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...

Anthony Mellors was born in the fen country, where he had a troubled childhood and failed to attend various schools. He worked as a lithographic artist for printing firms in Skegness and Great Malvern, and lived in Exeter with a group of itinerant painters, before going up to read English at the universities of Sussex and Oxford. He has since lectured in English and American Literature at universities in Oxford, Durham, Manchester, and Birmingham, as well as helping to maintain the collection at The Poetry Library in London and (reluctantly) becoming a house restorer. In 1990, he founded...