Description
Book SynopsisThis short introduction to Modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature.
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- Provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary Modernism.
- Covers both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention.
- Includes detailed discussion of major authors, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and H.D.
Trade Review‘David Ayers provides the reader with a series of interlacing readings – all of them original and provocative – of some major texts of Anglo-American modernism. Ayers’s central theme is the relation of the linguistic to the social in all its complex “modernist” manifestations. The theories of Benjamin and Adorno, as well as of Derrida, provide an important base for understanding the great poetries and fictions of the period. But
Modernism is first and foremost a book of close and acute readings of specific poems and novels – a book at once richly textured and yet also enjoyable to read.’
Marjorie Perloff
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
Introduction.
1. H. D., Ezra Pound and Imagism.
2. T. S. Eliot and Modernist Reading.
3 .‘The Waste Land’, Nancy Cunard and Mina Loy.
4. Wallace Stevens and Romantic Legacy.
5. Wyndham Lewis: Genius and Art.
6. James Joyce: Ulysses and Love.
7. D. H. Lawrence: Jazz and Life.
8. Virginia Woolf: Art and Class.
9. The Modernity of Adorno and Benjamin.
10. The Poststructuralist Inflection.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index
