Pound in Purgatory, available now in paperback, overturns all previous explanations of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism by uncovering its roots in economic and conspiracy theory. Leon Surette demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, Pound was not a lifelong anti-Semitie and consistently ignored or resisted anti-Semitic comments from his correspondents until after 1931. From 1931 to 1945 Pound's poetry took a back seat to his activities as an economic reformer and propagandist for the corporate state. Pound believed he had a simple and practical solution for the economic woes of the world brought on by the Great Depression, and he became increasingly preoccupied with capturing political power for the economic reform he envisioned. As the world spiraled toward war, Pound's program of economic reform foundered, and he gradually succumbed to a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Through an incisive analysis of Pound's correspondence and writings, much of it previously unexamined, Surette shows how this belief fostered the virulent anti-Semitism that pervades Pound's work--both poetry and prose--from this time forward.

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound-the founders of vorticism-undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism. Building on the initial accomplishment of the magazine Blast, McLuhan's subsequent Counterblast, and the network of artistic and intellectual relationships that flourished in Canadian vorticism, the contributors offer groundbreaking examinations of postwar Canadian literary culture, particularly the legacies of Sheila and Wilfred Watson. Intended primarily for scholars of literature and communications, Counterblasting Canada explores a crucial and long-overlooked strand in Canadian cultural and literary history. Contributors: Gregory Betts, Adam Hammond, Paul Hjartarson, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda M. Morra, Kristine Smitka, Leon Surette, Paul Tiessen, Adam Welch, Darren Wershler.