Russia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated, and uncovers the variety of forces that enabled and structured the British engagement with Russian culture. The resulting narrative maps an intricate pattern of interdisciplinary relations and provides the foundational research for a new understanding of Anglo-Russian/Soviet interaction. In this, it makes a major contribution to the current debates about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and 'global modernisms' that are reshaping our knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture.

Modernist poetry heralded a radical new aesthetic of experimentation, pioneering new verse forms and subjects, and changing the very notion of what it meant to be a poet. This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and argues that we cannot dissociate their bold, inventive poetic forms from their profoundly engaged theories of social and political reform.

Tracing the complex theoretical foundations of modernist poetics, Rebecca Beasley examines:

• the aesthetic modes and theories that formed a context for modernism
• the influence of contemporary philosophical movements
• the modernist critique of democracy
• the importance of the First World War
• modernism's programmes for social reform.

This volume offers invaluable insight into the modernist movement, as well as demonstrating the deep influence of the three poets onthe shape and values of the discipline of English Literature itself. Theorists of Modernist Poetry is relevant not only to students of modernism, but to all those with an interest in why we study, teach, read and evaluate literature the way we do.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class-the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

Modernist poetry heralded a radical new aesthetic of experimentation, pioneering new verse forms and subjects, and changing the very notion of what it meant to be a poet. This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and argues that we cannot dissociate their bold, inventive poetic forms from their profoundly engaged theories of social and political reform.

Tracing the complex theoretical foundations of modernist poetics, Rebecca Beasley examines:

• the aesthetic modes and theories that formed a context for modernism
• the influence of contemporary philosophical movements
• the modernist critique of democracy
• the importance of the First World War
• modernism's programmes for social reform.

This volume offers invaluable insight into the modernist movement, as well as demonstrating the deep influence of the three poets onthe shape and values of the discipline of English Literature itself. Theorists of Modernist Poetry is relevant not only to students of modernism, but to all those with an interest in why we study, teach, read and evaluate literature the way we do.

Ezra Pound was deeply engaged with the avant-garde art scene in London and Paris during the early twentieth century. The effects of this engagement were not restricted to experiments in poetic form, however; they directly shaped Pound's social and political thought. In this book Rebecca Beasley tracks Pound's education in visual culture in chapters that explore Pound's early poetry in the context of American aestheticism and middle-class education; imagism, anarchism and post-impressionist painting; vorticism and anti-democracy in early drafts of The Cantos; Dadaist conceptual art, internationalism and Pound's turn to Italian fascism. In establishing a critical vocabulary profoundly indebted to the visual arts, Pound laid the basis for a literary modernism that is, paradoxically, a visual culture. Drawing on unpublished archive materials and little known magazine contributions, this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pound's intellectual development and the relationship between modernist literature and the visual arts.

Ezra Pound was deeply engaged with the avant-garde art scene in London and Paris during the early twentieth century. The effects of this engagement were not restricted to experiments in poetic form, however; they directly shaped Pound's social and political thought. In this 2007 book Rebecca Beasley tracks Pound's education in visual culture in chapters that explore Pound's early poetry in the context of American aestheticism and middle-class education; imagism, anarchism and post-impressionist painting; vorticism and anti-democracy in early drafts of The Cantos; Dadaist conceptual art, internationalism and Pound's turn to Italian fascism. In establishing a critical vocabulary profoundly indebted to the visual arts, Pound laid the basis for a literary modernism that is, paradoxically, a visual culture. Drawing on archive materials and magazine contributions, this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pound's intellectual development and the relationship between modernist literature and the visual arts.