Conservative Modernists
Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900–1920

Shows that modernism was concocted out of surprising sources, and that one of them was Toryism during 1900–1920.

Christos Hadjiyiannis (Author)

9781108426367, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 March 2018

254 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

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. 

Preface: modernists against modernity
1. Conservative party crisis: Tory propaganda, imagist poetics
2. Bringing poetry and politics back to Earth: Tory ideology and classical modernism
3. The writer as conservative statesman: modernist theories of inspiration
4. Against representation: conservatism and abstract art
5. War, duty, sacrifice: anti-pacifism and objective ethics
Afterword: afterlives.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Society & culture: general [JF], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]