A study of early 20th-century literary and artistic culture. The text focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.
The late modernists were the ones who let down the side; they saw the wave of the future, the erosion of literary and political borders, and they let the world in and so distinguished themselves from the refinements of the early modernists. This is the first book to make this fascinating distinction and to highlight this aspect of intellectual history and to situate Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett at this critical juncture.