This chapter proposes that Louis Zukofsky’s ongoing work on his long poem “A” was animated by a strong investment in restoring a sense of language’s historical and material situatedness – its social ontology – as a means of combatting what Zukofsky and other contemporary writers saw as its vulgarization within an emerging commodity culture. I argue that in the eighth and ninth sections of “A,” written between mid 1935 and early 1940, Zukofsky equates labor and language, revealing both to be historically contingent and socially produced. I begin the chapter by returning to the debate between Zukofsky and Ezra Pound over the concept of the commodity to reveal an under-discussed aspect of their quarrel, namely its basis in the two poets’ attitudes concerning language’s relation to materiality. I then move on to align the treatment of the commodity in “A”-8 and (the first half of) “A”-9, an often-discussed aspect of these sections, with their seldom noted but equally important thematization of language. Focusing on the equivalences the poem draws between labor and language, I claim that the project of restoring both to their concrete historical conditions of social production furnishes a key to reading Zukofsky’s long poem.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

No translation can ever be the same as its original, but rather than seeing this in terms of a loss, it makes far more sense to think in terms of gain, for once a translation enters the receiving culture it sets out on a new path. Never is this clearer than in the practice of retranslating classical texts. The Iliad may have begun as an oral poem, but over the ages it has become a source for writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, video game creators, graphic artists – in short for creative artists across the world – and has consequently acquired new life in new languages and new forms. In the great interconnectedness of global textuality, the role played by translation, however we choose to define that term, is infinite.

This chapter places Elizabeth Bishop’s work within the cross currents of the aesthetic and poetic movements that constituted modernism. While it might be expected that Bishop and her contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell would form part of the generation that would inherit the sensibilities of modernism, what quickly becomes clear, particularly in relation to Bishop, is both her reticence at being identified with any one particular school or movement and her agility in moving between the definitions produced by, and for, modernism. In part her singular position on the peripheries of modernism was a self-selected one, Bishop is happier to stand apart from the categorizing and theorizing impulses of her time. In addition, the fact that she was a gay woman

This chapter takes up the friends and enemies of the liberal world order of 1919, beginning with the anti-liberal provocations of the postwar avant-garde. At its center it focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to liberal internationalism. I propose a new reading of the political Virginia Woolf as a writer devoted to rethinking liberal governance, rather than a critic writing “against empire,” and read her breakthrough anti-bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room, as an extended inquiry into liberal governmental order. I put Woolf’s approach to liberal government in dialogue with H. G. Wells’s World State fiction and his Outline of History, a major intellectual event of the postwar period.