The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms

Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms situates literary modernisms and the modernist arts in a series of unfolding relations with mass society and popular culture in both national and transnational settings. An unparalleled resource containing over fifty specially commissioned essays, the Handbook updates and extends the scope and depth of previous synoptic guides, bringing together new approaches to the more obvious themes of modernist studies as well as new research on the variety of cultural, aesthetic, and geographical factors that were intrinsic to the creation of modernism. The contributors draw upon a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and new methodologies in order to take account of the development of revisionist modernist studies over the past three decades. Two particularly innovative features of the Handbook are its focus upon the cross media and international character of modernism. A number of the essays examine visual culture and other media in order to delineate the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural formations linking the innovations and experiments of literary modernism with work in other arts and media. Others seek to analyze how Anglo-American and European models were inflected in a different temporal frame and in quite distinct geographical contexts. The Handbook is divided into six sections in order to reflect changed critical perspectives upon modernism's formal innovation and experiment, to foreground the relation of literature and the other arts, and to understand these in appropriate intellectual, social, and geocultural settings. The received canon is therefore revisited and "made new" as the varying aspects of metropolitan, regional, national, and transnational modernisms come into view.