This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. Using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials, it reexamines modernist and traditional writing to reveal how various modes of topographical representation allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war.

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.

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Drawing on a range of archival materials, this book explores the writing career of the poet, philosopher, art critic, and political commentator T.E. Hulme, a key figure in British modernism. T.E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism reveals for the first time the full extent of Hulme's relationship with New Age, a leading radical journal before the Great War, focussing particularly on his exchange of ideas with its editor, A.R. Orage. Through a ground-breaking account of Hulme's reading in continental literature, and his combative exchanges amongst the bohemian networks of Edwardian London, Mead shows how 'the strange death of Liberal England' coincided with Hulme's emergence as what T.S. Eliot called 'the forerunner of... the twentieth century mind'. Tracing his debts to French Symbolism, evolutionary psychology, Neo-Royalism, and philosophical pragmatism, the book shows how Hulme combined anarchist and conservative impulses in his journey towards a 'religious attitude'. The result is a nuanced account of Hulme's ideological politics, complicating the received view of his work as proto-fascist.

"In this book Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not effect changes alone and, further, that the Harvard Graduate School of Design was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. - She offers a crucial missing piece to the story - and to the history of modern architecture - by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder."--BOOK JACKET.

The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an environmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an environmental aesthetic, and explains why American modernism was never green. Examining the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution, Joshua Schuster posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission.