Sweet!

hi Jonathan- is 'modernism' as a movement english/european? is it of a certain era- only 1900 to 1940? how do i know modernism and why is this 'alternate' canon?

1. Modernism means here just how I have decided to define it for my own purposes - these dates and seeking to make things "new" in some way. I am not interested in getting into all the long and pointless academic debates about the meaning of the term.

2. It is not just European, and certainly not just English, even if one uses more technically correct definitions of the term. However, I can't read books in any other language, and seeing as even the most popular masterpieces of other cultures fail to be translated, there is no way I could get hold of the neglected.

3. The "Alternate Canon" is not to be taken seriously. Not least because it is obvious that there is no such thing as a "canon". However, the point of my reading this year was to find what had been missed in the usual overviews of the period. It is alternate in that it is not the one you will usually find (and there are already lots of Modernist lists on this site and others which contain the same (admittedly usually wonderful) books). This is not a list that I am positing as to somehow replace the existing canon, just to feed into and from it, or stand beside it.

This is simply a list of great books I have found this year whilst digging into the out-of-print or buried from the era. The point of putting it up here is to hopefully get more people reading these books, it is that simple.

I deliberately did not use a capital "M" on modernism in the description above for precisely this reason.

Thanks for clarity Jonathan... certainly suggests other work to read. I only read English but did find modernist work in Japan and Brazil very good, very different, translations of course...

the gift wrote: "Thanks for clarity Jonathan... certainly suggests other work to read. I only read English but did find modernist work in Japan and Brazil very good, very different, translations of course..."

yeah - I think the Modernist project started (self-consciously, though not necessarily in actual fact) in Paris, London and New York prior to WW1 and then spread outward - personally I think PostModernism is just Modernism as it has grown older, so think we are still in it as a movement...And there was lots going on in the non-english world which remains not properly investigated by anglo-european critics.

The main point for me this year was to try and expand the context within, for example, Ulysses should be viewed, or Woolf etc

Them's fightin' words to convinced modernists! I agree, and tend to include art, literature, philosophy... as post modernism is an elaboration, extension, dialogue with and of, modernism... how the English take it I do not know but there are culture critics I have read both from that side of the pond and this, who seem convinced postmodernism=everything bad...

Jonathan, thank you so much for compiling this list. Reading through your reviews has been a pleasure. I'd never heard of most of those authors and it seems such an injustice that they've been forgotten.

An interesting list, Jonathan. And thanks for the explanation too. I'm pleasantly surprised that I've actually read something that's included here.

Great! I put this together really as a way of saying "here are some great books that you may not have read/heard of that are worth your time" - quite a few of these I had not heard of before I started my research for the year, so I assumed others might be in a similar boat and so I should share my findings.

I read secondary texts on the period (particularly those focusing on minorities), tracked down out-of-print authors mentioned in letters/diaries (e.g. in Woolf's) and did a hell of a lot of googling for months and months to find many of these. There were a fair number of mediocre or plain rubbish books that really deserved to remain OuP, but there were also a large number of excellent novels that deserve much wider readership.

Jonathan wrote: "Great! I put this together really as a way of saying "here are some great books that you may not have read/heard of that are worth your time" - quite a few of these I had not heard of before I star..."

Bravo.

Phew, have one in the top 100. *mops sweat* Wonderful list!

I will be doing an "end of year top 20" with photo, which I am looking forward to immensely. The order of the list above has no meaning, it is just the order I entered them in - also people have voted for the better known books, which means they have automatically gone to the top....I have tried to write reviews, or at least provide some quotes, for the majority of these, so hopefully if anyone wants to find out more about a certain book they will be able to.

Hope you don't mind me saying a few things as a layman.

On postmodernism vs modernism: I would think that these were in many ways opposites. Modernism (capital M) to me requires that there is still a commitment to the Truth, indeed that that commitment is a driving force. Last year I wrote myself a rather bad essay on Woolf and modernism based on her "Mrs Brown" essay, and the overwhelming theme of Woolf's ideology seemed to be that sense of getting at the true nature of things in themselves (particularly people in themselves), piercing through the conventions and mythologies and prejudices that had until then obscured The Truth. Her manifesto seemed quite straightforwardly to be "previous ways of talking about people have failed to show us What People Really Are Like, so entirely new methods are required". Joyce said some similar things, and that seems to be the whole point of the 'stream of consciousness' thing.
And that's the second part: a determination that new methods are required and that the old ones will no longer suffice.

