HIGH AND LOW MODERNS: LITERATURE AND CULTURE 1889-1939.(Review)

HIGH AND LOW MODERNS: LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1889-1939. Edited by Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 259. $49.95.

Like most anthologies, High and Low Moderns is a mixed bag. It aims, according to Maria DiBattista's introduction, "to rejoin the aesthetic and the social in a cultural studies that may note, while working to defuse, the hostility between high and low culture, especially over its differing terms of relation with the aesthetic" (p. 10). Rather than seeking simply to expand the modernist canon, the editors are interested more in examining the shifting connections between high and low literary culture during the half-century that ended with the outbreak of World War II. Such a project is no longer particularly innovative, but DiBattista and her coeditor, Lucy McDiarmid, lay claim to an open-mindedness comparatively lacking in previous attempts to conceptualize the connections between various spheres of literary culture. Hence the terms of their title, high and low, remain determinedly neutral in implicit recognition of how the labels employed to distinguish various arenas of literary culture--elite, mass, avant garde, popular--carry strong evaluative connotations. Thus even though many of the anthology's essays are decidedly evaluative and re-evaluative, their judgments are made within a framework whose coordinates remain frustratingly inexplicit.

This seems to have been a conscious decision on the editors' part. Not content with rejecting as inadequate, even dogmatic, various established theoretical models for conceptualizing the relation between high and low, the editors appear to have renounced altogether the possibility of conceptualizing that relation, preferring instead a motley series of case studies treating individual figures. As DiBattista concludes her introduction, "Neither of the cultural models currently available--the theory of contagion, which presumes the necessary, often predatory encroachments of high and low on each other's domain, …