Written during the Italian winter of 1930, The Blue Spill is an unfinished detective novel written by Ezra Pound – the leading figure of modernist poetry in the 20th century – and his long-time companion Olga Rudge. Published for the first time in this authoritative critical edition, the novel reflects both Rudge's and Pound's voracious reading of popular fiction as it echoes and parodies such writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Based on the original manuscripts of the novel, this critical edition includes annotation and textual commentary throughout. The book also includes critical essays exploring the contexts of the work, from the dynamics of artistic collaboration to the growing popularity of detective fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. Taken together, this unique publication sheds new light on the relationship between the literary avant-garde and popular culture in the modernist period.

divA loving and admiring companion for half a century to literary titan Ezra Pound, concert violinist Olga Rudge was the muse who inspired the poet to complete his epic poem, The Cantos, and the mother of his only daughter, Mary. Strong-minded and defiant of conventions, Rudge knew the best and worst of times with Pound. With him, she coped with the wrenching dislocations brought about by two catastrophic world wars and experienced modernism’s radical transformation of the arts. In this enlightening biography, Anne Conover offers a full portrait of Olga Rudge (1895–1996), drawing for the first time on Rudge’s extensive unpublished personal notebooks and correspondence. Conover explores Rudge’s relationship with Pound, her influence on his life and career, and her perspective on many details of his controversial life, as well as her own musical career as a violinist and musicologist and a key figure in the revival of Vivaldi’s music in the 1930s. In addition to mining documentary sources, the author interviewed Rudge and family members and friends. The result is a vivid account of a highly intelligent and talented woman and the controversial poet whose flame she tended to the end of her long life. The book quotes extensively from the Rudge–Pound letters--an almost daily correspondence that began in the 1920s and continued until Pound’s death in 1972. These letters shed light on many aspects of Pound’s disturbing personality; the complicated and delicate balance he maintained between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife Dorothy, for fifty years; the birth of Olga and Ezra’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz; Pound’s alleged anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies; his wartime broadcasts over Rome radio and indictment for treason; and his twelve-year incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill. /DIV

Essays on recent developments in Pound scholarship and research, including newly available primary sources and methodological advances in cognate fields.

Collecting in full for the first time the correspondence between Ezra Pound and members of Leo Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt across a 30 year period, this book sheds new light on an important but previously unexplored influence on Pound's controversial intellectual development in the Fascist era. Ezra Pound's long-term interest in anthropology and ethnography exerted a profound influence on early 20th century literary Modernism. These letters reveal the extent of the influence of Frobenius' concept of 'Paideuma' on Pound's poetic and political writings during this period and his growing engagement with the culture of Nazi Germany. Annotated throughout, the letters are supported by contextualising essays by leading Modernist scholars as well as relevant contemporary published articles by Pound himself and his leading correspondent at the Institute, the American Douglas C. Fox.

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'. This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism

This volume makes a significant contribution to both the study of Derrida and of modernist studies. The contributors argue, first, that deconstruction is not “modern”; neither is it “postmodern” nor simply “modernist.” They also posit that deconstruction is intimately connected with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature stands out as a “modern” notion. The contributors investigate the nature and depth of Derrida's affinities with writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin, among others. With its strong connection between philosophy and literary modernism, this highly original volume advances modernist literary study and the relationship of literature and philosophy.

Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most important contemporary authors, but for years was neglected by critics. In 2018 the New York Times described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” and tipped him as a future Nobel Prize winner. Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.

Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a general inquiry on Beckett beyond the strictly literary to issues related to intermediality and embodiment (Maude, 2009; Tajiri, 2007), post humanism and technology (Boulter, 2019; Kirushina, Adar, Nixon eds, 2021), intersections with popular culture (Pattie and Stewart, eds., 2019). However, a specific analysis on Beckett’s relationship with Italian arts and poetry on one side–and on Italian artists’ response to Beckett’s oeuvre on the other–is still missing. The volume offers an original examination of Beckett’s presence on the contemporary Italian cultural scene, a stage where he became (and still is) the fulcrum of some of the most significant experimentations across different genres and media. The reader will look at him as an “Italian” artist, in constant dialogue with the most significant modern European cultural turns.

The first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's complete poetry, combining new work from major literature critics and new critical perspectives.

The figures of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear throughout the writing of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, featuring in his poems, short fictions, dialogues and as authorities in notes to his work. Bringing together into one volume published and unpublished writings featuring these two enigmatic figures, W.B. Yeats's Robartes-Aherne Writings traces their history and the development of Yeats's mystical thought that culminated (twice) in the publication of his visionary work A Vision (1925, 1937). Including reproductions of manuscript and notebook pages as well as transcriptions and extracts from a wide range of Yeats's mystical writings and substantial commentary and annotation throughout, this book is an essential resource for scholars of Yeats's thought, his stylistic evolution and the esoteric influences on modernist writing in the early 20th century.