Interpretations of Modernism current in the academy still tend to assume a long-dominant Anglo-American or Euro-American axis, despite the fact that criticism in recent years has begun to ask new questions as regards the transnational makeup of early-twentieth-century literature and art. Moreover, although Modernism evidently involved a series of movements that were animated by, and shaped within, inter- and transnational arenas, Modernism’s methodological and critical coordinates by and large remain transatlantic. The cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges that took place between artists, and the various cross-border journeys they undertook, all centrally formative to what we now understand to be Modernism, are perceived to be in the main exchanges and journeys between Britain, the rest of Europe, and America. Even Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses’s Modernism and Colonialism (2007), a path-breaking collection investigating how "the modernist revolution can be understood as a critical and artistic engagement with the...European quest for empire," ultimately circumscribes the investigation it wishes to pursue by focusing, the introduction emphasizes, on "traditional" Modernism. Taking a different direction, this chapter proposes that the shaping of Modernism by a colonial geopolitics can be persuasively demonstrated by setting its canonical figures - Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Yeats - in relation to expanded cosmopolitan and constellated colonial contexts, and examining the cultural and aesthetic contours of these.

From its inception Modernism defined itself - and has been defined - by its relationship to mass culture. Aesthetic autonomy, the Modernist ideology that defined art as separate from culture, was a project that emerged unevenly and across most industrializing nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The distinction between art and mass culture was central to artistic debates over Modernism in Great Britain, and offers an illuminating case study to be pursued within this chapter. Britain experienced rapid industrialization and new media as forces that exaggerated and simultaneously disrupted established class hierarchies. Modernist artists articulated their differences from mass culture to understand and explain themselves as a culturally distinct movement; critics of the period invoked these differences to justify their status as experts prepared to enlighten an under-informed public about Modernism's high purpose; and in recent decades a new generation of critics of British Modernism has distanced itself from artists' and critics' earlier claims of difference from mass culture by depicting Modernism and mass culture as historically related and dialectically interdependent. But whether critics articulate Modernism as separated by a "great divide" from mass culture or as mutually constitutive, they agree that one of the foundational contexts for understanding Modernism is its relationship to mass culture.

Charles Dickens, rising to his feet, stood at the table and surveyed the vast hall in which the leading citizens of Birmingham had gathered in early 1853 to pay him homage at a banquet. It was his duty to thank them now, and he proceeded to offer his tribute.

"The people," Dickens concluded triumphantly, "have set Literature free." And in return for that gift of liberty, he opined, "Literature cannot be too faithful to the people."

Within thirty years of Dickens ’s death in 1870, authors were far less confident about the beneficent effects of literature’s dependency on “the people,” or the prospects for a collective literary culture. In the intervening period, as many critics have noted, British popular fiction undergoes an unmistakable transformation, one in which the novel gradually acquires a class structure analogous to that of the social world surrounding it. By the decade 1900–10, the years when Conrad is writing his best work to little acclaim, the polarization between “high” and “low” literature is firmly in place, and the Modernist project issues its claim to aesthetic dignity by repudiating that Victorian literature, above all fiction, that had sold itself to a mass reading public. When

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.

In February, 1928, soon after T. S. Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell:

Seeing Woolf's unmistakable personal hostility towards God, certain critics have understood her work as distinctively atheist. Woolf's revulsion against Eliot's religious beliefs may seem part and parcel of her rejection of patriarchal authority: what better representative of patriarchy than God the Father? Yet, Woolf's putative atheism is complicated by her relation to her own father, Leslie Stephen, the most famous agnostic in Victorian England, against whom much of her work rebels.

The ancient parallel between literature and the visual arts - i.e., painting, sculpture, and architecture - became newly relevant in the twentieth century. Painters were the first to explore the revolutionary possibilities of Modernism, so that painting became the leading art form. Modernist writers often patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from the visual arts. It is impossibleto understand fully the development of literary Modernism, therefore, without at least a rudimentary knowledge of modern art. This chapter is intended to provide a brief history of modern art for those whose primary interest is modern British and American literature. It follows the version of Modernism that was endorsed by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and that served as the standard for most of the twentieth century. Literary parallels will be drawn primarily from poetry, since there the influence of the visual arts is deepest and most direct.

In August 1913, the Czech poet S. K. Neumann published the essay "Open Windows":

“To live with contemporaneity!” Neumann exclaimed.

In 1913, Neumann was a modernist in an age of imperialism, residing still in an empire of polyglots. Austria-Hungary was a vast domain, extending from Kraków to Sarajevo, from Vienna to Lemberg. Its cultural centers - like those of its imperial neighbor to the east - were marked by a cosmopolitanism inseparable from empire. In Warsaw and Kraków, Prague and Lemberg, Kiev and Budapest, art and literature from Paris and Berlin encountered philosophy and aesthetics from Moscow and Petersburg, making Eastern Europe the most cosmopolitan of European spaces.