Whereas Postmodernism is essentially skeptical of the sort of objective truth that Woolf and Joyce wanted to capture; and Postmodernism is happy to employ old methods, even archaic methods, feeling no need to always be new, or to always be appropriate to the age. Along with that, it lacks a certain optimism of Modernism, which tended to be convinced that change was inevitable and that all problems were on the verge of being solved. More generally, Modernism hand a strong sense of historical progress, of everything being totally different in different eras, whereas Postmodernism is more likely to downplay such transformations. There's also a quirk of postmodernism in which it tries to be 'playfull', often difficult... whereas Modernism tried to be direct, simple, approachable. Even the modernists who in hindsight look alien and unintuitive and complex often believed that they were doing something very commonsensical. Woolf says that "the writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises… and it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark," and of the importance of finding "a common ground between us, a convention which would not seem to you [the reader] too odd, unreal, and far-fetched to believe in". Whereas postmodernism often embraces the odd, unreal and far-fetched.

You're the expert here; I know almost nothing about this topic. But it would seem to me - looking at it from the perspective of a history of philosophy - that there might be four waves of Modernism, corresponding to Hegelian, Bradleyan, Logical-Analytical and, I don't know, Late Analytical worldviews.

First you get the Hegelians, and other late-19th century movements (Positivists, Spencerians, Marxists, etc). On the one hand they want to be wary of the big Romantic myths and show what life is really like. But on the other hand, they tend to see individuals as parts of the great social machine - the hegelian concern with "my station and its duties" or the marxist class consciousness and the inevitable progress of the material dialectic. In literature, the associated movement would presumably be the social realists; and not only did they portray people as products of society, but they portrayed literature as a social weapon - Woolf complains that their books aren't finished when you finish them, because they seem to need you to go join an organisation or donate to charity or otherwise do something.

Then you've got the Bradleyan moment. The Bradleyans believe that the only moral duty is self-realisation, both in the sense of knowing oneself as an individual and in the sense of improving oneself. They stress that people really do exist, even if they are only revealed through their social roles. But they also believe that all people are really one person and the whole world is a single thing, The Absolute, so in a way knowing anybody is knowing yourself. The Absolute is truth, and reality is nothing but true beliefs, so saying something true is the same as communion with the Absolute. However, the Absolute - and hence everything - is beyond the ability of language to capture, so everything we say is false. This has two important ramifications: first, although everything we say is false, some things are more false than others (it is possible to get closer to Truth); and second, because everything is false, contradicting something 'true' is not a problem - there can be multiple equally true (and equally false) but incompatible ways of describing the same thing. Many Modernists were explicitly Bradleyans, like Eliot and Borges, and his views had great and broad influence. I think Woolf is ideologically a Modernist in this Bradleyan sense.
[I think you could also bring people like Freud and Jung into this general worldview]

The third wave would be the Analytics, following Russell and Moore. They go further in challenging the idea of unity and systematicity, and emphasise atoms. Where Bradley saw a single entity manifesting in many ways, the same way that "redness" is shown by red birds, red cars and red handbags, the Analytics tended to see entities as only being our ways of describing the reality of collections of individual moments - there is no "redness", only this red thing, that red thing, etc. Basic, real things, not abstractions and grand systems... and a fear that a lot of words we use are meaningless and confusing, just fluff. A concern for clarity and precision, cutting through to the heart of the matter and eliminating ambiguity. Many believed that language should be analysed through the Ideal Language of logical relations. Morally speaking, they tended to be consequentialists: the right action was what lead to the best outcome. But they believed that some things could have inherent value. Most importantly for art, Moore and his followers believed that beauty and its appreciation had an inherent value. the Bloomsbury set as a whole were famously Analytic, and Woolf certainly has elements of this worldview.

