Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty

This book describes how three of the most significant Anglophone writers of the first half of the twentieth century – Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf – wrestled with a geopolitical situation in which national boundaries had come to seem increasingly permeable at the same time as war among (and within) individual nation-states had come to seem virtually inescapable. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's analysis of the elements of performativity in J.L. Austin's speech act theory, and making critical u...