Peter Nicholls's avowed purpose is to show that "modernism" was not a "monolithic ideological formation", but complex and multifaceted. His survey, or conceptual map, to use his preferred term, of the work of over 100 writers from Baudelaire to Thomas Mann covers most of the familiar "isms", here presented as "modernisms" in their own right. But the emphasis on multiple personality does not survive the introduction. The usual form in guides to "modernism" is to assure your readers that diversity will be respected, then round up the usual suspects - symbolism, futurism, vorticism, cubism and so on, along with the "men of 1914" - and work them over until they fit your definition.

"Is it too much," asks Nicholls rhetorically, "to say that this grounding of an aesthetic in an objectification of the other would constitute the recurring problem of the later modernisms?" Well, yes, if we are judging by results; the "modernists" here surveyed all end up sounding like literary theorists of the 1990s. Thus Filippo Tomasso Marinetti's deliberate reduction of literary figures to strings of nouns is intended to dissolve those private intensities of the reflective imagination and eroticised body whose "feminine" inscriptions - as "depth" and materiality - offer resistance to the mechanised currents of modernity.

Nicholls's "modernisms" float in a bland conceptual soup in which everything is reduced to particles of equal size, so that a Marinetti squib, or a fragment of gibberish by Aleksei Kruchenykh, is endowed with the same significance as Ulysses. Ominously, the blurb promises "histories which allow the familiar terrain of Anglo-American modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light". It should have been apparent to Nicholls, given his declared intention, that a reified "modernism" is precisely the obstruction that prevents new light from reaching the men (and women) of 1914. But the terrain according to Modernisms looks all too familiar.

When we turn to the Anglo-American modernists, we find once again that the problematic of time occupies a central place, but here temporality is explored not as a repressive genealogical structure, but rather as a discontinuous cultural memory conceived as the very matrix of the new modernism.

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The style ("wonderfully accessible", according to the dustjacket) betrays, or perhaps dictates, the characteristic failure of historical imagination. Characteristic, that is, of the modernism industry, within which countless scholars have laboured, as Roger Shattuck once put it, "to make a category of items that will not fit into a category". But one could hardly call this an opportunity missed, for the road not taken here has already been travelled, notably by Shattuck in The Banquet Years and The Innocent Eye, Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, Louis Menand in his deceptively titled Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Context, and by Frank Kermode in a long series of essays dating back to Romantic Image. Though one glimpses, at moments, a better book struggling to escape the confines of Nicholls's relentless theorising, Modernisms remains a textbook illustration of the problem it purports to solve.

John Harwood is reader in English, Flinders University of South Australia.

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