The modernist as pragmatist

by Brian May

The past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the study of British literary modernism. With recent publications on modernist American poetry and increasingly appreciative attitudes toward modern British novelists like Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, many scholars are experiencing a renewed interest in modernism. In The Modernist as Pragmatist, Brian May investigates modernist works that have been, until recently, regarded largely as mere exercises in stale Victorian liberal ideology. Breaking from one current interpretation of Forster as an innovative and perhaps objectionable representative of modernist fictional audacity, May keenly argues that Forster is neither a traditional liberal nor an imperial modernist stylist. He is, rather, a pragmatic liberal critic of both unreconstructed Victorian liberalism and unreckoning modernist aestheticism. May also looks at the debate between two contemporary progressive pragmatists, Richard Rorty and Cornel West, who have turned to the libe