426 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

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1 426 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE between Britain and North America: the use of the telegram office in this play is surely a parody of an equivalent scene in Boucicault s The Long Strike, although this is not pursued in the footnotes. The Wilde burlesque is perhaps the most singular piece in the volume: it is amusing, but never matches the wit of its source. Disturbingly, Brookfield and Charles Hawtrey, who played leading roles in The Poet and the Puppets, were later responsible for amassing evidence of Wilde s association with male prostitutes and, on the day of Wilde s conviction, attended a celebratory dinner with the Marquis of Queensberry. Despite the sharpness of their satire, the earlier burlesques also impress with their general benignity of tone. There is affection, as well as scorn, for the excesses of melodrama; indeed, if burlesque eventually helped sound the death knell of popular melodrama through relentless ridicule, it also kept it alive through this very obsession. While these plays are invariably ephemeral, they also tell us much about contemporary attitudes and opinions, as well as implying the existence of a partially submerged alternative culture. Burlesque survives as a form of critical discourse, sometimes radical, sometimes conservative, but always with the power to destabilize Victorian culture. Jim Davis University of Warwick Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Pp. x 187. $55. For more than half a century the men of 1914 such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce represented, in university departments of English studies, the very spirit of modernism. To know modernist style, so the story went, one had only to study their works, which were aesthetically self-reflexive, ambiguous, fragmented in both narrative and lyrical flow, and uncomfortably disrupted by the speakers or subjectivities they figured forth. While the modernists works were themselves difficult, scholars had little difficulty in knowing what to look for and when it had been found. Such knowledge was made even more straightforward by the manifestos and critical essays through which the modernists told others how to read their works and what to value in them, as well as what

2 REVIEWS 427 other kinds of writing to exclude. These writers considered themselves an artistic elite, and in the battle formations of the avant-garde, they announced the new by breaking off relations with the immediate past of Victorian representationalism, bourgeois (read low- or middle-brow) taste, and fussiness (read femaleness). Further, only an elite audience could appreciate their work. While the literate masses sought mere entertainment in moralizing novels and sentimental poetry, the chosen ones could glory instead in a more starkly powerful aesthetic experience. Through five fascinating and beautifully researched case studies of the modernists cultural maneuvers, Ann L. Ardis tells us how this dominant view of modernism came to be and which literary phenomena were attacked, muted, or ignored in the process. Ardis refers to the literature of the Pound-Eliot-Joyce nexus simply as modernism, for reasons that she convincingly explains, and this review will follow suit. Here are thick and complicated stories that replace the sleek version of modernism as a universal, timeless, and pure art with a far more nuanced and historically rooted account of what British readers, writers, and publishers of differing classes, genders, and aesthetic and social practices were doing during the forty-two years that Ardis studies. As if we were reading accounts of turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury CEOs who stop at nothing to ensure their own financial success, we learn here of cultural competition: the power plays and hypocrisies of male, self-proclaimed modernists who were bent on claiming and manipulating cultural capital. Ardis shows that modernism was, for all its aggressive self-promotion and endlessly played game of keep-away, a movement of self-contradiction and instability. Moreover, it did not fill the aesthetic landscape of its time: thriving at the edges of, or erupting beneath, its authoritarian strictures were more voices, interest groups, and styles. The more internally riven and the more threatened from without that modernists felt, the more doctrinaire and only apparently confident became their presentation. Because English studies began to take their current form at the turn of the last century, any account of the hegemony of the modernists has to include not only their own strategies but also answers to the question of why the academy chose to perpetuate the myth of modernist creation, excluding what the men of 1914 excluded, embracing (not too emotionally, but austerely) what they embraced. English professors, credentialed and superior readers and purveyors of the tradition of the new, carried the modernist standard, unquestioningly and in droves, until feminist critics in the early 1970s began

3 428 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE to question this particular understanding of turn-of-the-twentiethcentury literature. Since that time there have been many scholarly studies that address the issue of writers, styles, and cultural practices that were for too long left out of the picture. Ardis s earlier New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990) is one of the best of these. With this new study Ardis carefully situates her work in the now blooming subfield in which the story of modernism is situated historically, a task that includes finding and evaluating previously occulted literary phenomena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernism and Cultural Conflict strongly demonstrates multiple methods by which to achieve such a goal. One of these methods, which Ardis exercises throughout in her discriminating close readings, is effective in its simplicity: she looks with more care and at a fuller record than have scholars who accepted the modernists own claims to ultimate authority. Examining New Age, long considered a major modernist journal, for example, she reports in her last chapter that to read the journal cover to cover, issue by issue, year after year (p. 144) is to form a different impression of its modernist credentials. It did publish important modernist manifestos, but it also questioned their validity through parody, discussion, and the presentation of countermanifestos. And it was not wholly eclectic in its views: it supported primarily a radical fringe view of politics and the arts, that of Guild Socialism. In the instrumental role for the arts that the Guild Socialists advocated, the avant-garde modernism of Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis came under attack as fad, absurd theory, and charlatanism (p. 146). As more of these journals and other primary documents of the turn-of-the-century literary scene become available in full-text versions on the Web, scholars would do well to look at them with a wider lens than that supplied by modernist truisms, and Ardis offers us an excellent model for doing so. Another of her methods, more thematically based, is to identify a pressing question of the time, such as the significance of a burgeoning scientific culture, and then to study how artists of the Londonbased avant-garde and other writers responded to it. Would the world of aesthetic workers tremble before scientific disciplines, reject them, or attempt to appropriate them? The answer, in Ardis s reading, is all three, and she shows us how, in fascinating ways, the problem brought the modernists into close proximity to the very writers they attacked. Because both modernists (who claimed the apex of the literary hierarchy) and those writers they considered beneath them dealt with science s challenge to art in similar ways, the utter distinction between high art and low art, a first principle of modernism, was weakened.

