Arleen Ionescu at the LARB:
RECENTLY, THERE HAS been renewed scholarly interest in reassessing modernism. Several edited anthologies have been published this decade—Stephen J. Ross and Alys Moody’s Global Modernists on Modernism (2020), Douglas Mao’s The New Modernist Studies (2021), Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’s The New Modernist Studies Reader (2021), the renowned Bloomsbury series Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism, and Penn State University Press’s series Refiguring Modernism, to name a few. Terry Eagleton’s newest book, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (2025), rides the wave of this renewed interest. The book is written in the author’s typically witty style, offering a reader-friendly introduction to—and vivid account of—modernism, not only in literature but also in all of its cultural dimensions. The word “literature” in the subtitle is thus misleading as the book goes well beyond that, engaging a range of debates about “crisis” at the beginning of the 20th century.
T. S. Eliot’s question from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”—comes to mind as an emblematic statement of crisis in modernist literature.
more here.
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