Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors. Daily Modernism contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of literary history and, in its disruption of traditional concepts of "major" and "minor" literary forms, paves the way for a much needed reconsideration of the diary as a valid literary achievement.

Bryony Randall explores the twin concepts of daily time and of everyday life through the writing of several major modernist authors. The book begins with a contextualising chapter on the psychologists William James and Henri Bergson. It goes on to devote chapters to Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H. D. and Virginia Woolf. These experimental writers, she argues, reveal everyday life and daily time as rich and strange, not simply a banal backdrop to more important events. Moreover, Randall argues that paying attention to the everyday and daily time can be politically empowering and subversive. The specific social and cultural context of the early twentieth century is one in which the concept of daily time is particularly strongly challenged. By examining Modernism's engagement with or manifestation of this notion of daily time, she reveals a totally new perspective on their concerns and complexities.

Disruptions of Daily Life explores the mass media landscape of early twentieth century in order to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Arthur Mitchell examines this literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, Mitchell locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. He unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East vs. West. Mitchell's reading of these formalist texts expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, Disruptions of Daily Life reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed—and how those realities can be changed.

In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

Modernism and the Ordinary overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. Liesl Olson shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. With attentive and sensitive readings, Modernism and the Ordinary examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. In doing so, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism's most compelling attributes.

Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, two works that were arguably "the sun and moon" of modernist literature, some would say of modernity itself. In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the titanic achievements of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. As Jackson writes in his introduction, "On all sides, and in every field, there was a frenzy of innovation." It is in 1922 that Hitchcock directs his first feature; Kandinsky and Klee join the Bauhaus; the first AM radio station is launched; Walt Disney releases his first animated shorts; and Louis Armstrong takes a train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the age of modern jazz. On other fronts, Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics, insulin is introduced to treat diabetes, and the tomb of Tutankhamun is discovered. As Jackson writes, the sky was "blazing with a ‘constellation of genius' of a kind that had never been known before, and has never since been rivaled." Constellation of Genius traces an unforgettable journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works—over the course of twelve months—brought a seismic shift in the way we think, splitting the cultural world in two. Was this a matter of inevitability or of coincidence? That is for the reader of this romp, this hugely entertaining chronicle, to decide.

Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries.