Bringing some of the insights of modern critical theory to bear on a great deal of information about Pound's activities as a literary critic (some of it made available only recently), K.K. Ruthven provides a provocative re-reading of a major modernist writer who dominated the discourse of modernism.

What literary historians describe as the modernist movement in literature - in which Ezra Pound doubled as a major poet and principal publicist - is currently being revalued by practitioners of various symptomatic styles of criticism who find modernism Fascist in its politics and masculinist in its sexual politics. "Ezra Pound as Literary Critic" contributes to some of those debates by which Pound came to dominate the discourse of modernism. Indeed, so successfully did he dominate that his version of it was reproduced by academic critics as an official literary history of the period beginning in 1910 with the publication of Pound's "The Spirit of Romance", and culminating in 1922 with the appearance of "Ulysses" and "The Wasteland".