No aspect of modernist literature has attracted more passionate defenses, or more furious denunciations, than its affinity for the idea of autonomy. A belief in art as a law unto itself is central to the work of many writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. But is this belief just a way of denying art's social contexts, its roots in the lives of its creators, its political and ethical obligations?

Fictions of Autonomy argues that the concept of autonomy is, on the contrary, essential for understanding modernism historically. Disputing the prevailing skepticism...

Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language to re-imagine the relations between people, their languages, and the communities in which they live?

Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s. With a combination of fresh...

Commonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s-such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender-come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including...

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of...

While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, Digital Modernism provides an alternative genealogy. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's...

While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, Digital Modernism provides an alternative genealogy. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's...

Literary modernism emerged as death, stripped in the developing world of traditional meanings and practices, became strange. The sea-change over the first part of the twentieth century in how people died and tended corpses-the modernization of death-was a crucial context in which modernist writers developed their new novelistic and poetic techniques. They sought ways to renovate mortal obligations in an age of the obsolescence of the dead.
For many years, the flesh-and-blood body has been a central protagonist in literary scholarship--the body in pain, the body as spectacle and...