John Sutherland
Wake Up, England!
What Ever Happened to Modernism?
By Gabriel Josipovici
Yale University Press 224pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
What we have here is less a monograph than a genteel shriek of pain. How is it, a tormented Gabriel Josipovici asks, that the English have never taken to Modernism?
More to the point, why do the English (Josipovici invariably uses this term rather than ‘British’), unlike more enlightened peoples, so obstinately refuse to reform their insular, provincial, middle-brow, resolutely unmodernised cultural character? What ever happened to Modernism? England ignored it.
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