And then you have the later lot, who for simplicity we may take as the Behaviourists (although ryleans, some wittgensteinians and some OLPers would also be included). Behaviourists believe that there are no such thing as minds, or thoughts, or feelings - or rather than language about these things is just a way of talking about actual, concrete behaviours. Humans are like complicated automatons in a meaningless universe; words do not capture or represent 'truth', but are just social machinations - people are driven by fundamental needs.

So you get different views of people:
Systematising: people are epiphenomena of social processes, defined by their social roles
Bradleyan: people are manifestations of the universal absolute, are abstracts, but cannot be known in the abstract, only through their (sometimes contradictory) concrete elements
Analtyic: the concrete elements - the feelings, the actions - are real, but the abstract 'person' underlying them is the creation of our own attempt to understand them
Behaviourist: the only real concrete elements are the physical facts about what "they" do and say, everything else is credulous folk psychology.

And of the function of art:
Systematising: art serves to advance positive social processes - to make people see the world in politically desirable ways, and to act on that new way of seeing
Bradleyan: art serves to enable the artist and the observer to both gain knowledge of themselves and express themselves more perfectly
Analytic: art can help us avoid confusion and understand the world better, but it can also have intrinsic beauty [eg Duchamp's urinal: it says "forget all the social connotations - what is real is the gleam of the porcelain, the elegant mathematical curve - who cares what it's for or who made it, isn't it beautiful?"]
Behaviourist: art can make artists money, and can express various political and social affiliations and so on, and perhaps may irrationally fulfil some sublimated deficiency?


.... darn it, I've gone off on a tangent, haven't I? Well anyway, it's just my own ignorant way of trying to understand the progression of things in the world of art/literature.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think the fundamental problem with them, as with any attempts at this sort of categorization, is it neglects the complex, often self-contradictory or changeable, nature of the movement (if we can call it that). The view of Modernism that used to be put forward was based on a very limited set of texts, and works like those in my list above do much to demonstrate that. Woolf, Joyce, Butts, Barnes, H.D, Eliot etc had HUGE disagreements between themselves about Art and Society, indeed many Modernists hated each other. Those outside the "Bloomsbury Set", for example, considered the Set a bunch of elitist snobs with no interest in real people and their real problems. What Woolf may have written in an essay, and what she said in her diaries or in the texts themselves are also very different things.

In terms of philosophy - Bergson and William James were also a big influence. Freud (some were with him, some very strongly against) made a massive impact.

Many did, as you say, think 19thc realism a dead-end, and did not "really" correlate with the unique, individual experience. Some thought there were ways to get produce such experience in a text, some did not.

In terms of the technical/philosophical differences with the Postmodern, they are just simply wrong - Modernist texts could be playful, metatextual, sceptical of objective truth, implanting the past into the present, using cinematic techniques or archaic ones etc. I have been unable to find a single thing one could label as "postmodern" that does not already exist in a modernist text (or, indeed, in ones written even earlier).

But, again, I should repeat what I said at the top - a lot of the books in this list are probably not "Modernist" in the most commonly used, technical, definition of the term. But I think this definition could do with some blurring.

Well, as you've noticed before, I'm usually just simply wrong about pretty much everything. But with respect, I think you seem to be going about things backward. If some prototypically postmodernist things fall into your category of modernism, surely that just means that your category of modernism is failing to tell you which things are modernist and which are postmodernist? Otherwise, there would be no such thing as postmodernism, which there clearly is, because people use the word quite frequently.

[Of course, nobody has ever suggested hermetically enforced categorical divisions between anything. Obviously some modernists have elements of social realism or romanticism, while other modernists have elements of postmodernism. But that doesn't mean that modernism cannot be employed as a useful concept. After all, we already have the expression "20th century", so I don't think making modernism equivalent to anything from the 20th century is all that helpful.]

I think if you try reading Russell and then try reading Derrida, you will rapidly accede to the idea that there are some quite considerable differences between them!

[Obviously there are differences between modernists. I just spent far too many words giving four different types of them, and that's before starting to worry about where continental marxism, etc, fit in!]

