An exploration of how key modern writers challenged conventional ways of characterizing selfhood, thus developing a discourse expressive of the subtleties of experience in a post-Freudian world long before the self-representation theories of the post-structuralists and post-modernists.

The book examines key texts by the writers James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot as moves within a shared group-game - that of creating a new literature for the new age. It maps a great deal of intertextual reference, allusion and influence and suggests a psychoanalytically-informed hypothesis that certain literature can be constituted a species of interpersonal groupwork. It demonstrates how the core grouping within literary modernism developed an experimental discourse through mutual rivalry and sharing. And it describes different group roles, contributions and changes of...

The Poetry of Postmodernity reappraises key Anglo/American poets of the last fifty years in the light of debates about the postmodern situation. It offers fresh critical insights into how their literary contribution gives cogent expression to both the socio-cultural possibilities and the global problems of our recent past, our apparent present and our probable future. The poets considered are late Auden, Ginsberg, Plath, Berryman, Hughes, Hill, Ashbery and late R.S. Thomas.