Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers.

Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists. Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists—Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats, and O'Casey—resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her. In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured and their own creative sleves.

Assembling the most distinguished historians of Britian, this landmark book explores themes and questions across the entire span of British and United Kingdom history. Traditional chronological frontiers are broken down as medievalists, early modernists and modernists sustain a dynamic dialogue around the key issues of the British state such as expansion and contraction, the nature of political tensions and conflicting historiographies. Uniting the Kingdom? represents a comprehensive survey of the most recent historical scholarship and will preserve its resonance for years to come.