The resurgence of interest in modernism continues – particularly with respect to visual culture – but surveys specific to an American context have been somewhat scarce.  Daniel Singal’s special issue of American Quarterly in 1987 (reprinted as Modernist Culture in America) is still one of the few to explore the different fields of American culture and society that modernism touched, while also addressing important issues to do with the relation between modernism and nationhood: how does a particular kind of modernism emerge in America, and how does a particular construction of America emerge in modernism?  Walter Kalaidjian’s collection extends and updates these approaches, providing an invaluable introduction to the subject, and is likely to become a core text for many undergraduate programs.

The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism is predominantly literary in focus: other artistic forms such as painting, music and cinema are treated but largely in the extent to which they inform the writing of the period.  Kalaidjian states in his introduction that the aim is to map the “multiplicity, diversity, complexity, anarchy and chaos” (2) that characterises both the lived experience of modernity and its cultural expressions. If this seems quite a loose rationale for the book, it does accommodate the contributors’ various attempts to challenge embedded assumptions and open up the study of modernism to new material.  Thus Rita Barnard offers a provocative new reading of modernist fiction by placing canonical novelists alongside lesser known writers such as Nathan Asch; Cary Nelson resists the priority given to Imagism in accounts of modern poetry, arguing that it is both more formally diverse than supposed and only one aspect of a broader poetic endeavour encompassing anti-imperialist, feminist and proletarian writing; Mark Sanders likewise emphasises a “heterodox modernism” in which the New Negro Renaissance plays a more central part, and in which the preoccupation with alienation and epistemological crisis is offset against a more politically engaged project, rooted in pragmatism, seeking “to make real the promises of Reconstruction.” (154) The cumulative effect of these approaches is to give a renewed sense of a moment of unparalleled cultural activity radically different from the previous era, yet one whose own history is being continually reviewed and reinterpreted.  As such, the book ought to prove stimulating both for new and more established students of the era.

Given the emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, the least successful essays are those that cover a range of material at the expense of theorisation or synthesis.  Marjorie Perloff’s account of the American avant-garde is overly biographical, and while it does examine the correspondence between literary and artistic experiment - through the creative exchanges between Stieglitz, Picabia, Stein, Williams and others - it does not entertain critical debates about the cultural significance of the avant-garde.  To reflect on the passing of New York Dada with the vague words “a new ethos was in the air” (216) also seems an insufficient way to historicise the movement.  Equally problematic is Paula Rabinowitz’s piece on modernism and the city: riffing on themes of density and mobility, her analogies between social life and literary form are too speculative, and her enthusiasm for a “pulp modernism” in which hierarchies between the experimental and vernacular, the exotic and familiar are broken down leads her to lose a grip on her terms of analysis (just what is and what isn’t modernist) - as the unhelpful label of Esther Bubley as a “modern(ist)” photographer illustrates. (270)

The strongest essays are those that engage explicitly with theories of modernity or situate their material within a changing critical context – most notably Janet Lyon’s, which shows how gay and recent feminist perspectives have generated a more nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality in the modern period in the wake of Huyssen’s monolithic formulation of a feminised mass culture as modernism’s Other.  Walter Benjamin is the dominant theoretical presence: both Rita Barnard and Michael North usefully take up from his claim that changes in the material world (in production, technology and space) produce changes in perception, while moving away from his melancholy emphasis on modernity as anomie and alienation.  For me, North’s is the best piece here.  Placing visual culture at the centre of modernism, he traces a tension between two competing “scopic regimes” – vision as a form of rationalisation, and a chaotic “frenzy of the visible” – evident in modern phenomena from train journeys to photography and cinema, and which ultimately informs modernism’s dual impulse towards synthesis on the one hand and a partial, embodied perspective on the other.  In the process, he shows that avant-garde artists and writers are much better understood not to be repudiating popular culture but actively engaging with it to capture the delight and uncertainty of a world given over to representation.

Elsewhere, it has to be said that theorists of modernity are somewhat thin on the ground – whether Benjamin’s Frankfurt colleagues in debate during the 1930s over the relations between aesthetics, politics and culture, or more contemporary figures like Jurgen Habermas, David Harvey, and Marshall Berman who have in different ways attempted to assess the legacies of the era.  Postmodernism, indeed, hardly gets a mention.  Clearly, the book aims to concentrate on literary history, but it seems a missed opportunity not to entertain some of these wider questions: has there been another paradigm shift since?  Has the modernist project ‘failed’, to become little more than a degraded style, or can it be thought of as a continuing process of critique and renewal?  Can such categories as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘mass culture’ be meaningfully applied today?  While many of the essays in the collection do an impressive job of conveying the richness and complexity of the period itself, they underplay such matters and in doing so they arguably obscure its relationship, and that of modernism, to the present.