Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde by Paul Peppis - 9780521662383

Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-GardeNation and Empire, 19011918\nAuthor(s): Paul Peppis\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521662383, 978-0521662383\nSynopsis\nAccounts of the 'historical avant-garde' and of 'high modernism' often celebrate the former for its revolutionary aesthetics or denigrate the latter for its 'proto-fascist' politics. In Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde, Paul Peppis shows how neither interpretation explains the writings of avant-gardists in early twentieth-century England. Peppis reads texts by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound alongside English political discourse between the death of Victoria and the end of the Great War. He traces the impact of nation and empire on the avant-garde, arguing that Vorticism, England's foremost avant-garde movement, used nationalism to advance literature and avant-garde .