Robert Genter's Late Modernism is a valuable addition to our understanding of the transition from modernism to postmodernism around the middle of the twentieth century. In many ways, the period on which Genter writes is that which lies in parentheses, ancillary to the scholarly gaze of critics and historians of both modernism (because it is too late truly to be modernist) and postmodernism (because it is too early truly to be postmodern). Genter's study reminds us of two important things: first, that there is a tendency to oversimplify the periods preceding or following those in which we specialize, as we construct smooth intellectual histories to explain the emergence and decline of key movements; second, that what in retrospect seems as if it must have been inevitable, may only appear so now because of how things panned out.

Genter's thesis is that modernism, far from declining abruptly after World War II, is “invigorated” (6) in the postwar moment by lively debates and struggles between three distinct strands. The first two are fairly familiar: high modernism (“a defense of the humanities in the face of [the] rising enthusiasm for science” (24)), which Genter argues gets coopted into the conservative politics of the early Cold War and is found in, for instance, New Criticism; and Romantic modernism, which includes figures like the Beats, and comprises a “group of avant-garde writers, artists, and critics … [who] return to the original roots of modernism in Romanticism” (128). Genter's contribution is to identify a third strand, the late modernism of his title, which “critiqued the theoretical assumptions of these other traditions and prefigured the movement toward postmodernism” (10).

This model of 1950s culture will not convince everyone, but certainly Genter's argument is usefully provocative, and it is grounded in impressively detailed discussion of the interactions between key individuals and of the appearance of debates over modernism in a range of areas, including literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and painting. It is also embedded in a strong sense of the shaping influence of early Cold War culture and politics (both domestic and geopolitical). Hence Jasper Johns's Flag (1954–5) is not just a playful comment on modernist aesthetics, or meaningful through an understanding of Johns's engagement with his family history in the Revolutionary War. Rather, it “deliberately invoked the tone of the Cold War” (223) and is an engagement with the ways in which “the claustrophobic climate of the Eisenhower years had reduced individual identity to a reflection of stale national pride” (230).

One consequence of Genter's argument is to suggest that postmodernism was not the necessary or obvious outcome of the demise of modernism. Rather than being a movement that in the middle of the century was simply petering out into postmodernism, then, modernism emerges in Genter's analysis as a vital intellectual force, invigorated by debate and artistic experimentation, and wrestling with key issues like the identity of the self and the role of art. Scholars of the intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century will find Late Modernism useful for the questions it prompts about the narratives we construct (perhaps all too easily) on the assumption of modernism's inevitable decline.