Joshua L. Miller defines his aims for the recent Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel thus:

As such, the volume is accomplished, inclusive, and possibly mistitled. In a concluding paragraph to his introduction, Miller notes that the words “modernism” and “modernisms” are used interchangeably, primarily for stylistic reasons (15). But the differences between these two terms make all the difference. Are we reading an introduction to The American Modernist Novel or to some novels written by “Americans” mostly but not entirely between the 1890s and the 1940s? Miller's admirably globalizing and diversifying ambit follows the transition from a monolithic modernism to plural modernisms instituted by the New Modernist Studies (as canonized by the PMLA article of that name by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in 2008),Footnote ¹ yet students might reasonably wonder what the American modernist novel was. Between introducing the history of the field of modernism and contributing to the “multiplicity (and, indeed, incompatibility)” among modernisms, Miller opts for the latter (15).

But, as the best essays in this companion indicate, the notions of introduction and fresh scholarly insight are not mutually exclusive. Scott Herring's “Queering Modernism,” Emily J. Lordi's “Jazz and Blues Modernisms,” and Gayle Rogers's “American Modernisms in the World” best manage to strike this balance. The critical bibliographies they each offer at the beginning of their essays testify to the existence of ongoing conversations; Lordi is especially explicit and good in this regard, deftly accomplishing both criticism and metacriticism in short order: “the practice of invoking culturally black expressive forms as models and metaphors for literature was a key strategy through which critics organized the field of black literary studies” (182). These entries also range widely in the materials they study, implicitly arguing for the broad applicability of their methodologies; Herring, for instance, writes equally adeptly on Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Henry James, and Nathanael West. Rogers, in the collection's final, most capacious, and therefore highest-stakes offering, covers a tremendous array of texts before settling on the object lesson of “The Creole Faulkner.”

Since production of new knowledge about modernisms is the apparent intent of this collection, it might have further diversified its methods and in doing so further expanded its canon. An approach informed by recent developments in the study of the institutional underpinnings of literary production would have been most welcome. For instance, Julian Murphet's expert analysis of what might be called the phenomenological effects of new media forms on novels, detailing the warping of early twentieth-century literary aesthetics by, among others, the mass circulated newspaper, the radio, and the movie, could have been supplemented by an understanding of media as enmeshed in social systems and deployed by corporations. A chapter on new media and the modernist novel perhaps must acknowledge John Dos Passos's U.S.A. (1932–36), evidently conversant as it is with the communication technologies of the time, but such a chapter might also engage with a text like Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies (1922), a book not only in the Hollywood novel tradition but one also palpably shaped for eventual adaptation by the studios. In other words, a whole world of popular fiction would become visible as influenced by the media industry. This hypothetical literary domain might have been made actual, at least in part, using the techniques developed in the digital humanities, arguably the most pressing recent development in literary scholarship. Though Miller refers in his introduction to “digital modernism,” no elaboration of the concept occurs in subsequent pages. Perhaps as a consequence, although there are essays devoted to transpacific and borderlands modernisms, this volume, despite its best intentions, can't help but return repeatedly to a handful of names: Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hurston, and, most often of all, Stein.

Ultimately, then, this companion may be best understood as an index of contemporary approaches to the field, indicating both how far we've come over the past twenty years in diversifying our critical methods and, at least implicitly, where we need to go in making our canons more truly capacious.