Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Very complete, well-written, interesting to read, this introduction to Modernism is just what you're looking for, if you're interested in Modernism. It covers a lot of ground, and gives enough context, historical and otherwise, so that Modernism can be seen in perspective. Highly recommended.

I am an English PhD student preparing for my qualifying exams. I read Lewis's book so that I could begin to contextualize the vast number of primary texts that I have been blazing through so quickly. It is ideal for such a goal; I really can't recommend it enough.

There's a fantastic chapter on all the "isms" of Modernism that contains charts to help you distinguish one fringe movement from another, and Lewis thoroughly tracks how these isms disperse in various ways after the first world war. I also like his focus on figureheads such as Flaubert/Baudelaire and Joyce/Eliot; whether we want to spend much time on them or not, they are so centrally important to most artistic movements flourishing in the first part of the twentieth century.

It should be noted, however, that the text has more European/UK coverage than American, and the chapter on drama is almost exclusively about European drama. I very much appreciated the focus, but as a student of both I would've liked to have seen more information about how American drama fits into the international picture of Modernism.

Hello, I am a graduating college student and I have read this book for a course of Modern British Literature. In my opinion, Pericles Lewis does a good job of squeezing a huge amount of information into a book of less than 300 pages. Therefore it moves fast, so you should explore each topic yourself as he also provides key suggestions for further reading within the chapters. There are even charts and tables with descriptions of the literary movements and this really makes it plain to understand. One thing about taking this class was that we had a three-hour class period and we only met once a week, giving us time to go home a read and then review and respond once we returned, I feel that in order to read this book you have to have time to read more than just this introduction. In this course we read parts of this book along with reading other literary works that went hand in hand with the time period and the main points of each chapter. This will help you get a better idea of what the author is writing about because you can see it through other examples of literature (beware of spoilers!). It is clear, well written, and it even has pictures (black and white yet still helpful) to give the reader a visual idea of what is being explained however, it is still just not amazing enough for me to read outside of a course assignment. Without the notes and summaries and discussion from the classroom, I would not have understood half as much as I did. So yes for the classroom, not-so-much for personal exploration.

This book is good for any college student (or anyone else) who is interested in the modernist period. I read a large portion of the book for a class, and the examples of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and T. S. Eliot as modernist authors were useful in understanding the different concepts found in the modernist time period. The avant-garde, realism and stream of consciousness were particularly well defined; prior to studying this book I was not familiar with these concepts. This book is difficult in the way it is written--when discussing stories the reader may not be familiar with, a lot of the analysis is hard to follow--but over time a reader can get used to the style. I really appreciated the information I obtained from this book, and I would recommend it to others.

I read portions of The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism by Pericles Lewis for a British Literature course. I have taken multiple literature and art history courses that have dealt with modernism, and I think this book truly captures the definition of modernism as a term and as a movement. It shed a lot of light on modernism not just in terms of the literature but in the culture as well. Much of the literature of this time was pushing the boundaries of what society allowed, I think because of the sense of disillusionment that was prevalent during the era. Lewis addresses this through the works of multiple authors. I also found the historical references helpful. The chapters discuss specific historical events and there is also a chronology in the back. Being able to put the various novels, short stories, and poems into historical context really helped me to get a grasp of what was inspiring these works.

Three points of criticism. First, there was too much information to take in from each chapter. I found it was best to read a little at a time. Second, I found it difficult to understand the charts. I had to rearrange them on separate sheets of paper to be able to fully comprehend them. Third, while it really did not bother me that the artwork was in black and white, I think that for those that have not been exposed to the art world it would have been beneficial to include a section of colored prints. I would recommend this book for a classroom setting. To me the benefits of how it is written far outweigh the problems.

I am a senior English major and I have read several chapters of this book as required for a class. Pericles Lewis does a well laid out job of giving undergraduate students a grasp of modernism. Lewis pays much attention to literary periods and includes charts of simplified information to help summarize what can sometimes be thick paragraphs to decipher. Its strength is definitely the extensive detail that Lewis goes into concerning the stages of literary movements. The background information of the periods was engaging as it made connections not only across works of literature but also works of art and music. This Introduction to Modernism gave me a good understanding of the shift between the Edwardians and the modernizers; I received a comprehensive definition and period examples of the Edwardian writers who did not "explore the spiritual or mental lives of their characters" contrasted with the more modern writers of the period who would, such as Virginia Woolf (66). The diagrams occasionally overlaid the text in a way that was slightly confusing in that sometimes I would glance at the diagram after reading the text and second-guess what I had just read. While the extra information about each period is appreciated, Lewis tends to assume that the reader has already finished the works discussed. I was a bit daunted at first when he would start discussing critical points of a work I had not yet read. Lewis does do a good job of flowing from one idea to the next; but without some previous knowledge of the texts this can be a drawback to comprehending the somewhat congealed information, meaning areas where Lewis divulges a thick paragraph which requires finite attention to sort through all the facts offered by the book. However, as an introduction it gives a pretty fair scope of the historical context and related literary movements. I would recommend this piece for further study into the influences of British modernist writers with a side-study of the works that Pericles Lewis addresses.

