Ezra Pound As Literary Critic

Was the "modernist" movement in literature facist in its temperament and masculinist in its sexual politic? Ezra Pound as Literary Criticcontributes to the current debate surrounding the modernist movement by examining in detail the methods by which Pound came to dominate the discourse of modernism. As both a major poet and principal publicist of modernism, Pound so successfully dominated the movement 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'sThe Spirit of Romance, and culminating in 1922 with the appearance ofUlyssesandThe Wasteland. 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 rereading of a major poet who dominated the discourse of modernism.