This is a state-of-the-art book, both in its aims and execution. Scholars of modernism will understand it as anticipating and guiding the field's changing shape, and literary scholars in general will turn to this volume to explain how the 'new modernism' is altering our sense of twentieth-century fiction and literary history as a whole. -- John Marx, University of California, Davis

Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.