English Literary Modernism

ORIGINS OF ENGLISH LITERARY MODERNISM, 1870 – 1914

Gregory F. Tague, Editor & Contributor

 The aim of this work is to focus on the non-dramatic works of the early period of modernism in England with an emphasis on the origins and development of key writers and poets.  Other such studies date to the mid- 1980s and 1990s (Michael Levenson, Sanford Schwartz, Stan Smith, e.g.) and tend to lean heavily toward intellectual history or poetics.  This work strives to include  a broad mix of thought as to the issue and the purpose of modernism including literary and cultural economics, anthropology, mythology, impressionism and the use of architectural space, with some attention to publishing (the emergence of literary magazines, the use of literary reviews in creating a “public” for new writing).  Also, as opposed to some edited collections, research is not confined to a single genre nor strays from the focus of literary as opposed to other modern movements then in creation.  Vital currents of modernism such as literary feminism, secular humanism, Darwinism, visual aesthetics, place and placeless-ness, the postcolonial, and Anglophone reception are also discussed.

The writers and poets discussed include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, Thomas Hardy, F.M. Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Walter Pater, “Michael Field,” Henry James, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott.

        ~ Endorsements ~

 “I enjoyed the book [. . . and] I learned a good deal from it [. . .] The book is a vivid constellation of intelligences working on an elusive subject. [. . . .] The essays in “Origins of English Literary Modernism, 1870-1914” are suggestive, alert interpretations of something that is less than an entity but more than an apparition; not a movement to be apprehended by the diverse methods of literary criticism, history, philosophy, economics, and aesthetics, but a cultural impulse, one of many in its time, which these disciplines find seriously engaging. Gregory Tague’s book clarifies the subject without claiming to nail it down.”

 ~ Denis Donoghue, University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters, New York University.

________

 “This substantial volume  organized around thematics of Origins of English Literary Modernism  allows essays on the fin de siècle to talk interestingly to those on Edwardians and Georgians and they in turn to studies of early modernist masters.  The emphasis on genealogy of modernism holds the volume together but does not keep individual essays from fresh and interesting explorations, little magazines in the fin de siècle, Bennett’s early criticism, historiography in Vernon Lee, Baedeker in E. M. Forster: a rich and interesting collection toward study of the long twentieth century.”

 ~ John Maynard, Professor of English, New York University, and Co-Editor of Victorian Literature and Culture.

ISBNs: 978-1-933146-48-5  /  193314648-6

 Photo Courtesy of Dr. Divya Saksena 

Review (DHLR, 2010): “. . . it might appear particularly brazen, at such a relatively late stage in the debate, to claim to be investigating its [modernism’s] origins . . . . But it is in fact one of the refreshing features of Tague's volume that it remains largely unperturbed by definitional debates of the past . . .”;  Scholars “will find much of interest . . . in terms of general modernist contexts . . .”  The reviewer calls my own contribution "bold and sweeping" - a compliment?  Many of the essays are singled out as particularly good - uselful and helpful in terms of literary history, especially those that focus on print/culture and post-colonialism.  The reviewer exaggerates some of the flaws and weaknesses of such a large collection, but, overall, it is a balanced and favorable review.

Reviewed in Time Present (Summer 2010) by Kinereth Meyer, p. 5. http://www.luc.edu/eliot/newsletter/71%20sum%2010.pdf  [Title of the book in the review is slightly off.]