Books, Arts & Manners: The Men of 1914

Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-1939, by Julian Symons (Random House, 295 pp., $19.95)

In Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (1986), Shari Benstock perpetrates a revisionist study of Modernist writing that turns literary history on its head. Focusing on a group of lesbians in Paris, Miss Benstock rewrites history so as to give Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, et al. top billing. Miss Benstock attacks what she calls “the hegemony of masculine heterosexual values that have for so long underwritten our definitions of Modernism,” and attributes these women’s alleged eminence to their rejecting the oppressive patriarchy’s “enforced heterosexuality.”

JT

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James W. Tuttleton

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Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-1939, by Julian Symons (Random House, 295 pp., $19.95)

In Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (1986), Shari Benstock perpetrates a revisionist study of Modernist writing that turns literary history on its head. Focusing on a group of lesbians in Paris, Miss Benstock rewrites history so as to give Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, et al. top billing. Miss Benstock attacks what she calls “the hegemony of masculine heterosexual values that have for so long underwritten our definitions of Modernism,” and attributes these women’s alleged eminence to their rejecting the oppressive patriarchy’s “enforced heterosexuality.”