Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern Book

Such a compelling, eloquent, and well-organized and well-argued account of the currents connecting high modernism, mass culture, and popular fiction during not just 1922 but the modern period. North is so eloquent, and I was really excited by his writings on irony, mischief, and authority in one of the chapters on Seldes and Chaplin (the conflict between "impudence" as a negative from the point of view of would-be censors and "effrontery" as a positive from the point of view of modern artists); I wish I had read that chapter before and could have drawn on it for my own writing in *Playing Smart*. North writes so clearly and cogently; many of his examples could work beautifully in an undergraduate lecture. Each chapter explored rich juxtapositions, and the conclusion makes an earnest and necessary case for bridging the "Great Divide" between modernism and mass culture, an undertaking that modernism/modernity studies has been pursuing ever since. North explores the rich paradox between the wish for universality and the insistence on particularity and relativism in the modern period.