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A review by batbones
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 by James McFarlane, Malcolm Bradbury
3.0
A selection of critical writings of various aspects of the modernist movement. This collection goes beyond English/American modernism to embrace its Continental roots and manifestations, and I felt it was skewed toward the latter. The thematic divisions of the chapters made finding something interesting easy and made the book feel organised: there is a section for geography (London vs New York vs Berlin), specific movements (Futurists and Vorticists and Dadaists), lyric poetry, novels (Symbolist, Joycean, Consciousness and Time) and drama.
Its heavily academic nature sometimes made reading a tad dry. It's definitely not something one can expect to sit down with in one day, and I preferred selecting topics that interested me and finding out more about them. If you're looking for familiar English modernists like Virginia Woolf or Ezra Pound (as I was) you're bound to only find a few disappointing references rather than a whole passage or chapter, given the scope and focus of this collection. If you're looking to take in a 'landscape' view of the movement as a whole, or to view writers such as Mann, Brecht, Kafka and Huysmans through a modernist lens which groups them together, this book is for you.
Its heavily academic nature sometimes made reading a tad dry. It's definitely not something one can expect to sit down with in one day, and I preferred selecting topics that interested me and finding out more about them. If you're looking for familiar English modernists like Virginia Woolf or Ezra Pound (as I was) you're bound to only find a few disappointing references rather than a whole passage or chapter, given the scope and focus of this collection. If you're looking to take in a 'landscape' view of the movement as a whole, or to view writers such as Mann, Brecht, Kafka and Huysmans through a modernist lens which groups them together, this book is for you.