Modernism & Democracy.(Modernism and Democracy : Literary Culture 1900-1930)(Book review)

Publication: English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Publication Date: 01-JAN-08

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Rachel Potter. Modernism and Democracy : Literary Culture 1900-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. x + 198 pp. $74.00

THE CONFRONTATION of the concepts of modernism and democracy in the title of this book seems an obvious one, especially considering the fact that the two movements came into being simultaneously and were famously considered to be at odds with one another for most of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the two terms are difficult to grasp and recent scholarly works have opted out of this stark opposition by using the plural form rather than the singular. Not so Rachel Potter: she goes back to the old hostility between the two although she is aware of the danger of definitions and of letting those take root in a given time and cultural context. What was it that "modernist writers meant by the terms 'democracy,' 'liberalism,' and 'authority,'" and what "exactly was Pound attacking in 1914?" are some of the questions indicating her awareness of imposing a twenty-first-century definition of those terms on early-twentieth-century usages.

Potter goes on to address and explode another conviction which many literary scholars seem to have...

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