Book contents
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
- British Literature in Transition Series
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Nation and Empire
- Part II Media
- Part III Aesthetics
- Chapter 12 Transitions, Turns
- Chapter 13 Poetry and Transition
- Chapter 14 Realism and Mass Politics
- Chapter 15 Short Fiction
- Chapter 16 Ideals of a Picture Gallery
- Part IV Society
- Index
Chapter 12 - Transitions, Turns
Centuries, Decadents, Modernists
from Part III - Aesthetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2021
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
- British Literature in Transition Series
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Nation and Empire
- Part II Media
- Part III Aesthetics
- Chapter 12 Transitions, Turns
- Chapter 13 Poetry and Transition
- Chapter 14 Realism and Mass Politics
- Chapter 15 Short Fiction
- Chapter 16 Ideals of a Picture Gallery
- Part IV Society
- Index
Summary
This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? , pp. 229 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021