Reluctant modernists

A Collection of Essays edited by Evelyn S. Firchow and Bernfried Nugel with an introduction by Jerome Meckier and a personal memoir by Janice Rossen. Presented on the occasion of his 65th Birthday.This collection of essays is about modernist writers who believe that it is just as important to look backward as it is to look forward. Indeed, for most, looking backward is more important because it is only through the past that one can understand one's proper place in the present and in the future. That is why Huxley's Brave New World rejects the past in the future--and by implication in the present--where it makes its satire so penetrating. Modernism, in other words, means for these writers not a radical break with the past, but a continuing search for what still connects them (and us) vitally with it.