[And I clearly wasn't trying to definitively identify any of those potential waves with one single individual. Yes, Freud goes along with Bradley, and so probably do the Pragmatists. The phenomenologists probably go along with Russell and Moore. Likewise Skinner, Ryle, Austen, Quine etc all go together in the fourth wave, even though there are obviously differences between them. The fact remains, however, that if you were transplanted to 1914 and had some conversations with people about their worldviews, and then were teleported to 1968 and had some conversations with people about THEIR worldviews, I think you would come to the conclusion that substantial change had occured between these two time periods.]

But of course I know nothing about this topic. It just seems to me that your views are surprisingly radical, to a layman.

Otherwise, there would be no such thing as postmodernism, which there clearly is, because people use the word quite frequently.

This implies that people who use the word are using it to signify the same thing - which judging by the range of debates about what postmodernism is (or, indeed, if it is something at all), is not the case. The term started in architecture and art, and only later came to be used in respect of literature. There may be some hazy, undefined, generally understood meaning to the term, but one cant then go using that as a way to create categories.

I don't use the term modernist as a tool to enable me to define the postmodern. It is, with respect, you who is going about things backward. One cannot define something as post-X without having a definition of X. If post-x actually = x, then the term post-x is meaningless, which is precisely my point.

Now, there are writers who would chose to define themselves as Postmodern, and there are academics who have their own definitions, but there is no "one true definition" - even if we turn to the dictionary.

For example: any of a number of trends or movements in the arts and literature developing in the 1970s in reaction to or rejection of the dogma, principles, or practices of established modernism, especially a movement in architecture and the decorative arts running counter to the practice and influence of the International Style and encouraging the use of elements from historical vernacular styles and often playful illusion, decoration, and complexity.

But Websters, for example, says: "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature) "

But "ironic self-reference and absurdity" has been a literary technique used for hundreds if not thousands of years. It was also one used a great deal by the Modernists - one only has to turn to Joyce to see this. So if a proto-typical modernist text also fits the definition of a postmodernist text, the latter is clearly not post-modernist, but simply modernist and "postmodernism" is a useless term, save where used in very specific academic contexts (usually where an artistic community or movement wants to use it to describe themselves for a specific reason - which is the context in which one can say "my work is explicitly Post-Modernist, and by "modernist" I mean the work of X and Y").

The danger, and the reason why I (and I am actually not very radical in saying this, and am certainly not alone!), don't like the traditional definitions (and associated canon) of either term is because they perpetuate lazy misunderstandings about literature produced during the period, and operate to shut out those (usually minorities) whose work does fall within the lines.

And finally, as for the changes between 1914 and 1968, this is obvious when speaking in general terms, but I could easily find you an author from 1914 whose views were closer to the modern day than one in 1968. I just don't think generalizations like that are helpful. Each text is so varied and complex that all it does is per-determine, pre-limit, our response. My purpose with my reading project this year was to test the common assumptions about the "modernist" period, and the types of texts produced (and, also, therefore demonstrate that many of the "inventions" of the literature of the second half of the twentieth century were already in place at an earlier date).

I don't think you are wrong about everything, it is just that we have quite different philosophical stances on certain things, which is absolutely fine and dandy.

I'm sorry if that was intemperate. It's never pleasant seeing one's inadequacies brought home to one so dramatically!


On a more productive note, I'd originally been going to say two other things. First, that at a glance I only saw one Russian, which surprised me given Russia's significance for the modernist moment in general.

The other thing is that I'm surprised - particularly given your very broad definitions - that there's not a lot of SF&F here. I think in terms of people looking to do something new in the first half of the 20th century the emergence of the SF&F genre is surely one of the big expressions of that urge.

I guess Wells, Verne, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Mach, Capek, Huxley, Zamyatin, Lewis, Nesbitt, etc are too big to be 'alternate'? But you might consider writers like Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd John and Star-Maker), Hodgson (The House on the Borderland and The Night Land), Rosny ainé (The Death of the Earth and Navigators of the Infinite), Williams (Descent into Hell and The Place of the Lion), Lindsay (A Voyage to Arcturus), London (The Iron Hell, The Star Rover), Garnett (Lady into Fox), and Cabell (Jurgen, The High Place, Figures of Earth). You could also throw in Campbell's stories "Who Goes There?" and "Twilight" and Weisbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" for fun. And for something different, Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+, which is by all accounts a groundbreaking, seminal and astonishing work, and borderline illiterate garbage... ...or how about an avowedly Anti-Modernist work from that era, Benson's Lord of the World? I think the current rule is that only Popes are allowed to admit to having read that one, it would be good to see a normal person have a go...


