Reading Modernism by Peter Childs: A Book Review

Abstract

In the realm of literary theory and criticism, Peter Childs' Modernism is widely regarded as an influential and illuminating work ever to be published. This book makes an effort to investigate a variety of facets of modernism in addition to its adjacent ideas, and it does so in a straightforward, comprehensive, and effective manner. Despite the little area available, it has successfully depicted the enormous task of modernism while also presenting the many facets of this movement. The book is broken up into three main chapters in addition to an introduction. It begins with explaining the many literary movements, including Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Childs makes an effort to address the topic of debate from a comparative perspective, most notably the contrast between modernism and postmodernism presented in the introduction. Instead of getting tangled up in purely abstract notions, the book provides a detailed examination of movements that occur inside settings and literary works. The conversation concerning modernism includes not just modernism itself but also related trends like postmodernism and realism and previously excluded points of view. Instead of attempting to provide definitions that are ironclad, Childs looks for signs of one movement in the other, as well as how the two movements overlap and are interconnected.