This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterises modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two.
The book's central concern is why the aesthetic mysticism that Walter Benjamin called the faith of those 'who made common cause with Fascism' continued to be a guiding principle for literary elites and countercultural movements...

This collection assembles many of the major theorists of postmodernism, across the humanities and the social sciences, to reconsider the nature and significance of the postmodern moment, as historical phase and as theoretical field. The authors look back on their own contributions to the postmodernism debate of the 1980s and 1990s and address the ways in which the contemporary world and their own concerns have developed, and the continuing validity or otherwise of 'postmodern' as a master designator of the contemporary.
Following a substantial introductory survey, the 15 compact articles...

John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity. At the heart of the book is Kinsella's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (Kinsella himself writes and teaches in the USA, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an important autobiographical element, as Kinsella explores the pulse of his poetic...