I am a Secondary English Education major, and we read this book for a course on Modern British Literature . We
read Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7. One of the greatest strengths this book has is the amount of information that is given to students in it, for example, the way it explains the different movements like Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. I do think it functions very well as an introduction to modernism. The use of reproduced paintings helped my interest in the book and clarified meanings within the book. But the charts were of really no help to me, they in fact, tended to make me more confused than when I started to read. The charts only had parts of the information about different movements and when I read the entire chapter I would have to go back and read the parts that were covered by the charts again. Only then was I really able to grasp the concept.

However I don't feel this book was very engaging. I often found my mind wandering off and having to reread chapters because I wasn't able to remember the information. However, I usually find myself thinking about other things when a book is not creatively written. Most text books are like this and I have only enjoyed reading one text book in my entire educational career (my world history class in 10th grade, and that was only because the school didn't want my teacher to teach it). The biographies about writers were very interesting and I did enjoy the information on them. I think this is a good book for teachers to use in their classrooms. The information is clearly stated in it and it makes the information in it relatable to the texts that we were reading.

I am senior in college and I read a large portion of this book as required for a college course on Modern British Literature. The chapters we focused on were Chapters One ("Trials of Modernity"), Two ("Primitivists and Modernizers"), Three ("The Avant-Garde and Modernism"), Five ("Prose Fiction"), Seven ("Literature and Politics"), Six ("Drama"), and Conclusion ("after modernism?"), but on my own I also looked through the Preface and Introduction. As an undergraduate-level Introduction to Modernism, I believe Pericles Lewis' book does a fine job. Its strengths lie in the amount of detail Lewis goes into to elaborate his points, and his clear, almost colloquial, diction. It really felt like he was trying to clearly explain what is going on, not speaking above a students's level or using jargon. He also includes nifty charts that sum up the contents of specific chapters for easy reference, which are helpful when overviewing the chapter after having read it. But one large drawback to the book is that all of the pictures are in black and white. As literary Modernism was influenced by by visual art in this period, it is hard to get a clear idea of what the art stands for in grayscale. Also, if one is not entirely familiar with all of the works and authors of the time period, it may be difficult at first to put things into context. Lewis does try to offer brief explanations of who was who, but a lot of the time I felt that this information was skimmed over in favor of concrete literary analysis or a brief paraphrase of a work of literature. As an introductory text, Lewis's book should be writing from the assumption that his readers know absolutely nothing about the period. He gives away the endings of books and discusses critical points as if the reader had already read the work or was familiar with it, which, to me, would be more appropriate in a more advanced text. Overall, the book is well-written and offers a plethora of information, giving a clear historical perspective on the time period along with an analysis of the literary techniques commonly used by British modernist authors. I highly recommend it for any student or instructor interested in this time period.

I read this book for an undergraduate course on Modern British Literature. As we spent the majority of the semester discussing modernism, I felt that this book was appropriate for the class. We were assigned about three-fourths of this book. I believe that this book functions very well for an undergraduate level literature course. It was a great companion to the novels and poems that were read, as it provided a deeper understanding of the function of the work in terms of literature as a whole as well as the specific time period we were discussing. Novels such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier are explained so that they are more accessible to an individual who may not have had experience with the book before or feel as though they do not have a good grasp on the material. The pictures help expand understanding of how modernism stretched over a number of artistic media (such as poetry and music) and the charts help to present movements such as Realism and Aestheticism in an organized manner. I found that the writing style was accessible and much more absorbing than other, more dry books I have read. I would highly recommend this to any individual who is studying this specific time period, whether for a class or not.

Pericles Lewis's The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is an excellent book for discovering how modernism evolved throughout time. This text takes you through many different categories of modernism and the movements surrounding them. Lewis uses these movements to connect back to the art and writings of many different influential artists such as W.H Auden and Virginia Woolf. Although this book makes these connections, I feel that is its major downfall: There are too many historical facts and not enough facts about modernism itself. One example is when he spends an entire section in chapter 7 about Nazis and Fascism. He does include how authors responded to these movements, but the section read as if he was focusing more on the history and less on the literature. He repeats this process in most of the other chapters as well, especially chapter 3 when he discusses the First World War. This text could be a lot stronger and I would enjoy it more if it included more about the publications of artists, than about the historical facts surrounding them while they were publishing. This being the only issue I have with the text, I would still recommend the book to anyone who wishes to discover interesting facts about the writers of modernist literature such as the love affair of H.G Wells and Rebecca West, the sexuality of W.H Auden and Oscar Wilde, and how it affected their writings, and the connections between artists and the political movements of World War I & II.