Patricia Rae, ed. Modernism and Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell up, 2007. 310 pp. $55.00. The cover of Modernism and Mourning features a photograph of what is perhaps the most famous piece of Canadian commemorative art, the Vimy Memorial. The memorial is often interpreted as an example of modernist innovation, but this reading overlooks the extent to which it also draws upon an older vocabulary of mourning: the figure of Canada Bereft who stands beneath the soaring abstraction of the monument's twin columns resembles the kinds of statues of weeping women commonly found in Victorian cemeteries. Julia McArthur's photograph, while of a different mourning figure, nonetheless foregrounds this contradiction in a way that nicely introduces this essay collection's focus on mourning as a site that complicates the persistent narrative of modernism as a clean break with the past and interrogates the binaries (new/old, high art/popular culture, intellect/emotion) that have typically underwritten high modernist self-fashioning.
