Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.

Peter Nicholls provides original analytic accounts of the main Modernist movements. Close readings of key texts monitor the histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. This new edition includes discussion of the recent research trends, examination of developments in the US, and a new chapter on African-American Modernisms.

Explores modernist aesthetics and cultural exchange in Britain, France and beyond Offers cutting-edge explorations of different aspects of artistic exchange between Britain and France, written by experts on both sides of the ChannelProvides original close readings of canonical and marginalised modernist textsOpens up new conceptual paradigms by probing multiple meanings related to 'crossing' and 'channelling' modernismOrganises chapters around three key themes of 'translating', 'fashioning', 'mediating' that intervene in the new modernist studiesDescribed by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as 'a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure', in the early twentieth century the English Channel, or 'La Manche' in French, represented both a political and intellectual barrier between European avant-gardism and British restraint, and a bridge for cultural connection and aesthetic innovation. Organised around key terms 'Translating', 'Fashioning' and 'Mediating', this book presents ten original essays by scholars working on both sides of the Channel. Cross-Channel Modernisms historicises artistic exchangesa ina Britain, France and beyond and proposes a rich conceptual apparatus of 'crossings' and 'channels' through which we can read modernism and understand it as emerging from, and intervening in, an always-already shifting, multivalent,a internationala context.

Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.

The first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism and its transnational diasporic network of composers, musicians, and institutions.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.