Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 322 pp. $40.00

A term like “modernism” exudes the sort of elasticity that is bound to attract scholars eager to parse its various meanings, no matter how elusive. An entire journal now exists that is devoted to the classification of modernism and to studies in relevant works of literature in particular. Because the standard experimentalist works emerged at roughly the same time as the rise of fascism and Nazism, modernism ought to be a good candidate to set off against the despotisms of the right. The key episode in this regard was the notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) that the Nazis mounted in Munich in 1937. And yet Ezra Pound, a supremely modernist poet (“Make it new!”) who championed T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, broadcast so many dreadful speeches from Fascist Italy that only a clinical diagnosis of his madness spared him from a postwar conviction for treason. That a...