Mastery and Escape

This book examines modernism as a cultural and literary phenomenon. It distinguishes between two groups of modernists, one consisting mostly of exiles and characterised by internationalism and intellectual complexity, the other comprising primarily artists who consciously resist the aesthetic and political tendencies of the first group. The focus here is on the first group, and more particularly, on T.S. Eliot. Included are chapters on Mallarme and Hulme and extended discussions of Yeats and Joyce. In the social sciences, special attention is given to Frazer, Freud, and F.H. Bradley. Viewing modernism as an ideological term, the text evaluates contending theories, including those of Jeffrey Perl and of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Brooker argues that modernism is characterised by a pattern of "mastery and escape" - a dialectical play of opposites that moves forward by looping back, attempting to secure the future by redeeming the past. She shows that this pattern is pervasive in modernist theories of history, psychology and culture. The heart of her study is an exploration of this pattern in philosophy, particularly in the neo-idealism of F.H.
Bradley, whose work provided the subject of Eliot's doctoral dissertation. Brooker maintains that Eliot's strongly dialectical imagination was at once confirmed and shaped by his philosophical work. In the course of "Mastery and Escape", she analyses many of Eliot's major poems.