Since its inception as a category of literary study during the 1930s, Modernism has proven notoriously resistant to definition. This resistance has been one of its hallmarks as an object of literary enquiry; nowhere is it more pronounced than with respect to the relation of Modernist art to politics. How does Modernist literary activity stand in relation to the political ideologies and the epoch-making modes of power that were its informing context? What purchases does Modernism have on the social experience of modernity's subjects and citizens? Key texts of canonical Anglo-American Modernism vex the question and make it urgent when they offer up their own gorgeous artifice as a form of expression distinct from the rough-and-tumble of everyday social life, as in W. H. Auden's admonition that "Art is not life and cannot be / A midwife to society." But even this way of understanding - indeed, constituting - literature, as a mode of willed withdrawal, amounts to a political stance; and only a certain cadre of English-language Modernist writers and texts subscribe to this view.