It is nice, though, to see a genre author (Mirrlees) on your list, for something other than the work she's famous for! It's always good to remember how much work usually rests under the water of public consciousness, even for those authors whose peaks have attained a measure of fame...

Wastrel wrote: "I'm sorry if that was intemperate. It's never pleasant seeing one's inadequacies brought home to one so dramatically!


On a more productive note, I'd originally been going to say two other things...."

no, no...it is only that it is late and I am very tired and I always feel that such long discussions deserve a proper response, which is hard when exhausted and typing on a bloody computer.

Re russia - there is Akhmatova on here, Bely, and Agayev. The difficulty is that many of the translated russian novels of the period I have already read, or are well known enough that I thought I did not need to spend time on them this year - this is not an exhaustive list by any means!

As for SF&F - you are absolutely right - I have read quite a bit of Capek, for example, but simply ran out of time this year in getting to the others (I was looking at Lady into Fox just yesterday actually).

Re genre authors - it was interesting to find a number (usually women) of writers more well known for SF&F, or historical romance etc, who had written some more experimental literature which could be grouped with Joyce and all the rest (which is not to say that SF&F can not be either experimental or literature or both or just as important as Joyce, but simply that many of these writers wrote what one could call pulp in order to pay the bills, and it is only those novels that remain in print, but their "Art" sold about 2 copies in 1920 and was never republished or read...)

I have a number of SF&F books on my shelves ready for next year (starting with Dahlgren) as I know there are all sorts of interesting things buried in that section of the bookstore...

I think that the Pulps are quite underappreciated in that respect. Yes, the quality was often low - there are very few classics of either SF or F found in the pulps, and fewer still that would be tolerated by Literary Folk. [Ironically, given your project, the era probably most 'Modernist' in SF was the Golden Age around 1940-1960, whereas a lot of what had gone before was closer to old victorian romances - the Genre wasn't really at the cutting edge...]. But the pulps (and fantasy novels to a lesser extent) provided a place where people could actually make money writing, without having to be either mainstream conventional fiction or critically-acclaimed Literary Fiction (especially since the makers and acclaimers of Literary Fiction in that era could comfortably fit into one aristocratic parisian sex-party). It provided the freedom to pay the bills, as well as a certain freedom to experiment - with content if not with form, as well as alternative networks of support and criticism for those who weren't part of the salon-attending social circles. And yes, although those circles did provide opportunities for a certain sort of woman, there weren't that many opportunities for women outside those circles, so a lot of them turned to the pulps - particularly in romance, but also in other genres. CL Moore is maybe the most famous SF&F example, although I don't think she wrote much 'serious' fiction.

One interesting thing is that most of that pulp written by women, whether romance, western, SF, or fantasy, was not 'feminist' in the slightest (OK Moore did write some stories with a female protagonist, but still...) - it was the same ichor-dripping-tentacle-monster-leers-at-half-naked-slave-girl stuff the men were writing.

Of course, all that writing-genre-for-the-money is all reversed now. Iain (M) Banks, for instance, is on record as saying that while everybody assumed he wrote SF to pay the bills to let him write his respectable, award-winning Literary Fiction, he was actually forced to write respectable, award-winning Literary Fiction in order to be able to afford to spend his time writing serious SF... in fact, as early as the 1940s, apparently the SF magazines were only kept running by the donations of 'supporters' who were very often also the authors the magazines were paying. It's why the genre became so insular and so dominated by a certain type of science geek - because you needed to be getting a hefty and reliable paycheck from the US Navy Research labs (etc), since the writing itself wouldn't pay. Similarly, Leigh Brackett for instance was repeatedly distracted from her SF work by the need to write screenplays (like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo) to pay the bills - at least until Lucas made SF profitable on screen, and she got to combine both sides of her career in writing The Empire Strikes Back!