Robert Eaglestone Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), ix+273 pp., $37.50 (hardback) Donald Pizer, American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), xv+149 pp., £28.50 (hardback) Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), viii+284 pp., £27. 95 (hardback) Katherine V.Lindberg and Joseph G.Kronick (eds), America’s Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon, Essays in Honor of Joseph N.Riddel (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), ix+240 pp., £42. 95 (hardback) Gene H.Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790– 1990 (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), x+340 pp., £38.00 (hardback)

ABSTRACT

Modernism paradoxically seems to be becoming simultaneously more solid and less definable. On the one hand, it has become more and more useful as a term through which to understand a disparate range of writers, artists, philosophers and critics and their contemporary heritage, linking common themes and ideas. Even more temptingly, it becomes a term or epoch which can be juxtaposed with what came before or after it to stress radical similarities or differences. As either of these two, it has produced —and continues to produce-a huge array of critical material. On the other hand, we are becoming more aware of the historically grounded, politically motivated critical construction of a category of modernism into which we fit a range of texts. As a result of this, the category itself is called into question. These books rather neatly line up on either side of these divisions.