A Spectrum of Modernist Outsiders

Two new books, both published by Cambridge University Press, take modernist outsiders as their subjects. Collectively, these books illustrate the breadth of interpretation that the modernist movement demands. The first, Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New, is a rather straightforward literary history of those late modernist writers whose careers were overshadowed by the literary achievements of the high modernist circle. The second, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, is a much more theory-oriented account of how a group of modernist writers positioned themselves and their work in relation to war, loss and trauma. Both books will afford the reader a deeper understanding of how and why the period continues to define art in the twentieth century.