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Sound, Literature & London

one’s life so great, so authentic, and so meaningful that one is overjoyed at the prospect of living it repeatedly for eternity.” “Woolf found ways of unifying a fragmented postwar England in Mrs. Dalloway,” Kern writes, while To the Lighthouse records how she “probed fragments and unifications of things, action, love, and art.” Particularly for Kern, the resulting contributions of these figures to the culture of modernism lay in “a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.” Thus, their modernist attention to fragmentation and substitute unification grew from roots in their responses to religion and constituted more than an attempt at stylistic novelty. Kern situates his study relative to previous scholarship on modernism and fragmentation, on debates over “the secularization thesis,” on the fragmentation and unification occasioned by new technologies, and on developments in visual art. Kern also offers some important qualifications that frame his argument. He excludes Christian authors such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Rose Macauley on the grounds of “their relatively small number and, aside from Eliot, lesser impact.” Kern focuses on male writers because they “dominated modernist high culture” as a result of “male sexism,” and they left a larger amount of private documentary evidence of their sex lives (which the book recounts in detail). The words “modernist ideal type” appear with an indefinite article in order to show that Kern does not claim that his argument accounts for all modernists or explanations of modernism. However, he writes, the “anti-Christianity” of the seven individuals that he studies “aligns with that of ... over seventy” of the principal scientists and cultural figures of the time, by his count. In this way, Kern’s study looks outward to a broader culture while it deepens our knowledge of these particular modernist figures.