This study reconsiders the meaning of 'impersonality, ' the term modernists such as T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis explicitly employed in their critiques of 'personality, ' especially as it has been defined in classic works by critics such as Maud Ellmann, Daniel Albright, and Michael Levenson. Unbinding its connection to authority, Rochelle Rives argues that impersonality, as a response to the increasing prominence of 'personality' in twentieth-century political and aesthetic culture, might be understood instead as an exploration of affective engagement that spatially...

Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.