Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918

In Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde, Paul Peppis reads texts by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound alongside English political discourse produced 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 literature to advance empire. By recovering these neglected aspects of avant-garde politics, Peppis' book opens important new avenues for assessing modernist politics after the war.