If one judges solely from contemporary accounts, the central role of Scandinavian authors in European modernism can be in little doubt. To name but a few examples, in 1897 Henry James proclaimed Henrik Ibsen the greatest living author, while three years later the young James Joyce wrote his first publication on the Norwegian dramatist's final play. Joyce, moreover, learned Norwegian so that he could read the master in the original, just as Rainer Maria Rilke taught himself Danish in order to study his beloved novelist and poet J. P. Jacobsen. Jacobsen was also an object of adulation for Robert Musil, Sigmund Freud, and Stefan George, among others; and his compatriot, Herman Bang (who was in turn highly esteemed by Thomas Mann) was central to the development of Lugné-Poë's experimental theatre in France. Ibsen's The Master Builder provided the foundation for the Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s theory of modern tragedy, even as Bernard Shaw and William Archer in England vigorously championed the revolutionary realism of that same play. In 1924, the American Eugene O’Neill named “among the most modern of moderns” the Swede August Strindberg, whom Joyce had imitated in his celebrated Circe episode, and whose influence can be felt with equal force in expressionist drama and epic theater, Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

That Spanish literature of the early twentieth century should be considered an integral part of the wider phenomenon of European modernism is a position that Spanish criticism has begun to embrace only in the last ten to fifteen years. There are many reasons for this reluctance to organize within a modernist paradigm what is generally regarded as the most important moment of Spanish literary production since the “Golden Age” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - called by some a “Silver Age.” Before entering into a discussion of Spain's contributions to a trans-European, indeed, global phenomenon, it will be instructive to examine briefly some of the factors within Spanish criticism that have slowed the more widespread acknowledgment of the existence of a full-fledged Spanish participation in modernism. A principal factor is the continuing tendency in continental critical circles to draw a rather sharp distinction between the notion of a progressive historical "avant-garde" and a somewhat negative and limited view of a reactionary "modernism." In this view, modernism is a rightist phenomenon whose products originate in an alienated, private, withdrawn perspective inimical to the avant-garde's more public goals and its institutional criticism of bourgeois art. It is ironic that this and similar positions have emerged on the continent at precisely the moment when the concept of modernism begins to be applied to a much greater circle of literary production, one that today includes nearly all of Europe, the United States, and much of the Third World, a prominent part of which is Latin America. Just where Spanish peninsular writing fits into this larger scheme has remained a topic that Spanish criticism has been reluctant to explore.

Paris might rightfully claim to be the capital of modernism. It was there that the first experiments in both poetry and the novel - as well as in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music - led to a rupture with the classical tradition. It was there that the avant-garde first launched its attacks on an ossified bourgeois culture. In the century spanning 1850 to 1950, Paris attracted writers and artists not only from all corners of France, or even Europe, but from around the world, who saw in the City of Light a beacon of artistic freedom, as well as a particularly fertile climate for artistic experimentation. The fact that so many of the terms and slogans we associate with modernism originated in French - la modernité, l'avant-garde, l'art pour l'art (“art for art's sake”), il faut être de son temps (“you must be up to date”), épater les bourgeois ("shock the middle class") - signals the extent to which modernism, despite its cosmopolitan ethos, bears a Gallic imprint.

And yet modernism as a critical category has never played a particularly enabling role in French cultural history. Unlike in other national literatures, such as the Anglo-American tradition, modernism in France does not designate a school or a movement. Few French writers or artists labeled themselves modernists.

The term 'modernism', central to English-language criticism of early twentieth-century literature at least since Laura Riding and Robert Graves published their Survey of Modernist Poetry in 1927, has continually widened in scope. Contemporary scholars often describe modernism, understood as a cosmopolitan movement in literature and the arts reflecting a crisis of representation, as having arisen in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century and developing up to, and even after, the Second World War. Even so classic and wide-ranging an earlier account as the collection that Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane edited in 1976, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, today seems strangely limited in its historical timeframe. Modernism now seems to be a movement whose roots go back well over a century and whose effects are still being felt today.

This broadening of the concept’s historical boundaries has not always resulted in a similarly broad geographical perspective. The reassessment of modernism in the wake of postmodernism has led to the founding of the Modernist Studies Association and many similar scholarly groups; it has led to new explorations of the historical and social context of modern literature, notably with attention to questions of empire, gender, sexuality, political commitment, the role of avant-garde journals, and the status of long-neglected authors.

In order to outline a history of Italian modernism, we must begin with a reflection on the category of modernism itself, which in recent years has substantially broadened its scope. From a term indicating a particular moment in Anglo-American literature (what we might now call “high modernism”), modernism has grown into a period label encompassing much of Western literature from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Second World War. This re-interpretation has tended to privilege the northern Paris-London-Berlin-Moscow axis, as in the case, for instance, of the critical anthology edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, arguably the key text in redefining the boundaries of modernism. At the same time, as a historiographic category, modernism has played a very minor role in the Italian critical debate. The question with which we might begin, then, is to ask precisely what is at stake for Italian literature in the appropriation of modernism. I should point out that this is not a peculiarly Italian problem. Indeed, as Edward Możejko has argued in a recent essay, the “internationalization” of modernism as a term - its increased adoption on the part of critical traditions to which it was, until recently, foreign - entails a continuous process of redefinition of its meaning and implications.

