Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918

by Paul Peppis

Overview

In Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde, Paul Peppis reads texts by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound alongside English political discourse produced between the death of Victoria and the end of the Great War. He traces the impact of nation and empire on the avant-garde, arguing that Vorticism, England's foremost avant-garde movement, used nationalism to advance literature and avant-garde literature to advance empire. By recovering these neglected aspects of avant-garde politics, Peppis' book opens important new avenues for assessing modernist politics after the war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521119849
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/17/2009
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Conjuring new character: The English Review, Wyndham Lewis, and the reconstruction of Englishness; 2. Narratives of ambition and anxiety: confronting Europe in The New Age; 3. Advancing art and empire: futurism in England, Italy in Libya, and the founding of Vorticism; 4. 'Surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts': Vorticism and the Great War; 5. Anti-Individualism and fictions of national character in Lewis's Tarr.

Editorial Reviews

"Peppis's reserach into the social and political culture of 1901-1918 enables him to place Lewis in an historical context that is consistently illuminating. [His] interpretation of Lewis's formative years is always stimulating and forcefully argued." Modernism/Modernity

"Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde makes a respectable contribution to the literature on modernist politics." English Literature in Transition 2002

From the Publisher