Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of the Thematic Novel 1830-1950.

Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of the Thematic Novel 1830-1950. By Margaret Buckley and Brian Buckley. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2004. vii + 257 pp. (pbk) 36 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 90-420-1603-5.

Modernism: A Cultural History. By Tim Armstrong. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005. x + 176 pp. (pbk) 15.99 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 0-7456-2983-0 & 978-0-7456-2983-4.

This review allows me to compare two books that are loosely interrelated since they both consider aspects of modernism. Tim Armstrong's Modernism: A Cultural History treats the subject centrally, offering both a panoptic view of modernism as a cultural force for change, and the minutiae of a plethora of cultural interventions. He recognizes, importantly, that 'Modernism is in fact characterized by a series of seeming contradictions: both a rejection of the past and a fetishization of certain earlier periods [...]; both a celebration of impersonal making and a stress on subjectivity' (p. 5). Armstrong's immense knowledge of modernism informs this impressive guide, and its choice of chapters will loosen the grip of aesthetic notions that so often predominate in the minds of students. The internationalist orientation stresses the widespread nature of change in the Western cultural landscape; Armstrong illustrates the many traditions upon which writers and cultural figures drew. The chapter 'Modernity, Modernism and Time' demonstrates modernism's historiographic roots and its break with concepts of social teleology, producing an 'art as expressing a time-bound consciousness' (p. 6). Subsequent chapters similarly synthesize informed readings of text and context with a subtle and informing use of theoretical works.

Margaret Buckley and Brian Buckley's Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of the Thematic Novel 1830-1950 offers a thematic and comparative study of D. H. Lawrence, once so fashionable and surely deserving of some rehabilitation. I suspect that this book may not play any significant part in that process, since it both explores Lawrence's influences, and the Lawrentian in a range of other fictions. Initially the Buckleys are concerned with the notion that in Lawrence's novels and those akin to his work, 'theme' can be interpreted to signify 'an intellectual and emotional complex or area of exploration to which the author was drawn, operating in him like a profound problem returning compulsively to consciousness to be explored. In this the various factors, psychological, social and philosophical combine' (p. 2). A broader and more theoretically inclined study of such a compulsion as a determining principle in fiction might have been intriguing, but here everything is viewed through the prism of an associative analysis with Lawrence. Some of the assertive comparisons are startling, such as the claim that Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter 'lacks, of course, the rich complexity to be found in Lawrence and Dickens but there is no doubt about the basic similarity of structure' (p. 105), although the subsequent comparison of Dimmesdale and Lawrence's Thomas Crich has more substance, with both authors abjuring psychological depth to achieve broader archetypal brushstrokes. The themes (traditionally understood) in Lawrence that form the subject matter of the first three chapters inform the reader through a conventional close reading, but with little deployment of any critical paradigm or concepts, so much so that I could imagine myself as an undergraduate once again, reading Lawrence at a red-brick Leavisite department in the 1970s. Displacing the preceding, essentially Lawrentian architectonics finally, the 'Buckleyan' concept of the 'thematic' reasserts itself, yet insufficiently to allow this volume to live up to its title. The various critical strategies cannot quite hold together the disparate (and at times summative) accounts of some interesting literary sources.

Hence, given the above, I would recommend Armstrong's book to absolutely anyone interested in understanding modernism, or researching current thinking in the field. In contrast, I could only suggest the study written by the Buckleys as appropriate for real aficionados and scholars of Lawrence, who would need to assess the critique for themselves in more detail.

Philip Tew

Brunel University