The conclusion summarizes the book’s core arguments – specifically, that studying the reception of ancient architecture at the world’s fairs at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco furthers our understanding of the complex and possibly conflicting and contradictory ways in which the ancient world and its architecture were understood in the United States between 1893 and 1915. The appropriation of classical architecture for museums and fine art galleries emerges as a major theme. While classical architecture could be used to justify empire and institutional racism, it could also symbolize democracy and cultural sophistication. The fluidity and flexibility of ancient architecture underscore why it was so widely and creatively adapted in the United States. The physical legacy of these fairs – the buildings that survived and the parks – is also considered. In addition, the conclusion discusses the decline of ancient architecture as one of the most potent ways in which fair organizers expressed their cultural, political, and economic goals; the rejection of historical forms was vital to the birth of architectural Modernism. In sum, neo-antique architecture at American world’s fairs helped the nation and various cities to forge imagined ties to a glorious past, frame the present, and envisage the future.

Critics have routinely voiced their frustrations with William Carlos Williams’s term ‘measure’. But from the late 1930s onwards, he compared his idea of ‘measure’ to the science of measurement. This chapter suggests, first, that to fully appreciate Williams’s measure, one must understand how the science of measurement frequently appeared in the vocabulary of a variety of contemporaneous critics of poetry. In so doing, it sketches a lineage of scientific criticism that began in the late nineteenth century and that shaped modernist theories of prosody. Second, by close reading Williams’s long poem Paterson (1963), it suggests that by rejecting the term ‘rhythm’ and reprising ‘measure’, Williams was attempting to define the knowledge practices proper to poetry in an era where to measure was to know.

This chapter examines a literary critical ‘methodological moment’ from the middle of the nineteenth century to modernism. It argues that the re-emergence of the scientific method in this period was key to the normal scientific study of poetry. By returning to a series of forgotten critical debates about the relevance of the scientific method to the study of poetry, the chapter demonstrates how the nineteenth-century revival of method introduced a technical vocabulary into twentieth-century poetics, an epistemologically and politically charged discourse that centred on concepts of method, hypothesis and scientific law. The second half of this chapter goes on to examine published and unpublished poetry by George Oppen to show how he offered a new way of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and the scientific method. It suggests that Oppen turned to mathematics and set theory to create a new nominalist method that could create rather than explain. However, it is also argued that Oppen’s employment of the mathematical method actually ends up illustrating the epistemological power of poetic artifice: its ability to create the sights and sounds of the invisible but not inexistent multitude that Oppen’s poetry sought to bring into being.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.

Industrial imperialism affected Europe before anywhere else, bringing a dizzying burst of modernization that altered habits of life and the ways in which wealth was created and distributed. Among the many results of this disruption would be the opening of new niches in what had become an ossified theatrical environment. At the same time, realism and romanticism offered new ways of viewing the world and shaped how theatre artists filled those niches. Ballet and opera were transformed by romanticism although both would also eventually be touched by realism. The literary romanticism of spoken theatre was overwhelmed by competition from melodrama (which effectively integrated romanticism and realism) and the “well-made play” (which eschewed literary ambition in favor of stage-worthiness). It was then outflanked by a stringent realism that emphasized psychological and social issues, whose theatrical plainness led to avant-garde efforts to “retheatricalize” theatre.

Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s fiction blends Yoruba cosmology and modernist aesthetics. This blend renders the critical tendency to juxtapose the Indigenous and the modern, via the spiritual and the material, impossible. Instead, Tutuola’s fiction is an Indigenous response to mid-century West African modernisation and industrialisation under global capitalism. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology, this response offers an immanent critique of colonial modernity’s capitalist world-system by refusing to separate the spiritual and the material, thereby adapting a ‘folk’ logic that capitalism allegedly replaced. This survival of Indigenous cosmology into modernity demonstrates an analogous relationship between Tutuola’s animist realism and the gothic, a form that likewise offers an immanent critique of global capitalism by way of adapting folk logics. This analogous relationship leads this chapter to comparatively read Tutuola’s vision of the uncanny alongside the Freudian uncanny, highlighting the need for world-gothic criticism to situate the gothic alongside non-Western forms that render a shared modernity uncanny.

