Modernism/modernity

In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole undertakes the considerable challenge of rewriting the literary history of the twentieth century in England. H. G. Wells, she claims, has been maligned. Such a process began in Wells’s day, with his tendency to portray himself as a journalist rather than an artist, and to display scant respect for his venerated peers. For example, he famously lampooned Henry James in his novel Boon (1915), causing an irreparable rift in their friendship; repaid Joseph Conrad’s admiration by expressing impatience with literary impressionism; and frankly admitted to James Joyce that he considered Finnegans Wake (1939) to be a “dead end.” Conversely, many of the writers who are now considered modernist defined their artistic practices against those of Wells. Most famously, Virginia Woolf aligned him with Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy as “materialist” writers, who were being superseded by a new cohort of “moderns.” F. R. Leavis and the New Critics made similar assessments, as they formed their influential academic conceptions of modernism. To add insult to injury, “metamodernist” novelists write back to a tradition that excludes Wells. Against the features that have come to define modernism and shape many of our literary tastes—the primacy of the interior life of the mind, indirection and elusiveness, the banishment of political discussion or definitive position taking, the belief that the work of art is autonomous, and the eschewing of popular appeal—Wells does indeed fare badly (18).

Yet it is a great achievement of Inventing Tomorrow that it frees Wells from the weight of this collective judgement, and reappraises his writing outside the reductive portrayals that have been used to counter-define modernism. Wells, Cole argues, should be considered a “modernist antimodernist,” or better, should be included within a more capacious understanding of modernism (16). By doing so, she joins a broader trajectory in modernist studies, and particularly the “vertical” expansion of modernism associated with the new modernist studies, in which the sharp boundaries between high art and popular culture have been reconsidered. In rehabilitating Wells, Cole shows how he carved out a role for himself as a public commentator, and traces characteristic features of his style: his tendency to place himself in his writings; his unusual uses of figurative language; his development of a mode of fiction-as-argument that stretches his themes across multiple texts; his idiosyncratic use of specialized language; his tonal dialectic that shifts between violent destruction and optimism; and his powerful visual imagination, which links his works with literary impressionism and the aesthetics of film. What emerges is a picture of Wells as an activist writer, constantly developing new literary forms and genres to support his political projects. While this model of political activism may set him apart from other writers of his time, Cole contends that it deserves greater attention in our current political moment, and particularly in relation to “environmental crisis and precarity” (235).

Having explored how Wells developed a voice capable of engaging a wide readership, the second chapter of this study surveys his writings on war. Cole attends to his visions of worldwide destruction in works such as The War in the Air (1908); his belief that the noncombatant faces a challenge of the imagination; his emphasis on what is to come, partly inspired by the genre of next-war fiction which flourished since the 1871 defeat of France by Germany; and his development of a mode of writing that positions the civilian to take responsibility for peace, in pamphlets [End Page 435] such as The War That Will End War (1914). She draws on Judith Butler’s, Marianne Hirsch’s, and Anna Tsing’s theorizations of the ethical incitement of shared vulnerability to argue that his novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) and wartime polemics provide ways of transforming precariousness and threat into empowerment and alliance. Flagging how his ethics of imagining reorient us to the future allows Cole to reposition Wells in relation to what Paul...