Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism

"English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press." Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters—"black riders" on a blank page—that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance...