Editor's Introduction

Imagine that you want to write something original and powerful about well-known modernist authors, each of them guarded by more glosses, guides, and Google entries than one can hope to survey in a lifetime. This modernist issue gives you a modest tip, a simple method, which I will abbreviate for easier mnemonic manipulation as the three C's: Complicate, Couple, Contextualize. This is what has been done, with various inflections and tactics, of course, by the authors of this fine group of essays dealing with canonical modernist writers (the usual suspects are almost all there: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett; Laura Riding and Joseph Cornell have been thrown in to test the conceptual limits of what we tend to call "late modernism"). These essays attempt to complicate our usual notions regarding the "canon" by reading these formidable authors in hitherto unexplored contexts that either bring new information to bear on the texts (as is the case of Pound's "Seafarer" presented in the framework of The New Age, a context that gives a new political dimension to the famous creative translation from the Anglo-Saxon) or add a dialogical dimension that had not been worked through previously (such as when Cornell is seen dialoguing with Moore, or Stein discussing with Riding the poetic use of private correspondence).

With the emergence of these new contexts, "couples" tend to be constituted: they can be real-life acquaintances like Pound and Orage or Eliot and his Swiss doctor Vittoz. These "couples" could also include one-time lovers like Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, deeply frustrated or would-be lovers like Yeats and Maud Gonne, or more distant friends and collaborators like Moore and Cornell, Stein and Riding. These couples encompass the dynamic function of interiorized models, such as philosophers—Bertrand Russell or her own father—for Woolf as she debates whether to accept or reject philosophy, or the critical and literary models provided by a strong predecessor, which Eliot found in Chapman's works. My list seems to imply that only Beckett was left to stand alone—but this is not true, as we see him in front of his mirror, carefully preparing the image of isolation, alienation, and exclusion that served him so well in the launching of his career, according to Stephen John Dilks's not so pious revisionist interpretation.

Thus we move from biography to literary and cultural history, a modernist historiography that pays attention to the crucial role played by little magazines, as Lee Garver does innovatively in "Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism." Yet these essays never bracket off the constitutive function of hermeneutics, as we can see best in Janet Neigh's engaged essay, which takes a feminist and post-colonial problematic as a point of departure. A central cluster focuses on T. S. Eliot, with Steven Matthews, "T. S. Eliot and Chapman: 'Metaphysical' Poetry and Beyond," Amanda Jeramin Harris, "T. S. Eliot's Mental Hygiene," and Jewel Spears Brooker's review essay "Sleuthing Around in The Waste Land," in which she reviews two important books by Lawrence Rainey. Then Woolf is submitted to new couplings and contextualizations by Victoria L. Smith in "Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's Orlando" and Michael Lackey in "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf's Critique of Philosophy." Issues of space — the literary space opened by letters, or contained in boxes and in poems defined by strict syllabic counts — produce an interesting contrast between the practices of Stein and Riding on the one hand (as we discover in Logan Esdale's "Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters") and Moore and Cornell on the other (as Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta shows in "Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure"). Finally, Yeats's and Beckett's various strategies of self-dramatization and auto-mythification are scrutinized without complacency by Janet Neigh in "Reading from the Drop: Poetics of Identification and Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'" and by Stephen John Dilks, in "Portraits...