The New Death: American Modernism and World War I
The Politics of Irony in American Modernism
Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life

These three first books, all with American modernism in their titles, provide an interesting snapshot of modernist studies. Although the terrain and the arguments of these studies are each quite different, there are some similarities of style and methodology. First, although each does discuss important canonical works of literature, each also ranges freely across genres and juxtaposes texts that all readers are likely to know with texts that few readers will. Second, each is post-theoretical not in the sense of eschewing theory but in the sense of invoking multiple theoretical frames and perspectives. Third, although aiming ultimately to explicate canonical literary works, each book explicates with reference to a range of social and historical contexts in a way that is genuinely explanatory and does not in general feel overdetermined. In each of these dimensions—generic, theoretical, and contextual—there is a nimbleness found in these books that is both encouraging and refreshing....