Modernism: A Short Introduction

This short introduction to modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature. It provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary modernism, considering both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention. Author David Ayers shows that, however diverse modernist texts are, they are linked by concerns about social modernization and the role of art and the artist. He also demonstrates that German Marxism and French deconstruction have been crucial in realizing the full complexity of modernism. Ayers s arguments are illustrated with reference to the works of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, H. D., Nancy Cunard, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, among others.

Acknowledgements.

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

David Ayers is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature and Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent. He is the author of Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (1992) and English Literature of the 1920s (1999).

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