This new anthology of critical essays on Henry Miller takes as its starting point the continuing neglect of his work in contemporary academia. Nonetheless, recent work on Miller, most noticeably Katy Masuga's The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2007) and Henry Miller and How He Got That Way (2011) and Indrek Männiste's Miller: The Inhuman Artist (2013), reminds us of the ongoing fascination with this nearly unclassifiable 1930s enfant mauvais. Many of the essays in New Perspectives thus reiterate the fact that Miller's original persona as either free-spirited pornographer (Erica Jung, Norman Mailer) or virulent male chauvinist (Kate Millett, Jeanette Winterson) neglects his potential as an indicator of several, and at times tellingly, contradictory forces within modernism.

The impetus to renegotiate the ways in which we classify modernism as symptomatic of, and occasionally hostile towards, modernity is what makes this collection stand out. By fairly quickly disregarding the pornographer/prophet perspective, most of the contributions move beyond sexual politics in order to connect the dots between Miller's messy and oftentimes contradictory worldview. Miller's tendency to wax lyrical about Paris, whilst writing scathingly about its inhabitants, and vice versa – as discussed in Finn Jensen's chapter “Miller's Paris” – along with his anarchic rhetoric and Spenglerian economics, are parsed in this collection in an attempt to unravel the antagonism of a writer infamous for claiming that his chief aim is life was “to spit in the face of art.”

Indrek Männiste's chapter “Henry Miller's Inhuman Philosophy” and Ondrej Skovajsa's “Tropic of Cancer: Word Becoming Flesh” argue, for instance, that the placement of the artist at the forefront of human endeavor constitutes the very foundation of Miller's ethos and aesthetics, the two overlapping in various permutations. This is not, then, the polite humanist impulse behind the modernist sensitivities of such 1930s contemporaries as George Orwell; on the contrary, Miller's rhetorical flourishes eliminate the possibility of placing him in any leftist or right-wing camp of anti-establishment writing. Instead, Miller's desire to safeguard the elitist position of the artist is maintained at all costs by the use of writing as a guarantor of liminality, a way to maintain the outsider status of the artist politically and aesthetically.

More fascinating, perhaps, is the attempt to reformulate how the sexual shenanigans of Miller's narrator/protagonist negotiate the issue of what exactly constitutes obscenity. Rob Herian's “Henry Miller: Obscene Other of the Law” and Katy Masuga in “Henry Miller's Titillating Words” both circle around the necessity of maintaining Miller's stature as a genuinely obscene writer, to resist the temptation to coopt him into the very mainstream he sought to avoid. While some of these arguments inevitably have a lovely inverse logic to them, in keeping with Miller's own work, there is great merit in reestablishing Miller's hostility as something purposeful rather than an incidental offshoot of male chauvinism. Likewise, Guy Stevenson's comparison, in “Henry Miller's Morality,” of Miller's antihumanism with Pound's disregard for a progressive and democratic form of modernism reminds us that not all modernists were nice and certainly not all of the time. If Miller's wider sociological and political positioning as arbiter of the obscene allows for an interrogation of what literature is or thinks it should be – as argued by James Gifford in “Dispossessed Sexual Politics: Henry Miller's Anarchism” – then the issue of Miller's sexual diatribes and objectification of women nonetheless remains. For Sarah Garland in “A Surrealist Duet: Word and Image in Into the Night Life by Henry Miller and Bazalel Schatz,” the vaginal imagery and lyricism of Miller's more artistic visual work constitutes a clue to a man whose personal foibles and anxieties, rather than being repressed, allowed a fruitful union between a subconscious and external world of word and visual play. Whilst such readings could be seen as lame excuses for a virulent male chauvinism – outdated but still offensive – New Perspectives nonetheless constitutes an excellent example of what literary criticism can do once it dispenses with ideas of good taste and morality. Like Miller, for whom a progressive view of Western civilization was, at worst, an excuse for bourgeois complacency and, at best, a pipe dream best left to a more genteel version of modernism, New Perspectives sticks to its guns in terms of dealing with the body politic as contested territory. One suspects that Miller, despite his anxieties regarding academic valorization, would have been nicely flattered by this edition and that, perhaps, this is not such a bad thing after all.