Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry

In this collection, an international team of contributors contest the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalisation. These essays offer a fresh perspective on contemporary revaluations of modernism through their investigation of some of the Anglo-American locations of modernism, and reassess the regional and nationalist affiliations of modernist poetry. The Locations of Literary Modernism maps a topography of poetic modernism that is quite different from what has hitherto been accepted as comprehensive.

• Essays by leading critics and scholars of modernist poetry • Broad range of poets discussed, from the canonical to the neglected • Alternative focus on modernist poetry, with wide implications for its field of study

Preface; Introduction: locating modernisms: an overview Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins; 1. MacDiarmid in Montrose Robert Crawford; 2. Bunting and Welsh Richard Caddel; 3. Antithesis of place in the poetry and life of David Jones Thomas Dilworth; 4. ‘Shut in a yower of words’: Dylan Thomas’ Modernism John Goodby and Christopher Wigginton; 5. ‘Literally, for this’: metonymies of national identity in Edward Thomas, Yeats and Auden Stan Smith; 6. Reactions to their Burg: Irish Modernist poets of the 1930s Alex Davis; 7. Pound’s places Peter Nicholls; 8. Wallace Stevens and America Lee Jenkins; 9. Locating the Lyric: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and World War II Fiona Green; 10. ‘In the published city’: the New York School of Poets Geoff Ward; 11. Modernism deferred: Langston Hughes, Harlem and Jazz Montage Peter Brooker; Index.