Michael Levenson

I have read this book a number of times and it continues to teach me about Modernism and about what literary criticism by a really good reader and researcher feels like. Levenson's analysis of Conrad's narrative technique and of The Wasteland in the final chapter are worthy bookends to the study and are alone worth the price of admission. But the real value of this book is that Levenson reveals how quickly the ideologies of the major players were being formulated and intermingling with Pound show more as the bull always driving things forward. This provides historical context that reveals that many generalizations about this period do more harm than good--they gloss over differences and provide static summations of what was incredibly dynamic terrain. show less

This should, perhaps, be more aptly titled "The Cambridge Companion to Apologizing for Modernism," since nearly all of the essays disparage modernism either in comparison with the artistic movements of romanticism and victorianism that preceded it or with postmodernism, which succeeded it. Oddly, the only contributors who unreservedly celebrate the modernist period are Michael Wood and Christopher Innes writing, respectively, about film and the drama, two genres that are not always show more associated with the label "modernism." But I guess nobody gets published today by expressing opinions that people held yesterday. That's what makes us modern. show less