Introduction

Summary

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, with its new and revised chapters, engages fully with recent changes in our understanding of a major cultural episode. In the first decade of this century, Modernist studies have at once widened and deepened. An actively engaged community of scholars has produced more ambitious acts of contextualization, more inclusive histories, and more precise readings of formidable works. We have more Modernism now, as well as more flexible and perspicuous ways of interpreting it.

Still we call it Modernism, and this despite the anomaly of holding to such a name for an epoch fast receding into the cultural past. "Modernism" has now become the unstable name of a period in the beginning of a previous century, too distant even to serve as a figure for the grandparent. Uneasily but inevitably, we have reached a time when many feel the obsolescence of a movement still absurdly wearing such a brazen title. The temptation, much shown in recent years, has been to dance beyond the reach of the aging, dying giant, to prove that one can live past the epoch marked by such names as Joyce and Woolf, Stein and Eliot, Eisenstein and Brecht, Freud and Marx. Certainly, many forces have joined to change the vectors of a new millennial culture. But the imperative to declare a new period and to declare ourselves citizens of a liberated postmodernism has distorted and sadly simplified the moment it means to surpass.