The origins of modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the rhetorics of renewal

This study draws on the resources of modern literary theory to reconsider central issues of classical Modernism in the writings of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. It examines both poetry and critical and cultural writings in a postmodern perspective, taking an approach which is theoretically and historically informed. Grounding its analysis in contemporary social and political concerns, the study opens up the period from 1908-1922 in a retrospect afforded by the crisis years of the 1930s, to recover the repressed discourses of gender, class and nationality at the heart of Modernism.