Drawing on a range of archival materials, this book explores the writing career of the poet, philosopher, art critic, and political commentator T.E. Hulme, a key figure in British modernism. T.E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism reveals for the first time the full extent of Hulme's relationship with New Age, a leading radical journal before the Great War, focussing particularly on his exchange of ideas with its editor, A.R. Orage. Through a ground-breaking account of Hulme's reading in continental literature, and his combative exchanges amongst the bohemian networks of Edwardian London, Mead shows how 'the strange death of Liberal England' coincided with Hulme's emergence as what T.S. Eliot called 'the forerunner of... the twentieth century mind'. Tracing his debts to French Symbolism, evolutionary psychology, Neo-Royalism, and philosophical pragmatism, the book shows how Hulme combined anarchist and conservative impulses in his journey towards a 'religious attitude'. The result is a nuanced account of Hulme's ideological politics, complicating the received view of his work as proto-fascist.

Despite sustained scholarly interest in the politics of modernism, astonishingly little attention has been paid to its relationship to Conservatism. Yet modernist writing was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology from when it emerged in the Edwardian era. By investigating the many intersections between Anglophone modernism and Tory politics, Conservative Modernists offers new ways to read major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. It also highlights the contribution to modernism of lesser-known writers, including Edward Storer, J. M. Kennedy, and A. M. Ludovici. These are the figures to whom it most frequently returns, but, cutting through disciplinary delineations, the book simultaneously reveals the inputs to modernism of a broad range of political writers, philosophers, art historians, and crowd psychologists: from Pascal, Burke, and Disraeli, to Nietzsche, Le Bon, Wallas, Worringer, Ribot, Bergson, and Scheler.

Setting out to demonstrate the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot and Ideology charts first of all the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot's prose and poetry, and further argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework he employed throughout his career. Asher's concentration on the specifically ideological separates this book from previous works on Eliot, and sheds light on Eliot's celebrated mid-career conversion to Catholicism. What results is a re-estimation of Eliot's view of literary history and literary theory, and new appraisals of several major poems and plays. Finally, the book discusses at length how Eliot's ideology profoundly influenced the study of literature in the English-speaking world for several decades.

This book traces the literary friendship between Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells from their early correspondence through to the differences that caused their estrangement, including their respective responses to the First World War. It thus gives an overview of the literary scene in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period.

A powerful and persuasive new reading of Frost as a poet deeply engaged with both the literary and public politics of his day.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

The first comprehensive history of modern poetry in English from the 1890s to the 1920s, this book embraces an era of enormous creative variety--the formative period during which the Romantic traditions of the past were abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created. By the end of the period covered, The Waste Land, Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Stevens' Harmonium, and Pound's Draft of XVI Cantos had been published, and the first post-Eliot generation of poets was beginning to emerge.More than a hundred poets are treated in this volume, and many more are noticed in passing. Mr. Perkins discusses each poet and type of poetry with keen critical appreciation. He traces opposed and evolving assumptions about poetry, and considers the effects on poetry of its changing audiences, of premises and procedures in literary criticism, of the publishing outlets poets could hope to use, and the interrelations of poetry with developments in the other arts--the novel, painting, film, music--as well as in social, political, and intellectual life. The poetry of the United States and that of the British Isles are seen in interplay rather than separately.This book is an important contribution to the understanding of modern literature. At the same time, it throws new light on the cultural history of both America and Britain in the twentieth century.