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...