The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction

Lest this sound like faint praise, I find this return to formalism a welcome counterbalance to recent accounts of modernism that seem ashamed of discussing modernist form, as if praising the fertile and impressive array of aesthetic experimentation of the early twentieth century were, necessarily, to buy into a political elitism as well. Kern in fact makes no bones about the methodology and scope of his study here: "I focus on formal innovations because modernism is primarily a set of new ways of seeing and interpreting the world, and narrative forms are the literary manifestations of those ways" (2). [...]Kern is after no canon-expanding, globalizing, or mass-culturing of modernism.