Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence

This volume explores the idea of decadence through readings of major modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Vincent Sherry (Author)

9781107437500, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 January 2019

342 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'Sherry's study is at once broad in scope and refined in the detail of its exegeses, and moves deftly between some of the best-known documents of modernism and rich findings from the archive.' Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Committee (www.msa.press.jhu.edu)

In this major new book, Vincent Sherry reveals a fresh continuity in literary history. He traces the idea of decadence back to key events from the failures of the French Revolution to the cataclysm of the Great War. This powerful work of literary criticism and literary history encompasses a rich trajectory that begins with an exposition of the English Romantic poets and ends with a re-evaluation of modernists as varied as W. B. Yeats, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Rebecca West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and, centrally, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Sherry's hugely ambitious study will be essential reading for anyone working in modernist studies and twentieth-century literature more generally.

1. The time of decadence
2. The demonstrable decadence of modernist novels
3. Ezra Pound, 1906–20
4. T. S. Eliot, 1910–22.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]