This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding s "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account by turns personal, by turns historical of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of...

Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding enjoyed a fascinating if brief three-year friendship via correspondence between 1927 and 1930, and in A Description of Acquaintance, Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm make the letters available to a larger audience for the first time. Riding and Stein are important figures in twentieth-century poetry and poetics and are considered progenitors of later movements such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. The editors contextualize their relationship and its time period with an introduction; annotations to the letters; and supplementary materials, including pieces by Stein and...