The Modernist Papers

<i>The Modernist Papers</i> is a<i> tour de force</i> of analysis and criticism in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics including the work of Baudelaire Rimbaud Mallarmé Wallace Stevens Joyce Proust and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel <i>The Aesthetics of Resistance</i>. Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this period this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.