1922 - that great year of literary modernism with the publications of both The Waste Land and Ulysses - was also the year of the formation of the Irish Free State and the beginning of the Irish Civil War. This historical coincidence reveals the intertwined nature of Irish politics and anything we might call Irish modernism. From the political reasons behind Lady Augusta Gregory's and W. B. Yeats's founding of the Irish Literary Theater in 1899 - "We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery" - to the explosion of fervent unionist, nationalist, revisionist, and feminist responses in the Irish press to the 1996 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, literary events spanning twentieth-century Ireland are deeply imbricated in the political strife of a divided nation. And yet for a long time the most canonical Irish modernists - Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett - were often plucked from the Irish context, denuded (as much as possible) from purely Irish concerns, and heralded as cosmopolitan modernists free from any kind of Irish national interest or bias. As Joyce himself lamented: “condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, [the Irish] have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.”

On the tenth day of April, 1910, it was raining hard in Athens. A handsome man, aged forty, dressed in a white flannel suit and matching gloves, hired a two-horse carriage for the short drive to Skaramanga, a port on the coast facing the island of Salamis. Today, the shipyards of Skaramanga and the rusting tankers lying offshore are among the ugliest sights in Greece; a hundred years ago, there was not even a fashionable beach. There was, at least, an inn, where the visitor ordered lunch and a beer. Then, rising from the table, he called for the driver to unhitch one of the horses. Mounting without stirrups, he kicked the horse to a gallop and rode bareback straight into the sea. Far out from the shore, he raised a pistol, held it to his temple, and pulled the trigger. The rider disappeared; the horse swam back to shore. It would be another two weeks before the body washed up.

Pericles Yannopoulos had made a name for himself with a series of newspaper articles and two very thin cultural manifestos published in 1906 and 1907. In one of them, he had written, perhaps prefiguring his suicide:

The achievements of Russian modernism appear all the more extraordinary given how recent, if rapid, have been many of the major developments of Russian literature. Medieval Russia possessed little in the way of secular belles lettres; and when modern Russian literature arose in the eighteenth century, it was as the tentative by-product of a state-sponsored program of political modernization and cultural enlightenment. Acquiring new confidence, verbal suppleness, and cultural breadth with Aleksandr Pushkin and his romantic contemporaries, Russian literature finally came of age with realism and the nineteenth-century novel. In their epic reach, their social engagement, and their insistence on linking the nuances of psychology and character development to the larger metaphysical dimensions of human experience, the works of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii seemed to bend or extend novelistic form in ways unimaginable to the western European author. The Russian nineteenth-century novel vividly expresses the characteristic tendency of Russian literature to question the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and the discursive mediation of institutional forms, in favor of a direct appeal to the antinomies of the spirit and the hope of renewed human solidarity. This impatience with conventions and distinctions, preceding but also fueling Russian modernist experimentation, can be attributed to many local factors.

In the history of Portuguese literature and art, the term “modernism” generally refers to the production of two generations of writers and artists spanning the period 1914-40. The first generation of Portuguese modernist poets (Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá Carneiro, and José de Almada Negreiros) is closely tied to the short-lived literary review Orpheu (1915); their work evolved out of a late-symbolist aesthetic that explored intensely subjective themes in traditionally metered verse. Members of the group soon succeeded in breaking with these practices, however, and their most celebrated texts often engage with such European avant-garde movements as futurism, simultaneism, and cubism.

The second modernist generation in Portugal is associated with the magazine Presença (1927-40). Members of the Presença group (José Régio, João Gaspar Simões, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and Miguel Torga until 1930) were the first to call attention publicly to the value and importance of the Orpheu generation's literary experiments; they were also the first to refer consistently to the Orpheu poets as “modernists,” implicitly positioning themselves as that generation's literary disciples.

The popular perception of German modernism in the English-speaking world is defined by an almost exclusive preoccupation with the Weimar period, those fertile fifteen years stretching from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. That such a thing as a popular perception of German modernism exists at all has largely to do with the allegorical subtext that we now invariably read into the period: the frenzied dance around the volcano by brilliant yet morally louche artists, and the eventual eruption of that volcano in the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century. Yet such a reading is deeply flawed, and not just because German modernism, like all of its European counterparts, had roots that reached back into earlier decades and an afterlife that continued long after Weimar had perished. More importantly still, it suggests that German modernism was a self-contained phenomenon, an exceptional case that went exceptionally wrong. The political development of the Weimar Republic was indeed without parallels, but the culture that accompanied it was enmeshed in transnational networks that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Oslo to Milan. The fabulous diversity of German modernism, along with all the characteristics that make it so distinctive, would not have come into being without these multifold exchanges.