Although John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. This is the first study on this relationship, with contributors examining Ruskin's connection to pre-modernist writers such as Worringer and Pater and the importance of Ruskin's thought to modernists such as Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and Lawrence and to intellectual history and architectural theory.

Why was the Bard of Avon so frequently on the agenda of avant-garde writers in Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Germany and Ireland? This volume explores the rich and diverse landscape of Shakespearean encounters in the tormented aesthetics of pre- and post-World War I Europe. However manipulated, deformed or transfigured, the Renaissance dramatist was revived in infinite guises: verbal, philosophical, visual and linguistic. Was he an icon to be demolished ruthlessly as the expression of a stale past or, on the contrary, did his works offer the foundation for new and provocative artistic explorations? Was he an enemy, a foil, a mirror? As they cross the borders of European countries and languages, the essays of this book interrogate Shakespeare's living presence and chart the multiple facets of his vibrant and chameleonic afterlives as no single volume has done before. The exploration of territories situated beyond Anglophone boundaries partly displaces the Bard from his given niche in English culture and retrieves lost or marginalized Shakespearean voices. The annotated bibliographies which complete the volume greatly extend the territory of scholarship and offer a precious map of orientation in the maze of critical works.

T. S. Eliot's reformulation of the idea of literary tradition has been one of the key critical concepts of the twentieth century. In this reappraisal of tradition, an international team of scholars explores the concept from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives, including a series of illuminating case studies evaluating Eliot's version of tradition alongside the theories of other major twentieth-century critics. This 2007 volume will be of great interest to students of literary theory, modernist studies and intellectual history, initiating a dialogue between Continental and Anglo-American investigations into the nature of literary traditions. Tradition is a concept often viewed by contemporary critics with misunderstanding or even hostility. This book powerfully reaffirms the continuing importance of our artistic and cultural traditions in shaping the past and creating the future.

The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded modernity, powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century.

T. S. Eliot's reformulation of the idea of literary tradition has been one of the key critical concepts of the twentieth century. In this reappraisal of tradition, an international team of scholars explores the concept from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives, including a series of illuminating case studies evaluating Eliot's version of tradition alongside the theories of other major twentieth-century critics. This 2007 volume will be of great interest to students of literary theory, modernist studies and intellectual history, initiating a dialogue between Continental and Anglo-American investigations into the nature of literary traditions. Tradition is a concept often viewed by contemporary critics with misunderstanding or even hostility. This book powerfully reaffirms the continuing importance of our artistic and cultural traditions in shaping the past and creating the future.