David Ayers is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature and Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent. He is the author of Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (1992) and English Literature of the 1920s (1999).

‘David Ayers provides the reader with a series of interlacing readings – all of them original and provocative – of some major texts of Anglo-American modernism. Ayers’s central theme is the relation of the linguistic to the social in all its complex “modernist” manifestations. The theories of Benjamin and Adorno, as well as of Derrida, provide an important base for understanding the great poetries and fictions of the period. But Modernism is first and foremost a book of close and acute readings of specific poems and novels – a book at once richly textured and yet also enjoyable to read.’ Marjorie Perloff

• Acknowledgements. Introduction.1. H. D., Ezra Pound and Imagism.2. T. S. Eliot and Modernist Reading.3 .‘The Waste Land’, Nancy Cunard and Mina Loy.4. Wallace Stevens and Romantic Legacy.5. Wyndham Lewis: Genius and Art.6. James Joyce: Ulysses and Love.7. D. H. Lawrence: Jazz and Life.8. Virginia Woolf: Art and Class.9. The Modernity of Adorno and Benjamin.10. The Poststructuralist Inflection.Notes.Bibliography.Index