Epilogue

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.

Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism