The aim of this work is to focus on the non-dramatic works of the early period of modernism in England with an emphasis on the origins and development of key writers and poets. Other such studies date to the mid- 1980s and 1990s (Michael Levenson, Sanford Schwartz, Stan Smith, e.g.) and tend to lean heavily toward intellectual history or poetics. This work strives to include a broad mix of thought as to the issue and the purpose of modernism including literary and cultural economics, anthropology, mythology, impressionism and the use of architectural space, with some attention to publishing (the emergence of literary magazines, the use of literary reviews in creating a “public” for new writing) . Also, as opposed to some edited collections, research is not confined to a single genre nor strays from the focus of literary as opposed to other modern movements then in creation. Vital currents of modernism such as literary feminism, secular humanism, Darwinism, visual aesthetics, place and placeless-ness, the postcolonial, and Anglophone reception are also discussed.

The writers and poets discussed include Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, Hardy, F.M. Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Walter Pater, “Michael Field,” Henry James, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott..

“I enjoyed the book [. . . and] I learned a good deal from it [. . .] The book is a vivid constellation of intelligences working on an elusive subject. [. . . .] The essays in “Origins of English Literary Modernism, 1870-1914” are suggestive, alert interpretations of something that is less than an entity but more than an apparition; not a movement to be apprehended by the diverse methods of literary criticism, history, philosophy, economics, and aesthetics, but a cultural impulse, one of many in its time, which these disciplines find seriously engaging. Gregory Tague’s book clarifies the subject without claiming to nail it down.”

Denis Donoghue, University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters, New York University.

“This substantial volume organized around thematics of Origins of English Literary Modernism allows essays on the fin de siècle to talk interestingly to those on Edwardians and Georgians and they in turn to studies of early modernist masters. The emphasis on genealogy of modernism holds the volume together but does not keep individual essays from fresh and interesting explorations, little magazines in the fin de siècle, Bennett’s early criticism, historiography in Vernon Lee, Baedeker in E. M. Forster: a rich and interesting collection toward study of the long twentieth century.”

John Maynard, Professor of English, New York University, and Co-Editor of Victorian Literature and Culture.