Modernist Figures

Modernist Figures brings together three decades of Peter Nicholls’s scholarship on poetry and poetics, tracing how modernism redefined literary form, skepticism, and cultural authority. The collection ranges across American, British, and European traditions, this second volume beginning with a substantial group of chapters that examines the positive and negative features of Pound’s legacy—from his fascination with Japanese Noh and the Ruskinian grotesque, through his ideological entanglements with fascism, to the late Cantos’ fragmentary brilliance. Closing essays extend modernist concerns into postmodern and contemporary writing, including Toni Morrison, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe, showing how these writers also fundamentally contested and revised Pound’s ideological notions of time and historicity.