Lawrence Rainey

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett. Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism’s dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography. Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world .

An Anthology

Modernism

Lawrence Rainey offers new insights into T.S. Eliot's intentions and shows us that 'The Waste Land' is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

Revisiting The Waste Land

divThis groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot’s greatest achievement and on the poem’s place in the modern canon. Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet’s intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew./DIV

Revisiting "The Waste Land"

"Modernism: An Anthology" is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. The giants of modernist literature - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett - are amply represented, along with another 20 Anglo-American writers. In addition, the book features a generous selection of texts by avant-garde thinkers and writers from the Continent. These enable the reader to trace modernism's interaction with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations and an extensive bibliography, this "Anthology" allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that utterly transformed the aesthetics of the modern world.

Laura Wittman

Christine Poggi

In 1909, F.T. Marinetti published his incendiary Futurist Manifesto, proclaiming, “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!!” and “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” Intent on delivering Italy from “its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians,” the Futurists imagined that art, architecture, literature, and music would function like a machine, transforming the world rather than merely reflecting it. But within a decade, Futurism's utopian ambitions were being wedded to Fascist politics, an alliance that would tragically mar its reputation in the century to follow. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Futurism, this is the most complete anthology of Futurist manifestos, poems, plays, and images ever to bepublished in English, spanning from 1909 to 1944. Now, amidst another era of unprecedented technological change and cultural crisis, is a pivotal moment to reevaluate Futurism and its haunting legacy for Western civilization.

Lawrence Rainey

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