4 REVIEWS 429 Ardis explores issues of science and modernism by placing Beatrice Potter Webb in relation to Pound. Webb never made it into the modernist club. She began by writing fiction and ended by writing in a form that blurred distinctions among the genres of social science reports, fiction, and diary. Borrowing from the nascent discipline of ethnography enabled Webb to engage in systematic, scientific social analysis instead of merely producing the fluff of women s fiction (as she saw it after internalizing many a misogynist message). Allying her writing with the new disciplinary professionalism couldn t hurt. Ardis observes that while Webb attributed objective social analysis to some male novelists, she simply could not see that domestic and sentimental novels indeed any novels by a woman could in themselves serve as a form of political activism. As a social investigator who just happened to insert novelistic narrative, dialogue, and characterization into her studies, she felt safer. In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist Pound attacks Webb as a social scientist who is blind to art. He was fearful, however, of being left behind in the disciplinary reorganizations that threatened to subordinate art to science; like Webb, he defensively mingles art and science. The good modernist writer, he asserts in the same essay, is just like a medical specialist, since both the artist, through scientific humanism, and the physician, through the application of scientific principles, attend to human health and well-being. Pound does not seem to notice, as Ardis does, that he clings in this essay to the idea of l art pour l art (even as he argues for art s usefulness) and that the very idea of the modernist coterie was in part an imitation of institutionalized science s growing claim to absolute authority. Ardis also concentrates on specific aesthetic dilemmas, or on studies of particular literary works. What, for example, were the adamantine modernists to do with the scandal of their brother Wilde? Here was a problem indeed: his undeniable importance to the modernist program was matched by his off-putting effeminacy. Because a founding myth of modernism its serious rupture with Victorianism depended in part on its gendering of Victorian art as female, Wilde s sexual ambiguity had somehow to be made safe for modernism. And the modernists were not alone in the ghosting of Wilde (p. 174): the Guild Socialists, too, had to separate themselves from him. Once again Ardis shows similarities and connections between modernists and the groups from which they tried so hard to distinguish themselves. When she organizes chapters around particular writers, Ardis wisely chooses to address some who have been neither erased by nor elevated to the pinnacles of high modernism, such as D. H. Lawrence

5 430 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE and Wyndham Lewis, so that her own work does not fall into the center/margin dichotomy that she criticizes in the modernists themselves. In her chapter on Netta Syrett, one of the women writers put under erasure by the modernists, Ardis teases out Syrett s selfpositioning during the period from 1910 to 1930, when, without wholly rejecting repressive Victorian gender roles, Syrett nonetheless critiqued Victorian domestic ideology, socialist gender politics, and the modernist avant-garde. In fact, Syrett disliked orthodoxies of all kinds. Boldly associating bourgeois culture with aesthetic sensibility, she thereby talked back (p. 116) to modernist discourse. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Modernism and Cultural Conflict is its demonstration that the ideology of modernism, which continues to infiltrate our scholarly study of literary culture, can be overcome only by embracing complication, even a tonic confusion. While the book s argument never lacks clarity, it succeeds only by acknowledging, in Wallace Stevens s words, that the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, that absolutes and tidy binaries may have been modernist goals, but they no longer suffice as goals for literary study. We as scholars of another day must deal in anti-modernist contingency and incompletion. Ardis tells us that modernism s most basic categories of analysis were stitched into the very fabric of English studies as a discipline (p. 79), but the process of unstitching has, in fact, only begun. Her book both stitches and unstitches, as Yeats would say. We still inhabit the world of professional and disciplinary issues that Ardis adumbrates. This book brims with the names of twenty-first-century academics and with careful delineations of the argumentative territory that each has claimed. Painstakingly setting her insights apart from, within, and around those of others, Ardis participates in a scholarly coterie conversation that may lead us to wonder whether we will ever free ourselves from the very developments that she so richly reveals to us. If we do not, we may eventually find that the only readers for our work are, sadly, ourselves. Jessica R. Feldman University of Virginia

International Seminar. Creation, Publishing and Criticism: Galician and Irish Women Poets. Women, Poetry and Criticism: The Role of the Critic Today

International Seminar. Creation, Publishing and Criticism: Galician and Irish Women Poets. Women, Poetry and Criticism: The Role of the Critic Today 1 International Seminar Creation, Publishing and Criticism: Galician and Irish Women Poets Women, Poetry and Criticism: The Role of the Critic Today Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Dalarna University, Sweden Before