Creative engagement with the Arthurian myth has been prolific in the modern period and shows no sign of abating. This chapter provides a panoramic shot, an overview of how and where the Arthurian myth surfaces in texts in English in Great Britain and Ireland from 1920 to the present. Additionally, it provides close-ups, more detailed readings of selected works that capture the critical concerns of modern artists and their audiences, foregrounding especially trauma and the impacts of war and industrialised culture; expressions of the interconnectedness between all living things, often in response to contextual ecopolitical crises; and human interactions, including tragic relationships and empowering female networks. The discussion breaks materials into broad categories that are loosely determined by form – poetry, prose and drama – and moves between foundational works and newer narratives. Where possible, the discussion foregrounds Arthuriana that has previously received little or no attention, especially works by women.

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

This Preface begins with a passage from Pierre Auguste-Renoir’s diary, in which he records the following aphorism: ‘Everything that I call grammar on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: Irregularity.’ Taking Renoir’s idea of irregularity as a starting-point, this chapter sketches out the historical origins of impressionism and gives a brief outline of its formal and thematic variety, before gesturing to its significance as a cultural and stylistic reference point for writers at the turn of the century, including the group of British, Irish and American poets at the heart of the present study.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

The Afterword considers a passage from Clive Bell’s seminal book of modernist art criticism, Art (1914), in which he puzzles over whether to describe impressionism as an art-historical end-point, while also expressing a deeper uncertainty about the ends of impressionism itself. In particular, he returns to the question that had baffled critics at the inaugural impressionist exhibition in 1874, and which has been a source of vexation to scholarship ever since: the question of whether impressionism is imaginative and self-expressive, or imitative and bound to the external world. By following the twists and turns in Bell's thought, the Afterword reflects on the irregular significance of impressionism to the writers discussed in the present study, before gesturing to its continued importance for the writers who followed them.

This chapter begins with reference to Les Murray’s impressiveness as a reader of his own work. It illustrates the distinctiveness and variety of Murray’s poetry, celebrating its avoidance of predictable forms, topics and ideas. The chapter also observes the difference in the reception of Murray’s work in the global North and the global South. It points to the ways in which Murray’s poems don’t seem to end in conventional or predictable ways, but seem unending. The chapter discusses ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ as possibly Murray’s greatest poem, for its all-encompassingness. It cites Murray’s anti-modernism and his membership of the diasporic super-group of English-language poets, including Brodsky, Walcott and Heaney. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the flavour and nature of Murray’s poetry changed in the last twenty years of his life.

This chapter explores how the concept of the collective entered into and helped to shape important works of literature during and after the Second World War. It takes the ubiquitous wartime speeches of Winston Churchill as a key site for articulating the idea of the ‘people’s war’, offering a reading of these ubiquitous texts. In relation to Churchill’s version of a collective wartime identity and experience, the chapter looks at writings by H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, all of whom wrote passionate and deeply felt works that offer their own assessment of the idea of people’s war, or of the collective more generally, as a social project. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that the problem of the collective in wartime is a central one in literary modernism.

This chapter discusses the concept of the visual imaginary and the visualism apparent across all of Kenneth Slessor’s writing, including his war journalism and poetry. It argues that Slessor’s career as a film writer for the popular press is related to the visualism of his poetry and to the history of cinema in Australia. The chapter analyses the relation between the light effects in Slessor’s poetry and the existential state of the poet, including in the elegiac ‘Five Bells’. It concludes with a discussion on the relation between Slessor’s war despatches about World War II in North Africa and the elegy for the casualties of war.

This chapter explores the place and significance of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’ in left-wing literary discourse between the wars, concentrating on the leftwards shift among literary intellectuals in the 1930s. It connects a widespread literary fascination with the idea of a ‘popular voice’ and the notion of popular literary ‘content’ to political shifts in Britain and on the international scene, particularly the rise of fascism and concomitant developments in the cultural politics of the Communist International. It examines the left-wing journal Left Review and a selection of left-oriented poetry anthologies as sites in which questions of the relationship between writers, literary forms, and popular audiences were negotiated.

This chapter identifies Symbolism’s influence on Australian poetry as taking two trajectories. The first, more dominant trajectory traces the Symbolism as emerging from A. G. Stephens’s editorial work and Christopher Brennan’s adaptation of Mallarmé’s doctrine into a metaphysical tradition. The chapter follows its continuation in the poetry of A. R. Chisholm, Randolph Hughes, Nettie Palmer, Zora Cross, the Vision circle, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. The chapter argues that a second, more adventurous and feral trajectory includes Brennan’s most experimental writing, the work of Ern Malley, Patrick White’s Voss, and more recent poetry by Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Chris Edwards.

The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.