Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded modernity, powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century.

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism is the first full-length study of the vexed relationship between America's great modernist writers and the nation's “second city.” Michelle E. Moore explores the ways in which the defining writers of the era-Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald-engaged with the city and reacted against the commercial styles of "Chicago realism" to pursue their own, European-influenced mode of modernist art. Drawing on local archives to illuminate the literary culture of early 20th-century Chicago, this book reveals an important new dimension to the rise of American modernism.

In Modernism and Eugenics, first published in 2001, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorization of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an interesting study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.

A reinterpretation of Katharine Mansfield's work that expands our understanding of her place in Modernism.

This is a critical history of Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its impact on European modernism. Koss explores the legacy of Wagner's concept, laying out its genealogy and the political, aesthetic, and cultural context from which it emerged.

Taking 44 Mecklenburgh Square as the focal point and springboard for a critical group study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of modernist biofiction and poetry to the literature of the First World War. A group that Perdita Schaffner described as 'another Bloomsbury set', the Mecklenburgh Square writers, like the Bloomsbury Group proper, 'lived in squares' and 'loved in triangles', in Dorothy Parker's famous formulation. Geographically adjacent, these sets intersected socially and, at points, in their aesthetics: both practiced innovative forms of what may broadly be defined as 'life writing'. But, demarcating the Mecklenburgh Square writers from the Bloomsbury Set, the former had its origins in the transatlantic avant-garde: Lawrence. H.D., Aldington (and John Cournos) were all associated with Imagism, the poetic movement which instantiated Anglo-American modernism. Considered as a pro-tem collective, these four poets, all of whom were also novelists and translators, contest the binaries that still obtain between modernist and First World War writing. This group study of Lawrence, H.D., Aldington and Cournos tracks the transition of Imagism from a pre-war mode to a war poetics which includes but is not confined to the trench lyric and it traces, in the transtextual relations between the Mecklenburgh Square novels, the traumatic imprint of the war on modernist life writing.