George Lamming’s novels (1953–1972) are legible as novels of ideas in at least three senses. All six devote substantial space to exchanges of ideas or solitary philosophical reflection. All feature characters who allegorize ideas or serve as vehicles for their enunciation. And all are narratively propelled by figures intensely devoted to an aspiration, cause, model, or imagined destiny. Lamming’s own remarks on his attraction to the novel of ideas, along with his representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the nonfictional Pleasures of Exile, underscore how in Lamming ideas are not (as has been asserted of other novels of ideas) decorative or disconnected from mundane existence. Rather, they emerge from the enduring matrix of colonialism in a way that renders obsessives different in degree, rather than kind, from (post)colonial subjects whose daily experience shapes them in less evidently striking ways.

Modernism and Trouble of Mind

IF YOU’RE IN search of a word whose ordinary use encodes the sorts of complexities in subject-object relations that modernism probed with fervour, you could do worse than light on troubled. When applied to a person as a modifier itself unmodified, troubled expresses anxiety, anguish, internal unsettlement: ‘She’s a troubled soul’; ‘They’ve always been troubled’. In conjunction with the preposition by, on the other hand, troubled indicates a negative judgement applied by the observing subject to someone or something else: ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’; ‘We’re troubled by the safety record of this factory’. On the one hand, the troubled subject; on the other, trouble about the object. The feeling promised by the construction troubled by can be merely rhetorical, as when a disciplinarian tells the reprobate about to be punished ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’ without experiencing much consternation herself. But troubled by doesn’t always point to a privileged stance of distance and control; it can also be an expression of real torment generated in the observer by what’s observed. That I’m troubled by your situation may in fact render me troubled if the anxiety goes deep enough.

A little reflection reveals that troubled and troubled by can in truth relate to each other in at least three different ways. First, there’s the case in which trouble in the subject mirrors or parallels trouble in the object. Louisa Gradgrind of Hard Times is a troubled person, and the reader is invited to consider how her subjective disaffection comments on the conditions of Coketown, where she lives. Second, there’s the case already mentioned, in which trouble about the object leads the subject to feel troubled. In North and South, to take a second example from a Victorian novel, Margaret Hale’s relative composure is unsettled when she confronts labour conditions in the industrial north. Third, there’s a relation that’s something like the reverse of the one just named, in which someone who’s troubled for whatever personal reasons either projects her troubles on to the world or finds relief from them in working to remedy the troubles of others.

Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.

The introduction begins by articulating the volume’s two main aims: to offer a rich account of the origins of the new modernist studies (part 1) and to suggest possible new paths of inquiry for the field in the near future (part 2). The introduction then surveys key features of the new modernist studies; examines ongoing debates over what the term “modernism” can encompass; and considers the position of modernist studies vis-à-vis recent critiques of contextualist scholarship. Throughout, it recurs to the strong institutional grounding by which the new modernist studies has been shaped. It also highlights how the collection’s individual chapters speak to the new modernist studies’ intersections with other areas of inquiry; to the continuing importance of examining modernist works in relation to non-, anti-, or not quite modernist ones; and to the value of working close analysis of textual intricacies together with elaboration of historical and cultural contexts.

If by “modern American literary criticism ” we mean the evaluative and theoretical discourse most closely related to the high modernist literature of the United States, we would need, in this kind of survey, to focus mainly on statements by that literature's makers. Undoubtedly, the most illuminating criticism of modernism is to be found in polemics such as Pound's Imagist manifesto, Hughes's delineation of the racial mountain, and Stein's lectures in America, as well as the poetry, prose writing, and plays that - just as a longstanding commonplace holds - execute the most potent criticism of all in their formal ruptures, their surprising modes of being, their nervy materializations of the unexpected. The writers in question tried hard to outdistance assimilation by criticism as such, and for the most part they succeeded: although their experimentalism was noted at once, it was only around midcentury that modernism as we now think of it began to be written about as a coherent formation. And this recognition, as we will see, was inseparable from a sense that what had rendered modernism visible was nothing other than its recent death.

We might, however, construe “modern American literary criticism” in a different way: as the discourse produced in this period by writers who regarded themselves principally or significantly as critics. This discourse had much to say about the literature of its own moment, but it was at least as concerned with the Elizabethans as with the moderns, at least as apt to dwell on Dryden or Poe as to take up Frost or Cather. Moreover, this discourse failed to take most of the makers of literary modernism especially seriously as critics, however vigorous or groundbreaking their polemics. Why, then, should a reader interested primarily in American modernism bother with this body of writing?