4 A recent systematic review on the global trends and practices of PPI recognised 28 million PPI users from 23 countries, suggesting that 23.4% of the adults were using PPI. 5 Inappropriate use of PPI appears to be frequent, although there is a lack of compiled information on the prevalence of inappropriate overuse of PPI. Hence, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on the inappropriate overuse of PPI globally.

Supplemental material

Overall, 79 studies, including 20 050 patients, reported on the inappropriate overuse of PPI and were included in this meta-analysis. The pooled proportion of inappropriate overuse of PPI was 0.60 (95% CI 0.55 to 0.65, I 2 97%, figure 1 ). The proportion of inappropriate overuse by dose was 0.17 (0.08 to 0.33) and by duration of use was 0.17 (0.07 to 0.35). Subgroup analysis was done to assess for heterogeneity ( figure 2A ). No significant differences in the pooled proportion of inappropriate overuse were noted based on the study design, setting (inpatient or outpatient), data source, human development index of the country, indication for use, sample size estimation, year of publication and study quality. However, regional differences were noted (p<0.01): Australia—40%, North America—56%, Europe—61%, Asia—62% and Africa—91% ( figure 2B ). The quality of studies was good in 27.8%, fair in 62.03% and low in 10.12%. 6

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Forest plot showing inappropriate overuse of proton pump inhibitors.

(A) Subgroup analysis of inappropriate overuse of proton pump inhibitors (PPI). (B) Prevalence of inappropriate overuse of PPI across different countries of the world. NA, data not available.

This is the first systematic review and meta-analysis on global prescribing inappropriateness of PPI. The results of this meta-analysis are concerning and suggest that about 60% of PPI prescriptions in clinical practice do not have a valid indication. The overuse of PPI appears to be a global problem and across all age groups including geriatric subjects (63%). Overprescription increases the patient’s cost, pill burden and risk of adverse effects. 7–9 The heterogeneity in the outcome data persisted after subgroup analysis. Hence, this may be inherent to the practice of PPI use rather than related to factors such as study design, setting or study quality.

Several factors (both physician and patient-related) may contribute to the high magnitude of PPI overuse. These include a long list of indications for use, availability of the drug ‘over the counter’, an exaggerated sense of safety, and lack of awareness about the correct indications, dose and duration of therapy. A recently published guideline makes detailed recommendations on the accepted indications for the use of PPI, including the dose and duration, and further such documents may help to promote its rational use. 3 Overall, there is a need for urgent adoption of PPI stewardship practices, as is done for antibiotics. Apart from avoiding prescription when there is no indication, effective deprescription strategies are also required. 10 We hope the result of the present systematic review and meta-analysis will create awareness about the current situation and translate into a change in clinical practice globally.

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Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

Abrahami D ,
McDonald EG ,
Schnitzer ME , et al
Jearth V , et al
Malfertheiner P ,
Megraud F ,
Rokkas T , et al
Shanika LGT ,
Reynolds A ,
Pattison S , et al
O’Connell D , et al
Choudhury A ,
Gillis KA ,
Lees JS , et al
Paynter S , et al
Targownik LE ,
Fisher DA ,

X @drvishal82

Contributors AKD: concept, study design, data acquisition and interpretation, drafting the manuscript and approval of the manuscript. VS: study design, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation, drafting the manuscript and approval of the manuscript. AJ, AE, MKP, SM: data acquisition and interpretation, critical revision of the manuscript, and approval of the manuscript. RK: study design, data analysis and interpretation, critical revision of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript. MP, MG, SB, UD, DNR, RK: data interpretation, critical revision of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript. GKM: concept, study design, data interpretation, drafting the manuscript, critical revision and approval of the manuscript.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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