Modernist Parody: Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature

Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It argues that parody is central to the ...