The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergency of corporate social forms.

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergency of corporate social forms.

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergency of corporate social forms.

This book situates Louis Zukofsky's poetics (and the lineage of Objectivist poetics more broadly) within a set of ethical concerns in American poetic modernism. The book makes a strong case for perceiving Zukofsky as a missing key figure within this ethical matrix of modernism. Viewing Zukofsy's poetry through the lens of the theoretical work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, Woods argues for an ethical genealogy of American poetics leading from Zukofsky through the contemporary school of LANGUAGE poetry. Woods brings together modernism and postmodernism, ethics and aesthetics, in interesting and innovative ways which shed new light on our understanding of this neglected strain of modernist poetics.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Ezra Pound forever changed the course of poetry. The author of a vast body of literature, his enormous range of references and use of multiple languages make him one of the most obscure authors and—because of his Fascism, anti-Semitism, and questionable sanity—one of the most controversial. This encyclopedia is a concise yet comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Included are more than 250 alphabetically arranged entries on such topics as Arabic history, Chinese translation, dance, Hilda Doolittle, Egyptian literature, Robert Frost, and Pound's publications. The entries are written by roughly 100 expert contributors and cite works for further reading. Ezra Pound forever changed the course of poetry. His vast body of poetry and critical works make him one of the 20th century's most prolific writers, and his influence has shaped later poets, great and small. His enormous range of references, deliberate obscurity, and use of multiple languages make him one of the most difficult authors and— because of his Fascism, anti-Semitism, and questionable sanity—one of the most controversial figures in American literary history. This encyclopedia is a concise yet comprehensive guide to his life and writings.

In her provocative study of Gertrude Stein, G.F. Mitrano argues that Stein's particular take on modernity has special relevance for today. Tracing what she describes as Stein's deeply modernist story of transformation from a nineteenth-century American woman to the disquieting muse of avant-garde culture portrayed in Picasso's famous portrait, Mitrano illuminates Stein's immense appetite for life, her love of thinking, and her craving for recognition. Her approach is innovative, combining the exegetical, the visual, and the theoretical, to emphasize Stein's struggle for individuality and public achievement as a profoundly historical struggle involving personal choices linked, for example, to her sexuality or the uses of her physical appearance. Stein continues to attract attention, Mitrano contends, because she anticipates many contemporary concerns, especially in the field of critical thinking: from the question of subjectivity, to the status of the writer as a laborer among many, to the meaning of fame and the private/public divide.

How did modernist poetry respond—both thematically and technically—to communism? In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned—and aesthetically responsive—to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into Stalinism, opening up a hitherto underexplored domain in the political history of avant-garde literature. In doing so, Steven amplifies the resonance among the universal idea of communism, the revolutionary socialist state, and the American modernist poem. Focusing on three of the most significant figures in modernist poetry—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky—Steven provides a theoretical and historical introduction to modernism’s unique sense of communism while revealing how communist ideals and references were deeply embedded in modernist poetry. Moving between these poets and the work of T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and many others, the book combines a detailed analysis of technical devices and poetic values with a rich political and economic context. Persuasively charting a history of the avant-garde modernist poem in relation to communism, beginning in the 1910s and reaching into the 1940s, Red Modernism is an audacious examination of the twinned history of politics and poetry.

From debates about reparations to the rise of the welfare state, the decades following World War I saw a widespread turn across disciplines to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? Marshalling wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, Returning the Gift argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism. The book begins by revisiting the locus classicus of twentieth-century gift theory — the French sociologist Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. His title notwithstanding, the gift Mauss envisions is not primitive or pre-capitalist, but rather a distinctively modern phenomenon. Subsequent chapters offer sustained, nuanced readings of novels and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. from the 1920s to 1940s, underscoring the ways their writing is illuminated by contemporaneous developments in the social sciences, economics, and politics, while also making a case for their unique contributions to broader debates about gifts. Not only do these writers insist that literature is a special kind of gift, but they also pose challenges to the gift's feminization in the work of both their Victorian forebears and contemporary male theorists. Each of these writers uses tropes and narratives of giving — of hospitality, sympathy, reciprocity, charity, genius, and kinship — to imagine more egalitarian social possibilities under the conditions of the capitalist present. The language of the gift is not, as we might expect, a mark of hostility to the market so much as a means of giving form to the 'society' in market society — of representing everyday experiences of exchange that the myth of the free market works, even now, to render unthinkable.

Praise for the print edition:" ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this.