Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce, and Baldwin (review)
plary because it depicts artists who fail to understand their situations as artists or as social beings. If we agree with Miller's sense of modernism, we can conclude that late modernists are insightful for thematizing the end of a modernism that offers only aesthetic resolutions to social crises. But, couldn't we, instead, conclude that in allowing modernism only the arms of autonomous art, Miller makes this late modernist "unproductivity and spiritual drift" appear significant? For a book that asserts modernism's defining significance, I think the author leans too heavily on the rather tired definition of modernism as escapist and aestheticizing—a manner of mastering worldly chaos with an aloof, autonomous textual mastery. This engaging study would be even better if it recognized that much recent scholarship points to politicized, socially aware currents within high modernism. Miller's style is readable, his examples well researched, and his method of reading late modernist texts through a nuanced and dexterous combination of continental literary theorists and period sources impressive. Late Modernism deserves to be read because it emphasizes the important area between the two prominent fields of modernism and postmodernism, not only as a peak from which to view the developed terrain of modernism, but as a unique setting with its own features and rewards.