Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson

This book proposes an alternative modernist tradition, a line of writers captured by the archaeological project and the poetic possibilities it created. This tradition spans from Théophile Gautier’s mid-nineteenth-century passion for Egyptology to Charles Olson’s literal excavations on the Yucatan peninsula in the 1950s. With attention to the historical development of archaeology, the author argues that the archaeological became a rich site of cultural fantasy, a location where modernity’s ...