Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence

Vincent Sherry is Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Washington University, St Louis. He is the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Modernism and the author of several books in the field. Sherry is currently working on A Literary History of the European War of 1914–1918.

• 1. The time of decadence; 2. The demonstrable decadence of modernist novels; 3. Ezra Pound, 1906–20; 4. T. S. Eliot, 1910–22.

'Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is a surprising yet inevitable book, at once expansive and meticulous. For decades we've been thinking about the relationship of modernism to the culture of the fin de siècle, but this book allows us to perceive that relationship more vividly than ever before. Vincent Sherry, who negotiates the thickets of intellectual and material history as elegantly as he inhabits the language of poems, is the only scholar of Anglo-American modernism who could have written it. The book is brilliant.' James Longenbach, University of Rochester